Mary Richardson, Suffragette, "Vandal," and Fascist

Mary Raleigh Richardson (died 7 November 1961)

I've posted many times here about women's long fight to gain the vote and about women who participated in that fight--some of them compelled to acts of violence. Mary Richardson is one of the most complex and complicated figures in the suffrage movement.

A surveillance photograph
of Mary Richardson,
taken in 1913 by Scotland Yard

Born in England in 1882, Richardson was raised in Ontario, Canada, by her Canadian mother and grandfather, returning to Britain when she was sixteen. Her life at the end of the nineteenth century seemed conventional enough--in 1898, for example, she was studying art, and then she traveled to Paris and to Italy. Once she completed her education, she moved to Bloomsbury and began a career as a journalist. 

But after witnessing the violence of the Black Friday Protests of 18 November 1910, Richardson found her life transformed, and she joined the Women's Social and Political Union, the militant suffrage group founded by Emmeline Pankhurst and dedicated to "deeds not words."

In 1912, the WSPU began a campaign of arson, directed by Pankhurst's daughter Christabel--the group attempted to destroy homes of members of parliament, then escalated their campaign to include setting fire to railway stations and other public facilities, cutting telephone lines, and destroying the contents of mailboxes.

Mary Richardson was committed to this increasingly militant--and violent--campaign, which she regarded as "a holy crusade." As biographer Hilda Kean describes the physical sufferings borne by Richardson:  

She was arrested nine times, serving several sentences in Holloway prison for assaulting the police, breaking windows, and arson. She was frequently attacked while campaigning for the suffrage cause: her shoulder blade was broken and her clothing torn to shreds when she presented a petition to George V in Bristol in 1913. She campaigned with the socialist Sylvia Pankhurst in east London and was arrested and then imprisoned with her after a rally in Bromley by Bow in July 1913. 

Mary Richardson was one of the first two women to be force fed, under the "Cat and Mouse Act" in 1913, having been arrested at the scene of an arson attack. She suffered extensive bruising and poor health as a result, writing about this experience as "torture." When released in 1914 after a long period of forcible feeding, she declared, "The worst fight on record since the movement began is now raging in Holloway."  

However, Mary Richardson's most infamous act of political protest was not directed against a private home or a public building but a work of art: on 10 March 1914 she slashed a painting in the National Gallery, Diego Velázquez's nude portrait of Venus, Venus at her Toilet, now known as the Rokeby Venus (so-called because the painting was first brought to England and hung at Rokeby Park, Yorkshire, before being acquired by the National Gallery in 1906). 

The Rokeby Venus after
Richardson's attack,
photo published in The Times, 1914

Richardson was not the first suffragette to attack a work of art as an act of political protest. Five years earlier, in 1909, a suffrage poster demanding "Votes for Women" had been stuck onto a Royal Academy exhibit of a portrait of Herbert Henry Asquith, the Prime Minister (the portrait itself was behind glass, the poster stuck to the glass). 

In 1912, the Royal Academy had decided to close its annual winter exhibition early because of the WSPU campaign--the Academy noted that its decision was made in order to "safeguard the valuable pictures now on loan." The next year, in April of 1913, a group of women had broken the glass protecting a number of paintings at the Manchester Art Gallery, damaging more than a dozen works, including paintings by Edward Burne-Jones, Everett Millais, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. 

Two months later, in June 1913, a group of suffragettes attempted to disrupt the Royal Academy's Summer Exhibition by holding a meeting in one of the galleries, and the Academy took precautions by instituting security measures, locking cupboards, gates, and doors. But they suffered during the next year's exhibition: on 4 May 1914, the suffragette "Mary Wood" (Mary Aldham) broke the glass protecting John Singer Sargent's  portrait of the author Henry James and slashed the painting three times with a meat cleaver while crying "Votes for women!" Further attacks followed: despite precautions, Gertrude Mary Ansell attacked the Royal Academy portrait of the duke of Wellington on 12 May, and Mary Spencer attacked George Clausen's Primavera on 26 May.  

