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Sisters in arms
One hundred years ago this week, British women first won the right to vote. To celebrate the suffragettes’ great victory Margarette Driscoll meets Helen Pankhurst, great-granddaughter of the movement’s founder, Emmeline. Portrait by Kate Peters
To celebrate 100 years of women having the vote, Margarette Driscoll meets Helen Pankhurst, great-granddaughter of Emmeline
It was written in the stars that Helen Pankhurst should become a women’s rights activist: she is the great-granddaughter of Emmeline Pankhurst, granddaughter of Sylvia, and the only woman of her generation to bear their name. The leaders of the suffragette movement have bequeathed the quietly spoken academic both a responsibility and a privilege: ‘I feel the need to keep campaigning because my name gives me a voice. When they hear it, people are more likely to listen,’ she says.
‘What my grandmother and great-grandmother did still resonates. I once met a woman who had changed her name because she felt such empathy for Emmeline. People are always saying, “I’m doing what I’m doing because my grandmother fought for the vote and thought your grandmother was amazing.”’
The Pankhursts were a feisty bunch whose campaign for the female franchise changed the lives of women all over the world – winning the vote for women over 30 in 1918, and for all women of voting age a decade later. (Today, Vatican City is the only state in which women are still denied the vote.) Emmeline, the movement’s leading light, was born in Moss Side, Manchester, in 1858 to a politically active family and became part of the women’s suffrage movement aged 14. She later formed the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) to intensify the campaign for the vote, by which time she had married barrister Richard Pankhurst (24 years her senior), given birth to five children and been widowed. ‘Emmeline was the mother figure, the matriarch, quite strong but small and very delicate, very aware of what she looked like,’ says Helen. ‘The suffragettes used that a lot, her feminine presence… [but] there was flint behind the soft exterior.’
Supported by her daughters, Christabel, Sylvia and Adela, Emmeline attracted an army of followers willing to shout, demonstrate and fight in the years running up to the First World War, sometimes at great cost to themselves. Around 1,000
‘For the lucky women it’s better than ever before – but we still have work to do’
women – officially, members of Emmeline’s WSPU but nicknamed suffragettes – were imprisoned and brutally force-fed while on hunger strike. The movement’s great heroine, Emily Wilding Davison, gave her life for the cause when she threw herself in front of George V’s horse at the Epsom Derby in 1913.
By then the WSPU has started a campaign of arson and destruction of property: one of the first targets was a house being built for David Lloyd George – then Chancellor of the Exchequer – near Walton Heath Golf Club in Surrey. The WSPU’S aim was to attack those things most valued by society – ‘money, property and pleasure’. When an official at Tunbridge Wells Cricket Club was unwise enough to quip, ‘It is not true that women are banned from the pavilion. Who do you think makes the teas?’, the suffragettes responded by burning it down.
Their bold, sometimes violent approach came in for criticism but no one can deny their impact. ‘They were mocked and derided – in Disney’s Mary Poppins, for example – but they are remembered,’ says Helen, 53, who on Sunday 4 March will be dusting off the suffragette costume she keeps at her home in Hertfordshire – a long black skirt and lacy, pie-crust-collared blouse – ready for this year’s #March4women in London.
This month sees a series of events to mark the centenary of the suffragettes’ great victory – the passing of the Representation of the People Act, which first gave women the right to vote, this Tuesday, 6 February. They include the premiere of The Pankhurst Anthem commissioned by BBC Radio 3. Then in March, London’s Old Vic will stage a series of monologues, curated by Maxine Peake.
Helen’s new book, Deeds Not Words, which takes its name from the suffragette slogan, is being published to coincide with
the anniversary and will be celebrated on Tuesday at Emmeline’s house in Nelson Street, Manchester, which is now the Pankhurst Centre. ‘We’ll be right where it all happened,’ she says.
Helen grew up in Ethiopia, in a bungalow surrounded by eucalyptus trees on the outskirts of Addis Ababa, where she still lives for six months a year, working as a senior adviser to charity CARE International. As a child, though her name was famous in Ethiopia, she knew little about her family history.
This is partly because, despite their success, the Pankhurst women’s political differences eventually overcame their family loyalties and there was a seismic falling out, ostensibly about their disagreements over tactics: Adela and Sylvia objected to the increasing level of violence involved in the campaign and were expelled from the WSPU. But emotion came into the mix too. Emmeline was a Christian and in many ways quite conventional, so she was horrified at Sylvia’s decision to have a son, Helen’s father Richard, out of wedlock. ‘Emmeline was an icon, but she was also a mother who felt betrayed by her daughter, and the daughter [Sylvia] always felt second-best to her older sister, Christabel. There are so many family dynamics involved, let alone political ones,’ says Helen.
Emmeline died the year after Richard’s birth but the arguments were never resolved and the sisters became scattered around the globe. Christabel went to America and became an evangelical Christian. Adela moved to Australia, and Sylvia, who had been campaigning for Ethiopian independence since the Italian invasion in 1936, was invited to visit Ethiopia by Emperor Haile Selassie and moved there full time at the age of 74. ‘Imagine a 74-year-old doing that today, let alone in the
‘Emmeline was an icon, but she was also a mother who felt betrayed by her daughter’
1950s!’ says Helen. ‘It is testament to how passionately she dedicated herself to the causes she cared about. She didn’t do things by halves.’
