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Emmeline Pankhurst Women's Suffrage

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Emmeline Pankhurst was an English women’s rights activist who founded the WSPU or the Women’s Social and Political Union in 1903. The main purpose of the WSPU was to advocate for women’s suffrage, which was women’s right to vote. They did this by badgering politicians, setting letters in mailboxes on fire, shattering windows, lacerating museum paintings, and even martyrdom. Emmeline Goulden was born in 1858 in England and she was the oldest daughter of ten children. Goulden’s parents were pro suffrage, and when she was fourteen, she went to her first women’s suffrage meeting. She met her husband, Dr. Richard Pankhurst, in 1878. He was a lawyer who supported many reformist causes, one being women’s suffrage. He was 24 years older than …show more content…
Her daughters also joined the fight by becoming members of the WSPU. “Why We Are Militant” is a document containing the words of a speech Pankhurst gave in October of 1913 in New York City to defend the WSPU’s method for advocating for women’s suffrage. According to Scholastic, the beginning of the English women’s suffrage movement was in 1792 with the publication of The Vindication of the Rights of Women by Mary Wollstonecraft. This was then followed by the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848, which was when the request for the enfranchisement of women was officially conceived. There were two main groups campaigning for women’s enfranchisement: the suffragists, who campaigned peacefully through methods like lobbying, and the suffragettes, who campaigned through any means possible, including violence. Both parties, however, refused to stop fighting until all …show more content…
Emmeline Pankhurst, played by Meryl Streep in the movie, galvanized this group of women into being full-time activists. As tensions rose, Maud and her colleagues did anything they could to bring the thought of women’s suffrage to the attention of the authorities. The authorities were shocked at the level of civil disobedience the women were willing to go to, which sparks national debate. All characters in the movie were willing to risk anything and everything they have to get equal rights for women, just like Pankhurst was in real life, which is evident in “Why We Are Militant”. The movie is very similar to Pankhurst’s speech in premise, because the women in the movie are very dedicated to the women’s suffrage movement and continually try to persuade the men in leadership roles at the time that they deserve the right to vote. Suffragette and “Why We Are Militant” are very similar because they center around Emmeline Pankhurst and her fight to get women the right to

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