But Mary Richardson's slashing of the nude Venus remains the most notorious of these acts of artistic vandalism. As Richardson described her act and its motivations to The Times,

I have tried to destroy the picture of the most beautiful woman in mythological history as a protest against the Government for destroying Mrs Pankhurst, who is the most beautiful character in modern history. Justice is an element of beauty as much as colour and outline on canvas. Mrs Pankhurst seeks to procure justice for womanhood, and for this she is being slowly murdered by a Government of Iscariot politicians. If there is an outcry against my deed, let every one remember that such an outcry is an hypocrisy so long as they allow the destruction of Mrs Pankhurst and other beautiful living women, and that until the public cease to countenance human destruction the stones cast against me for the destruction of this picture are each an evidence against them of artistic as well as moral and political humbug and hypocrisy. ("Miss Richardson's Statement, The Times, 11 March 1914)

While Richardson's attack may be the most infamous, it was not the last act of vandalism against art undertaken by the suffragettes to gain attention to their cause. According to Rowena Clausen, some fourteen incidents were to follow, with suffragettes attacking works they found especially offensive: paintings of nude women and portraits of powerful men.

After this spate of violence against works of art, many museums closed their doors to unaccompanied women. (For Helena Bonett's "‘Deeds not words’: Suffragettes and the Summer Exhibition," posted at the Royal Academy's website, click here.)

The restored Rokeby Venus

Like many suffragettes, including the Pankhursts, Richardson suspended her political activities during the war and returned to writing, publishing a novel, Matilda and Marcus (1915), and two volumes of poetry, Symbol Songs (1916) and Wilderness Love Songs (1917). A third book of poetry, Cornish Headlands, was published after the end of the war, in 1920.

After some women women gained the right to vote in 1918 as a result of the Representation of the People Act,* and as a result of the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act of 1919, which removed limits on jobs because of sex, Richardson stood for parliament, in 1922 as a candidate, for the Labour party,  in 1924 as an independent socialist, and in 1931, again as a Labour candidate. She was never elected.

In 1934 she joined the British Union of Fascists, becoming the "organizing secretary" for the "women's section." She spoke for the party and wrote for the press on its behalf. But by 1935 she left the party. She would later try to explain her attraction to the fascist party: "I was first attracted to the Blackshirts because I saw in them the courage, the action, the loyalty, the gift of service, and the ability to serve which I had known in the suffrage movement."

It was this, her year as a fascist supporter and party member--more than her participation in acts of violence and vandalism--that seems to have damaged Richardson's reputation and memory beyond repair. When she eventually published her autobiography, Laugh a Defiance, in 1953, she omitted any account of this part of her political career. 

In her entry on Richardson in the Dictionary of National Biography, Hilda Kean notes that Richardson not only gave numerous accounts and varying interpretations of her career throughout her life, but that she maintained "total silence on her fascist activities." (If you don't have access to the DNB, Kean provides a version of her biographical entry here.)

Here, for example, is Richardson's later rationale for her political act of artistic vandalism: 

Law and its application reflected public opinion. Values were stressed from a financial point of view and not the human. I felt I must make my protest from the financial point of view, therefore, as well as letting it be seen as a symbolic act. I had to draw the parallel between the public’s indifference to Mrs. Pankhurst’s slow destruction and the destruction of some financially valuable object. A painting came to mind. Yes, yes--the Venus Velasquez had painted, hanging in the National Gallery. It was highly prized for its worth in cash. If I could damage it, I reasoned, I could draw my parallel. The fact that I had disliked the painting would make it easier for me to do what was in my mind. 

Richardson's autobiography is long out of print. No used copies are available (at the time of writing) on Amazon, and the book is unavailable through Google Books, Internet Archive, and Project Gutenberg. (See update, below). You can get a copy through Inter-Library Loan, however--here's a link to the book on WorldCat.

