By 1903 British women had been petitioning Parliament for more than thirty years, and they seemed no closer to the vote. In October of that year Emmeline Pankhurst, a widow active in the Independent Labour Party, founded the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) at her home in Manchester, with her daughters Christabel and Sylvia among its first members. Its motto, "Deeds, not words," announced a break with the patient methods of the older societies.

From heckling to prison

The first deed was small. In October 1905 Christabel Pankhurst and the mill worker Annie Kenney interrupted a Liberal election meeting in Manchester's Free Trade Hall to ask whether a Liberal government would give votes to women. They were thrown out, arrested after a scuffle and fined, and both chose prison rather than pay. The newspapers, which had ignored years of polite meetings, covered the story everywhere. The WSPU learned that arrest was publicity and that imprisonment won sympathy.

In 1906 the Daily Mail coined the word "suffragette" as a sneer, a diminutive meant to mock. The WSPU adopted it proudly, and the word came to mean the militants, as opposed to the constitutional suffragists of the NUWSS. The Union moved its headquarters to London, ran a newspaper, and staged rallies that drew huge crowds. Its leadership was tightly controlled by Emmeline and Christabel, and in 1907 a group led by Charlotte Despard left to form the Women's Freedom League, objecting to the Pankhursts' autocratic style of leadership. The League kept to nonviolent resistance such as refusing to pay taxes or fill in the census.

Escalation

In July 1909 the artist Marion Wallace Dunlop, jailed for stenciling a passage from the Bill of Rights on a wall of the House of Commons, refused all food and became the first suffragette hunger striker. Others followed. The government, unwilling to let prisoners die and unwilling to release them, resorted to forcible feeding, pushing tubes through the nose or mouth.

On 18 November 1910, a day remembered as Black Friday, hundreds of women marched on Parliament after the government shelved a compromise suffrage bill, and many were beaten and sexually assaulted by police and bystanders over several hours. From 1912 the WSPU moved to attacks on property: mass window smashing in London's shopping streets, then arson of empty buildings, bombs, and acid poured into post boxes. The leaders insisted they would not take human life, though arson and bombs put lives at risk. In 1913 Parliament passed the Prisoners (Temporary Discharge for Ill-Health) Act, nicknamed the Cat and Mouse Act, which let the government release hunger strikers when they grew dangerously weak and rearrest them once they recovered.

Did militancy work?

Historians remain divided. Defenders of militancy argue that it kept the question on the front pages, showed that women would suffer for the cause, and made the government feel it could not simply wait. Critics argue that the violence of 1912 to 1914 gave opponents an excuse to say women were unfit for the vote, and they point out that the peaceful NUWSS grew fastest in exactly those years. Both views may hold some truth: militancy raised the cost of doing nothing, and the constitutional campaign made it easier for politicians to say yes.

War and the 1918 Act

When war broke out in August 1914, Emmeline and Christabel suspended the WSPU's campaign and threw their energy into supporting the war; the government released suffrage prisoners. Sylvia, a socialist and pacifist, went her own way. Women took on munitions work, transport and farming, and the old claim that they could not serve the nation lost its force. In 1918 the Representation of the People Act gave the vote to almost all men over 21, and to women over 30 who met a property qualification or were married to a man who did. The age of 30 was chosen so that women would not form a majority of the electorate after the war had killed so many young men. In 1928 the Equal Franchise Act finally gave women the vote on the same terms as men, at 21. Emmeline Pankhurst died in June 1928, a few weeks before it became law.

Worked example: Emily Wilding Davison

On 4 June 1913, at the Epsom Derby, Emily Wilding Davison ducked under the rail and stepped onto the track as the horses came round the bend. She was struck by Anmer, a horse owned by King George V, and died four days later. Thousands lined the streets of London for her funeral procession, organized by the WSPU as a show of strength.

What did she intend? She had a return train ticket in her purse, and film of the race suggests she may have been reaching for the horse's bridle, perhaps to attach suffragette colors. Many historians now doubt she meant to die, though she had taken great risks before, once throwing herself down an iron staircase in prison. The case shows how hard it is to read motive from a single act, and how quickly a movement can turn an ambiguous event into a story of martyrdom.