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A Lucy Worsley documentary heads up a BBC season marking the centenary of women gaining the vote
“It’s about the dirty, violent, sometimes forgotten underbelly of the suffrage movement”
How Women Won the Vote with Lucy Worsley TV BBC One Scheduled for June Today, we take the idea of casting a ballot for granted. Yet we only have to go back to 1918 and the Representation of the People Act to find the moment when women, provided they were aged over 30 and met a property qualification, were granted the vote – along with all men over the age of 21.
It’s a centenary being marked across the BBC in a season where the cornerstone is a 90-minute documentary presented by Lucy Worsley. Her film serves as a reminder that this was a long campaign encompassing people from across society and was successful precisely because of this. It also highlights the fact that many who campaigned employed militant tactics.
“It’s about the dirty, violent, sometimes forgotten underbelly of the suffrage movement,” Worsley tells BBC History Magazine. “It’s easy to get the idea that the vote was won by nice ladies in big hats singing songs and waving banners, a bit like the suffragette mum inMary Poppins. We draw attention to just how extreme some of the suffragette ‘outrages’ could be.
“I can also half-understand – if not condone – just how angry they were, and why they felt driven to do it. I hope viewers will too.”
Drawing throughout on original sources, Worsley begins her story with an October 1905 incident where Christabel Pankhurst and Annie Kenney were arrested after a scuffle in Manchester involving policemen being spat upon. As well as heckling cabinet ministers and protesting at the Commons, suffragettes built bombs and conducted arson attacks. “There’s a clear escalation in the violence being used, which is accompanied by an ever-heavier state response,” says Worsley.
This response included force-feeding women who were on hunger strike. Worsley found it “brutal and horrific” even to see a reconstruction.
Elsewhere in the season, the BBC will give coverage across its networks to
Processions (Sunday 10 June), a mass participation artwork that will see women and girls marching in suffragette colours. Watch out too for The Making
of a Militant (June, BBC One NorthWest and iPlayer), presented by Sally Lindsay, which profiles suffragette leader Emmeline Pankhurst.