*The 1918 act eliminated almost all property requirements for men, allowing them to vote at age 21. The act did not eliminate all property requirements for women, nor did it grant them the right to vote until they reached the age of 30. This discrepancy was enacted deliberately to insure that women did not become the majority of the electorate--since so many men had died during the war, fears were that extending the suffrage to women on equal terms would place them in an "unfair" position. For equal enfranchisement, women had to wait another decade, until the passage of the 1928 Equal Franchise Act.

Update, February 2018: In honor of the centenary of some British women at last gaining the right to vote (the 1918 Representation of the People Act, 6 February 1918), the BBC's History Extra podcast has produced two excellent shows: "The Suffragettes" and "The Pankhursts." Enjoy!

Update, 15 January 2024: Laugh a Defiance is now available through the Internet Archive (click here).

The Black Friday Protests and Women's Suffrage

Black Friday (18 November 1910)

Elizabeth Garrett Anderson (l)
and Emmeline Pankhurst,
18 November 1910--before
the violence begins

On Friday, 18 November 1910, following the end of parliamentary discussion of the Conciliation Bill, a bill that would have given some women (wealthy, property-owning women--about a million in the United Kingdom) the right to vote, members of the Women's Social and Political Union (the organization with which Emmeline, Christabel, and Sylvia Pankhurst were involved), convened what they called a "Woman's Parliament" and issued a statement:

This meeting of women, gathered together in the Caxton Hall, protests against the policy of shuffling and delay with which the agitation for woman’s enfranchisement has been met by the Government, and calls upon the Government at once to withdraw the veto which they have placed upon the Conciliation Bill for woman’s suffrage, a measure which has been endorsed by the representative of the people in the House of Commons.

A "deputation" of about three hundred women converged to protest at the House of Commons. Winston Churchill, the Home Secretary, called in the London police and authorized them to use aggressive force in order to end the protest. The resulting confrontation has been variously reported. 

A 19 November 1910 Times article on the confrontation makes the situation sound almost comical. A few members of the police "had their helmets knocked off," one reported a "kick" on his "ankle," and a couple suffered cuts, all the while "they kept their tempers very well."

And the protestors? According to the same account, a couple of the women tried to elude police, one of whom, "apparently unused to mountaineering" (or maybe getting her dress caught), was "saved by a dangerous fall by two policemen." Other protestors, at least according to the Times, complained about not having chairs on which to rest themselves.

But the reality of the violence of this "Black Friday" seems to have been quite different than the Times report. As historian Katherine Connolly writes, "For six hours women were batoned, beaten, punched, thrown to the ground, kicked on the floor and had their faces rubbed against railings in full view of the House of Commons. There were also widespread reports of police sexually abusing the demonstrators. They repeatedly pinched and twisted their breasts, lifted their skirts, groping and assaulting the women for hours."

The Daily Mirror photo of Ada Wright

She further notes that two women died as a result of the injuries they received that day, and that Emmeline Pankhurst's sister, Mary Clarke, who had been beaten by police, arrested for throwing stones and then imprisoned, died just two days after being released from prison on 25 December. 

Not all the press covered up the violence of the protests--the Daily Mirror published a photo of one of the women protesting, Ada Wright, lying on the ground. She had been knocked down several times by police, according to eyewitness reports. As Nicholas Hidley reports in "The Candid Camera of the Edwardian Tabloids" (History Today):

At this point a bystander stepped forward to remonstrate with the two policemen, and as Ada Wright lay on the ground with this man shielding her from further violence, a number of press photographers, including Victor Console of London News Agency Photos, recorded the whole scene. Console's photograph was quickly printed and submitted to the Daily Mirror, where the art editor immediately recognised its visual potential.

