Still fighting for women with a suffragette spirit
AT the back of 62 Nelson Street in Manchester is a Victorian drawing room full of ghosts.
Wooden chairs sit around an empty table. Sashes in the suffragettes’ colours – purple, green and white – are draped over an armchair. A typewriter once used to type radical literature sits in silence behind glass.
This is the room that saw the first ever meeting of the Women’s Social and Political Union – the militant organisation calling for votes for women.
It was also the home of Emmeline Pankhurst and on October 10, 1903, a group of women gathered there and decided they could no longer just wait patiently for women’s suffrage.
The women, including Emmeline’s daughters Sylvia, Christabel and Adela, would become known as suffragettes. Their motto: “Deeds not words”.
“It is where they decided to take decisive action,” says Helen Pankhurst, Emmeline’s greatgranddaughter and granddaughter of Sylvia.
“They felt they had no choice.”
The suffragettes are the subject of a new film out this week starring Carey Mulligan, Anne- Marie Duff, Helena Bonham Carter and Ben Whishaw. Helen’s great-grandmother Emmeline is played by Meryl Streep.
I wondered how hard it was for Helen to watch the force-feeding scene in the film – where a suffragette on hunger strike is held down as liquid is forced into her using a steel gag and rubber tubes. Helen’s grandmother Sylvia – then just aged 26 – was the most force-fed of all the suffragettes.
“The force-feeding scene is difficult and then you think how many times it happened, just relentlessly, over and over,” Helen says. “There are lines in Sylvia’s writing where she describes hearing them going into each cell and the screams, one by one, listening to what’s happening to your friends. The more you struggled, the more damage you’d do to your throat and your lungs.”
But she says the worst violence in the film is the day-to-day violence faced by working-class women in their ordinary lives. “I like it that it doesn’t tell the story of the leadership, it tells the story of an ordinary person, Maud Watts, who we can all identify with,” she says.
Streep, as Emmeline, features only in cameo scenes as an inspirational and mysterious figure. Instead, the film reveals the powerlessness of women forced into dangerous, backbreaking work in the laundries of London’s East End and left at the mercy of bad employers. It shows why they so desperately needed the vote.
Suffragette is set in London, where the Pankhurst family moved in 1908 to
Through its foodbank, volunteers still lead with deeds, not words
agitate closer to Parliament. But in 1903, the first meetings were in the politically radical city of Manchester, where Emmeline was born. Then, the family home was on a street of villas, surrounded by paddocks and orchards. Now, it is almost swallowed up by the Manchester Royal Infirmary.
For decades the house fell in to disrepair and in the Seventies was saved only by the efforts of campaigners.
Today, the building is not just a museum but also a living legacy – a women’s centre serving Manchester Women’s Aid and other organisations. Emmeline Pankhurst would have approved of the foodbank run from the basement, where volunteers still lead with deeds, not words.
In a side room at the Pankhurst Centre, I meet three women whose lives have been saved and changed there. All three have fled domestic violence at the hands of their husband or partner.
“Being here, we all help each other,” one woman says. “It’s really built my confidence. It’s also helped me understand what the children have been through.” The other women nod.
“Seven years I put up with it,” another says. “Taking all those beatings. I didn’t know any support was out there. It’s just someone that hits you and that’s your life and you have to live with it.
“I left with my new baby and without this place would have had nowhere to go. Now, my kids say, Daddy used to hit my mummy, but Mummy isn’t crying any more.”
Premieres for Suffragette have benefitted Manchester Women’s Aid and humanitarian charity CARE.
Helen, whose grandmother Sylvia was made an “honorary Ethiopian” by emperor Haile Selassie, was born in Addis Ababa and works for CARE.
The charity makes the link between Helen’s history and women in developing countries with the annual Walk In Her Shoes march through the streets of London every March 6.
Gail Heath, CEO of the Pankhurst Trust, says earlier this year, Manchester Women’s Aid was facing 40% cuts.
“We nearly had to close two refuges,” she says.
Last week, the premiere of Suffragette film at the British Film Institute in London was the scene of a protest by Sisters Uncut.
Inspired into direct action by the suffragettes themselves, they say they wanted to bring attention to cuts to domestic violence services.
Helena Bonham Carter – whose greatgrandfather Herbert Asquith was the Prime Minister who refused the suffragettes’ demands and whose grandmother Violet despised their actions – called it the “perfect” response to the film.
In Manchester, before the women at the Pankhurst Centre left for their new lives, we went to stand at the room where the suffragette movement was born.
“I’ve been to this building so many times and not known this room was here,” one of the women now safe from domestic violence says.
“You don’t realise how linked our lives are to them. How we’re all still fighting. You can feel their strength as you stand here.”
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