Emmeline Pankhurst: Freedom or Death

I do not come here as an advocate because whatever position the suffrage movement may occupy in the United States of America, in England, it has passed beyond the realm of advocacy and has entered into the sphere of practical politics. It has become a subject of revolution and civil war.

And so tonight I am not here to advocate women’s suffrage. American suffragists can do that very well for themselves.

I’m here as a soldier who has temporarily left the field of battle in order to explain, it seems strange it has to be explained, what civil war is like.

When civil war is waged by women. I am not only here as a soldier temporarily absent from the field at battle. I am here, and that, I think, is the strangest part of my coming.

I am here as a person who, according to the law courts of my country, it has decided is of no value to the community at all.

And I am adjudged, because of my life, to be a dangerous person under sentence of penal servitude in a convict prison.

It is not at all difficult if revolutionaries come to you from Russia, if they come to you from China, or if they come from any other part of the world if they are men. But since I am a woman, it is necessary to explain why women have adopted revolutionary methods in order to win the right of citizenship.

We women, in trying to make our case clear, always have to make, as part of our argument and urge upon men in our audience, the fact, a very simple fact, that women are human beings.

Your forefathers decided that they must have representation for taxation many, many years ago when they felt they couldn’t wait any longer, when they laid all their arguments before an obstinate British government that they could think of. And when their arguments were absolutely disregarded, when every other means had failed, they began the Tea Party at Boston, and they went on until they had won the independence of the United States of America. It is about eight years since the word militant was first used to describe what we were doing. It was not militant at all.

Except that it provoked militancy on the part of those who were opposed to it.

Women asked questions in political meetings and failed to get answers. They were not doing anything militant. In great Britain, it is a custom, a time-honored one, to ask questions of candidates for parliament and to ask questions of members. The government. No man was ever put out of the public meetings for asking a question. The first people who were put out of a public meeting for asking questions were women.

They were brutally ill-used. They found themselves in jail before 24 hours had expired.

Well, in our Civil War, people have suffered.

But you cannot make omelets without breaking eggs. You cannot have civil war without damage to something. The great thing is to see that no more damage is done than is absolutely necessary, that you do just as much as will arouse enough feeling to bring about peace, to bring about an honorable peace for the combatants. And that is what we have been doing.

If you are dealing with an industrial revolution, if you get the men and women of one class rising up against the men and women of another class, you can locate the difficulty. If there is a great industrial strike, you know exactly where the violence is and how the warfare is going to be waged. But in our war against the government, you can’t locate it. We wear no mark. We belong to every class. We permeate every class of the community, from the highest to the lowest.

And so you see, the men in our country are discovering it’s absolutely impossible to deal with it. You cannot locate it, and you cannot stop it.

“Put them in prison,” they say. “That’ll stop it.” But it didn’t stop it at all. Instead of women giving up, more women did it, and more and more and more women did it until there were 300 women at a time who had not broken a single law, only made a nuisance of themselves, as politicians say.

They have said to us, government rests upon force. The women haven’t force, so they must submit. Well, we are showing them that government does not rest upon force at all. It rests upon consent.

As long as women consent to be unjustly governed they can be, but directly women say-

We withhold our consent. We will not be governed any longer, so long as that government is unjust. Not by the forces of civil war can you govern the very weakest women.

You can kill that woman, but she escapes you then. You cannot govern her. No power on earth can govern a human being, however feeble.

Who withholds his or her consent. Now I want to say to you who think women cannot succeed, we have brought the government of England to this position.

That it has to face this alternative. Either women are to be killed or women are to have the vote. I ask American men in this meeting, what would you say if your state were faced with this alternative that you must either kill them or give them their citizenship?

Well, there is only one answer to that alternative. There is only one way out.

You must give those women the vote. You won your freedom in America when you had the revolution by bloodshed, by sacrificing human life.

You won the Civil War by the sacrifice of human life. When you decided to emancipate the negro.

You have left it to the women in your land. Men of all civilized countries have left it to the women.

To work out their own salvation. That is the way in which we women of England are doing. Human life for us is sacred. But we say, if any life is to be sacrificed, it shall be ours. We won’t do it ourselves, but we will put the enemy in the position where they will have to choose between giving us freedom.

Or giving us death.