Console's photograph was chosen for the front cover of the next day's Daily Mirror, and the art editor also submitted a print to the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police for his comments on the incident. The Commissioner attempted to convince the paper's representative that, since one of the onlookers was smiling, it seemed likely that Ada Wright "had simply sunk to the ground exhausted with struggling against the police," but privately he was more worried by so controversial an image, and later that evening an attempt was made to prevent its publication.

Not only did the Daily Mirror receive an official instruction to suppress the whole edition, but when it was discovered that production was already underway, thanks to the paper's early deadline, a desperate attempt was made to buy up all the copies that had so far been produced. This astonishing manoeuvre failed completely, and the inclusion of Console's photograph in all 750,000 copies of the Daily Mirror that were circulated the next day helped to turn criticism away from the suffragettes and towards the Home Secretary, Winston Churchill.

(The Times eventually included at least one other account of the Black Friday protests. The UK National Archives has posted one letter printed in The Times opposing "official" accounts of the situation, a letter from March 1911 that reveals women suffered "every species of indignity and violence," some of it "of very gross kind," during the police assault, and that some of the women were still suffering the after-effects of the "treatment they then received."*)

To Katherine Connolly's article on Black Friday, click here. You can also listen to a brief interview with Connolly about Pankhurst, from BBC Radio 4's The Women's Hour, here.

A handbill for a protest of the
Black Friday riot,
detailing some of the violence
women experienced at the hands of police

Update, February 2018: In honor of the centenary of some British women at last gaining the right to vote (the 1918 Representation of the People Act, 6 February 1918), the BBC's History Extra podcast has produced two excellent shows: "The Suffragettes" and "The Pankhursts." Enjoy!

*The original National Archives post I’ve quoted here has been removed, so the link now takes you to an archived version of the letter at Trove. The National Archives now offer a longer post on the Black Friday protests and their aftermath, which is available here.

Emily Wilding Davison, Activist, Suffragist, and Martyr?

Emily Wilding Davison (born 11 October 1872)

The most well-known aspect of Emily Davison's life may be her death--on 4 June 1913, she stepped onto the track at the Epsom Derby, perhaps in an attempt to disrupt the race by reaching for the bridle of King George V's horse, Anmer. She collided with the horse, was trampled underfoot, and died four days later, on 8 June.

Emily Wilding Davison

Her act was controversial--or, rather, her intentions were unclear--and we'll come back to that in a bit. But, first, the life.

Born in London, Emily Davison attended Royal Holloway College, a women's college opened in 1886 (it would later become part of the University of London), but was forced to leave without a degree after a year because her father's death put the fees beyond her reach, despite the monetary award she had been granted upon acceptance.

After earning money, first as a governess and then as a teacher, she returned to her education, this time attending St. Hughes College, Oxford (the college was founded in 1886 by Elizabeth Wordsworth, a descendant of the poet William Wordsworth, expressly for women who found "even the most moderate" of colleges "beyond their means"). Although she finished her program with first-class honors, Oxford University did not award degrees to women.*

In 1906, Davison joined Emmeline Pankhurst's Women's Social and Political Union; by 1909, she had given up her teaching job and devoted herself to the suffrage campaign. She was arrested and imprisoned nine times for acts ranging from making a public disturbance to burning mailboxes. In 1909, for example, in Manchester, she was sentenced to one month of hard labor in Strangeways Prison for throwing rocks at David Lloyd George, then Chancellor of the Exchequer. She attempted a hunger strike, but after she barricaded herself into her cell, it was flooded by guards. "I had to hold on like grim death. The power of the water seemed terrific, and it was cold as ice," she later wrote.

In 1912, during a six-month sentence in Holloway Prison, she and the other suffragist prisoners again went on a hunger strike. They were brutally force fed, and as an act of protest, Davison threw herself down a staircase, intending, she said, to call attention to the women's plight by her actions.

She survived her prison term. But a year later, her life ended. 

What were her intentions when she stepped out onto the race track? And what were the implications of her death for the suffrage cause?