Revered as ‘an honorary Ethiopian’, Sylvia received a state funeral when she died in 1960. Helen’s father, Richard Pankhurst, an academic, was writing a history of Ethiopia when Helen was born, four years later, hence her name: Helen Sylvia Tarik (the Ethiopian word for history).
Though they never met, Helen was aware of her grandmother’s presence. Her bedroom in the bungalow had been Sylvia’s and the house was full of things she had touched: ‘Work was always very important in the family. As you come into the house, the first thing you see is a desk and that was where Sylvia used to work. When she died, that is where she was found, at her desk.’
Not surprisingly, it was a self-consciously egalitarian household. ‘My brother [Alula Pankhurst, named after a 19th-century Ethiopian leader] and I were very close in age and were treated equally. More than that, we were treated very equally with our parents. There wasn’t this children-adult relationship. From early on we were expected to behave properly. We were expected to help with the cooking and so on, especially when we moved here.’
We are sitting in the tiny kitchen of the terraced, redbrick house in Hampstead, north London, that became the Pankhurst family home in 1974, after they fled the brewing Ethiopian revolution. The house now belongs to Helen’s mother, Rita (her father died last year). There is a colourful Ethiopian wall hanging, depicting the Queen of Sheba, and in the living room, as well as many books, there are African artefacts and richly coloured tapestries and velvet cushions –
little touches of the family’s life that was suddenly left behind.
Helen was 10 years old: ‘It was a tricky time. My mother was worried about us being there and, in essence, put her foot down and said we had to come back to the UK.’
Helen had been to England on summer visits but it was only once she was settled here that she really began to appreciate the significance of her famous surname. ‘Whenever people heard my name they’d start talking about my family, but not about Sylvia. Here, the surname was associated with Emmeline,’ she says.
‘Now and again my parents had talked about the suffragettes but they had very busy lives and I think they felt, wisely, that in my own time I’d become interested. And the more I looked into it, the more interesting it was. The stereotypical picture of the suffragettes is of middle-class ladies but they ranged right across society.’
The suffragettes would, broadly-speaking, be heartened by the way women’s lives in Britain have evolved, Helen thinks. Her book looks across six areas – politics, money, identity, violence, culture and power – and gives an account of progress in each, and a score out of five for how far we’ve come since the suffragettes. In almost every area except violence against women (where progress scored a measly 1/5), the outcome was on the right side of the balance sheet, not to mention the fact that the UK currently has its second female prime minister. ‘Theresa May calls herself a feminist, she started the Women2 Win campaign and she’s moved forward the issue of the number of women in cabinet,’ points out Helen.
The picture is still evolving, of course: Carrie Gracie set Twitter alight recently by resigning her post as BBC News’s China editor after discovering that she was paid significantly less than fellow international editors Jon Sopel and Jeremy Bowen. This April, that indignant feeling is likely to spread to thousands more women when all companies with more than 250 employees will have to reveal their gender pay gap.
‘It will put a mirror up to society, and society continues to be majorly unequal,’ says Helen. ‘It will help some women say, “I’m worth more than this and I want to be valued equally.” It won’t solve the issue but it will be another significant step up. Then it will be smaller companies… I think the legislation will keep being pushed.’
The Harvey Weinstein scandal has been another eyeopener. In the backwash of allegations of rape and sexual harassment against one of Hollywood’s most powerful film producers, thousands of women have come forward to complain of sexual harassment and join the #Metoo and #Timesup campaigns. Though some cynics saw the black dresses worn by those attending January’s Golden Globes awards ceremony
‘I’ve heard that some women now will say, “Don’t go all Harvey on me” and it stops whatever behaviour’
to signal support to be more ‘look at me’ than ‘Metoo’, Helen found it thrilling. ‘It’s amazing. Yes, you can say it’s for show and that [Hollywood] is just one little world but it’s a very influential world. I’ve heard that some young women at work now will say, “Don’t go all Harvey on me” and it stops whatever behaviour.’
Helen has two children – a daughter, Laura, 22, who works at a law firm in London, and a son, Alex, 21, who is studying business (she and their father recently divorced). Watching them and their friends grow up has given her an insight into the immense pressures on teenagers today. ‘From the age of 10 it’s about make-up, selfies, how you look… then you have to be good at sports, good at academics, you have all the expectations that previous generations had of women and more. The sad thing is that instead of reducing the pressure on girls we are now foisting it on boys, too.’
After the summer Helen will return to Ethiopia. Working in a poor country where famine is in living memory is an excellent counterpoint to the selfie generation’s problems. ‘One of the things I feel passionately about feminism is that it cuts across the idea that we have solved it all and poor African countries are behind,’ she says. ‘In Rwanda there are more women in parliament than men.
‘There are also problems that morph and affect both places. Female genital mutilation affects Britain but to solve FGM here you also need to solve it in places like Somalia... and we can only go forward if we address the issues together.’
So is it true to say there has never been a better time to be a woman? ‘Yes… but it depends which woman, where,’ Helen says. ‘We’ve achieved so much. For the lucky women it’s better than ever before – but we still have work to do.’
Deeds Not Words: The Story of Women’s Rights, Then and Now, by Helen Pankhurst, is published on 6 February by Sceptre (£25). To order your copy for £19.99 plus p&p call 0844-871 1514 or visit books.telegraph.co.uk