February 2018 marks the centenary of the Representation of the People Act, the Act which extended the franchise to (some) women for the first time. Commemorative plans for the centenary are well underway and there is no doubt that this momentous point in British history will get the attention it deserves. However, even at this relatively early juncture, we are embroiled in a debate over who deserves to be memorialised in Parliament Square and risk losing sight of the opportunities this anniversary presents.
A couple of weeks ago, Professor June Purvis questioned the decision to erect a statue of Millicent Garrett Fawcett within Parliament Square. Instead, she felt it should have been Emmeline Pankhurst, famous Suffragette, founder and leader of the Women’s Social and Political Union, who should be immortalised in the honoured space. Worse still, she warned, “by erecting a statue only of Fawcett we are writing the radical Pankhurst out of history.” Though not explicitly stated, Professor Purvis’ argument suggests history is being sanitised. Emmeline Pankhurst: the radical we are in danger of forgetting. Fawcett: the comparatively forgotten figure we are trying to remember.
I’m not convinced though that we are in danger of writing Pankhurst out of history. The Pankhursts, along with the WSPU, dominate the popular memory of the suffrage campaign. Their militant campaign, resulting in countless acts of arson, instances of window smashing, and the tragic death of Emily Wilding Davison, has stuck firmly in our collective memory and their fame is unsurpassed among the leaders of the campaign for women’s suffrage. In 2015, Emmeline and the WSPU were immortalised on the big-screen in Suffragette – a film which also did much to highlight the barbaric force-feeding Suffragettes were subjected to. The Pankhursts; the term Suffragettes; the green, white and purple of the WSPU have become synonymous with and shorthand for the wider the women’s suffrage campaign, eclipsing the other suffrage societies and their leaders.
Nor should the Pankhurst’s greater name recognition, “the public will end up with a statue of a woman few people have heard of”, be an argument against the decision to memorialise Fawcett within Parliament Square. Fawcett, leader of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, campaigned just as passionately for the vote as Emmeline, despite differing fundamentally over how to achieve this. Instead of turning to militancy, Fawcett campaigned within the law, as did the majority of women struggling for the vote. At the outbreak of the First World War the NUWSS had over 500 branches across the country and 50,000 members. At its peak the WSPU had 2,000 members. Numbers can be misleading, but they rarely lie. If we are looking to memoralise the women who represented the greatest number of those who struggled for the vote it would be Fawcett.
Then there are the arguments over whose campaign ultimately led to women getting the vote in 1918: had the patient lobbying of the suffragists paid off, winning enough hearts and minds of lawmakers, or had the Pankhursts broken by force the will of those opposed to women’s suffrage. Or was the decision to extend the vote to women a calculation by the political class that the best way to balance the large number of largely working class men who had to be enfranchised for their service in the war was to give the vote to some middle class women?
But does this really matter? After all, both women fought for the same cause and deserve equal recognition. Surely, the centenary next year offers an array of potential opportunities to explore, examine, and tell the story of the suffrage campaign as a whole. Naturally, this will include both the Pankhursts and the WSPU (the suffragettes) and Fawcett and the NUWSS (the suffragists). It also offers the opportunity to discover the quirky Actress Franchise League and the creative Artists’ Suffrage League, and even the chance to recognise the male societies for women’s suffrage. But if we get bogged down in the circular questions of which female best represents the women’s suffrage campaign we risk these wider conversations and discoveries never taking place.
Emmeline Pankhurst will not be written out of our history because she is not memorialised in Parliament Square. Her name and the Green, White and Purple of the WSPU will endure in the public memory. Millicent Fawcett deserves equal recognition for the role she played too. In fact, every Suffragette or Suffragist – female or male – deserves recognition for the part that they played. The truth is that both women fought for the same cause – a cause far greater than themselves or, indeed, any individual. This was a campaign for all women, something we would do well not to forget.