As Germaine Greer notes, "The suffragettes made great theatre of Davison's funeral. The coffin was brought back to Victoria Station and taken in procession through streets lined with people to St George's, Bloomsbury." Some 6,000 women attended the service, while the streets were lined with people paying their respects. 

A scene from Davison's funeral procession

When she stepped out onto the race track, was Davison trying to bring down the horse, hoping to attach a suffragist sash to the horse, or just aiming to cross the track, intending to avoid the horses altogether?

Was Davison's death an act of heroic martyrdom? Was it a deliberate self-sacrifice for the suffragist cause? Or was her vision of the race course obscured, her death a terrible accident?  

Was she a political activist or a social anarchist? 

Whatever her intentions, Davison's death did not result in a change in the suffrage laws. In August 1914, after the start of the first world war, both moderate and militant suffrage groups set aside their campaigns and worked toward the war effort. The vote would have to wait.

For an excellent article on the recent "high-tech analysis" of the film of the 1913 race, see Vanessa Thorpe's "The Truth Behind the Death of Suffragist Emily Davison." For a nuanced analysis of the event itself, I recommend Germaine Greer's meditation, published on the occasion of the one-hundredth anniversary of Davison's death: "Emily Davison: Was She Really a Suffragette Martyr?" 

For more information, there is a wonderful online exhibition posted by the London School of Economics, which you can access by clicking here. You may also be interested in Carolyn P. Collette's In the Thick of the Fight: The Writing of Emily Wilding Davison, Militant Suffragette; it refocuses attention on Davison's life and work rather than celebrating or mythologizing her death.

*According to the Oxford University Archives, 

From the late 1870s, women had attended lectures, taken examinations, and had gained honours in those examinations. They were, however, unable to receive the degree to which, had they been men, their examinations would have entitled them.

The new University statute of 1920 which admitted women to full membership of the University, and which came into effect from October that year, enabled women who had previously taken and gained honours in University examinations to return to matriculate (ie go through the formal ceremony of admission to the University) and have the degree to which they were now entitled conferred on them (again, at a formal ceremony). Consequently, at the very first ceremony at which women were able to graduate more than forty women did so.

Update, February 2018: In honor of the centenary of some British women at last gaining the right to vote (the 1918 Representation of the People Act, 6 February 1918), the BBC's History Extra podcast has produced two excellent shows: "The Suffragettes" and "The Pankhursts." Enjoy!

Mary Ritter Beard Takes on the Encyclopedia Britannica

Mary Ritter Beard (born 5 August 1876)

Political activist and historian Mary Ritter Beard

There are many reasons to post about the American historian, suffragist, and activist Mary Ritter Beard: 

While in England with her husband at the turn of the twentieth century, she became involved in the labor movement and with the suffrage movement and suffragist Emmeline Pankhurst; 

When she returned to the United States, she continued her labor activism as an organizer for the National Women's Trade Union League and the Wage Earner's League;

She worked with Alice Paul in the last years of the campaign for women's suffrage, 1913-1919; 

She began to write and publish, first editing journals like The Woman Voter and The Suffragist, then producing articles and reviews, and then contributing a number of volumes on women’s history, including Women's Work in Municipalities (1915), Understanding Women (1931), America Through Women's Eyes (1933), A Changing Political Economy as It Affects Women (1934), and Woman As Force In History: A Study in Traditions and Realities (1946); 

She published on the topic of labor as well, including A Short History of the American Labor Movement (1920) and, co-authored with her husband, a social, cultural, economic, and political history, The Rise of American Civilization (1927).

After the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, she advocated for the Equal Rights Amendment. 

But what's particularly interesting to me, especially today, as I negotiate its judgments, peculiarities, and omissions, is Mary Ritter Beard's project analyzing the Encyclopedia Britannica and its treatment of women. Beard was asked to undertake this project by the Britannica's editor in chief, Walter Yust. She assembled a group of three scholars--Dora Edinger, Janet Selig, and Marjorie White.

