Posted May 28, 2011, 5:21 PM
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Join Date: Mar 2009
Location: Wiltshire, England
Posts: 1,938
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Notting Hill: Just A Girl, Standing In Front Of A Boy...
The Pankhursts
Perhaps the most influential people featured on this page are Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst, who led the struggle to win the right to vote for women, and endured imprisonment and hunger strike in the process.
Today, a statue of Emmeline Pankhust, chained to an imaginary railing, stands in the shadow of the Houses of Parliament, and a plaque to both her and her daughter mark the house in Notting Hill in West London where they lived.
Emmeline Pankhurst, a challenging and entertaining speaker, set out the case for radical action simply and forcefully, saying:
"You have two babies very hungry and wanting to be fed. One baby is a patient baby, and waits indefinitely until its mother is ready to feed it. The other baby is an impatient baby and cries lustily, screams and kicks and makes everybody unpleasant until it is fed. Well, we know perfectly well which baby is attended to first. That is the whole history of politics."
She went on to describe how the Suffragettes had carried out what today might be considered one of the first cyber attacks:
"We entirely prevented stockbrokers in London from telegraphing to stockbrokers in Glasgow and vice versa: for one whole day telegraphic communication was entirely stopped. I am not going to tell you how it was done. I am not going to tell you how the women got to the mains and cut the wires; but it was done."
However, in the tradition of British radicals, Emmeline drifted to the right in later life, eventually supporting the Conservative Party out of concern for the rise of Bolshevism in the 1920s.
Political differences led to a permanent rift with her daughter, Sylvia, who wanted to affiliate the Suffragette movement with trade unions and socialist parties. The rift was permanent, and Sylvia’s name does not appear on any of the London memorials to the Suffragettes.
Last edited by Bedhead; Jan 18, 2017 at 5:43 PM.
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