Vera Brittain on Mrs Pankhurst and feminism: from the archive, 20 June 1928 (original) (raw)

I only saw Mrs. Pankhurst once, and only once heard her speak. That was at a polite little meeting less than a year ago, when much of the old force was spent and the old fires were beginning to burn dimly. Under such circumstances it may seem an impertinence to lay claim to any impression at all. Yet it is, I suppose, true enough to any that those who impress us most in life are less often our friends and relatives, dear as these may be, than the makers of the movements of which we become members, and in which we remain when they are gone.

The name of Mrs. Pankhurst was a familiar echo in my schooldays - an echo that became louder as her exploits gathered publicity and I grew to the self-important maturity of a prefect. Our head mistress was an ardent if discreet feminist, and some of the older girls were occasionally taken to village suffrage meetings of a suitably moderate type. During the holidays rumours of imprisonments, church burnings, forcible feedings, and Cat and Mouse Act drifted through the unsympathetic columns of the morning papers to the prosperous and complacent Midland town in which we then lived. At bridge drives and other forms of social diversion Mrs. Pankhurst and her “screaming sisterhood” formed suitable subjects for that vocal variety of witch-burning in which tea-parties so very often indulge.

I remember being taken to those tea-parties, my feet clad in the stout low-heeled walking shoes of pre-war scholastic convention and my youthful ankles decorously concealed by the tight folds of a skirt just twice the length of the one I wear now. I listened to the sweeping indictments of “those awful suffragettes” - in a critical silence, which became more silent and more critical as the time approached for a battle royal with a recalcitrant family for permission to go to college. (How often, I wonder, do the supposedly emancipated girls of our “leisured classes” still wage these battles in the smaller towns of this country? More often, I suspect, than most of us imagine).

The Rokeby Venus
The affair of the Rokeby Venus, so my diary informs me, temporarily disturbed my growing sympathy with the despised and derided “suffs.” Schoolgirls feel - or at any rate used to feel – a disproportionate reverence for the contents of the museums and picture galleries round which they are - or were - escorted in well-behaved crocodiles. But not for long was my allegiance diverted; even then the voluptuous dorsal curves of Velasquian females appealed but little to my sense of the beautiful and agreeable. The fragile prettiness of Mrs. Pankhurst, depicted in effigy at Madame Tussaud’s, attracted me far more. Finally, however, it was Olive Schreiner’s “Woman and Labour”, - lent to me, as head girl, by that same discreet but feminist head mistress - which supplied the theory that linked my personal resentments with the public activities of the suffragettes.

And now that Mrs. Pankhurst is dead, though her life was tragic in so many ways, I cannot help but feel that she and the women who followed her were luckier than we. They were luckier, mainly, for two reasons. They fought, first of all, for a clear-out issue, which was popular in the sense that it was easily understood. Before 1914 you wanted a vote or you did not, and though you might differ as to methods, your object was the same. Suffragists and anti-suffragists were, on the whole, so much less complicated than feminists and anti-feminists.

A confusion of issues
To-day half a dozen things - equal pay, equal opportunities, the right of married women to work, freedom from restrictive legislation, the retention of nationality on marriage - remain to be fought for. They are no less urgent than the franchise merely because less obvious. Yet it is difficult to work for them all at the same time, and even more difficult for all of us to agree that they are all necessary and to decide which matters most. Their common denominator is, of course, that of equal humanity - is or is not a woman a human being in exactly the same sense as a man? But humanity is not a concrete, attainable qualification; it is an abstract idea. As such it is hard to transform into a slogan, and it has an academic flavour that renders it anathema to the present-day youngest women, with their horror of anything that sounds heavy or “pious,” and their self-conscious individualism which regards self-sacrificing devotion to any cause as “pre-war” or “démodé.” The woman’s movement of to-day requires a high degree of intelligence and reason in each one of its followers; the feminism of the suffragettes demanded such intellectual standards only from their leaders.

In the second place, Mrs. Pankhurst was fortunate in being the protagonist of a cause that was won. Even had she not lived to see virtually the victory, she must have known after the Act of 1919 that full enfranchisement was merely a question of time and perseverance. The satisfaction that the realisation of an ideal must bring can in this generation be fully appreciated only by those of us who left the schoolroom to be told that our King and country needed us; whose naive young enthusiasms were caught by the false gods of war, drained of their purity and vitality, and five years later flung back, empty and useless, in our disillusioned faces. It is given to few men and women to dedicate themselves, wholly and selflessly, more than once.

But the older feminists, unlike the majority of human pioneers, have seen their dreams come true. More certainly than Latimer in the days of Mary, Mrs. Pankhurst lighted a candle in England which neither change nor circumstance is likely to put out. The forms of religious expression change, and one sect follows another into oblivion, but a race or a class or a sex, once liberated, never returns to its old condition of servitude. The candle which Mrs. Pankhurst lighted at the beginning of this century has flared into a torch, and the women of to-day and to-morrow will see that it burns on for ever.