The group had a small budget, but Beard herself worked for free. After eighteen months of study, they published A Study of the Encyclopaedia Britannica in Relation to its Treatment of Women in 1942. And, perhaps not a surprise, the Britannica's "treatment of women" was not good. Beard and her co-authors included a list of suggestions for improvement along with their analysis, but they were ignored. By 1947, Ritter was advising women not to write for Britannica. 

For Beard's Encyclopedia Britannica report (as well as her other work), see Ann Lane's Making Women's History: The Essential Mary Ritter Beard. (To read a sample of the report, click here.)

For an updated view of gender bias in our reference works, you might be interested in Joseph Reagle and Lauren Rhue's "Gender Bias in Wikipedia and Britannica" (International Journal of Communication), which you can read by clicking here. You can also read what I've posted on this subject by clicking here.

Mary Ritter Beard died in 1958, aged eighty-two. There's an excellent biographical essay posted at the Sophia Smith Collection website, which houses many of Mary Ritter Beard's papers.

Emmeline Pankhurst: Deeds Not Words

Emmeline Goulden Pankhurst (born 15 July 1858)

I've already noted two key British suffrage activists, the sisters Elizabeth Garrett Anderson and Millicent Garrett Fawcett, but today's posting, for Emmeline Pankhurst, focuses on perhaps the most prominent figure in the cause of women's suffrage in Britain.

For what it's worth, Pankhurst was also included as one of the twentieth century's one hundred "most influential people" in Time magazine's end-of-the-century round-up, along with Einstein, the Roosevelts (Eleanor as well as Theodore and Franklin), Stalin, and Gandhi--but, then, the list included Lucille Ball and Bart Simpson, so, as I say, "for what it's worth." Though Aretha was on the list too, so there is that.)

Emmeline Pankhurst, c. 1913

Anyway, born on 15 July 1858, Emmeline Goulden was the daughter of a Manchester businessman, Robert Goulden, and Sophia Crane, both politically active--Robert Goulden campaigning against slavery, among other social causes, Sophia Crane Goulden a feminist who actively supported women's suffrage. As a friend of John Stewart Mill, Robert Goulden also supported the suffrage movement.

Despite their progressive politics, however, neither of Emmeline's parents was interested in educating their daughters in the same way they educated their sons.

As early as 1868, Emmeline and her younger sister Mary attended a suffrage demonstration; by 1872 she had attended her first suffrage meeting. A year later, in 1873, she was sent to the École Normale de Neuilly, but there she learned more than the kinds of conventional training in domestic skills that her parents seemed to consider all that was essential for girls. (Later, in her autobiography, she would write, "It used to puzzle me to understand why I was under such a particular obligation to make home attractive to my brothers. We were on excellent terms of friendship, but it was never suggested to them as a duty that they make home attractive to me.")

The school provided its female students, like Emmeline Goulden, a program that included chemistry and bookkeeping in addition to the kinds of finishing-school education most girls usually received. Soon after her return to Manchester in 1878, Emmeline Goulden met Richard Pankhurst; the two were married in 1879.

The marriage was reasonably happy--Richard Pankhurst had previously sworn to remain a bachelor so he could devote himself to public service, including drafting the Municipal Franchise Act of 1869 allowing unmarried female householders a vote in local elections. Emmeline gave birth to six children in ten years.  Three daughters, Christabel, Sylvia, and Adela, would join their mother in the suffrage cause. A son, Francis, died at the age of four in 1888; Pankhurst gave birth to another boy in 1889.

In 1889, after some disappointment with the direction other women's suffrage groups had been taking, Emmeline and Richard Pankhurst founded the Women's Franchise League, a "radical" group that not only advocated for the vote for both married and unmarried women but also supported unions and advocated reforms in marriage and property laws (in particular in relationship to divorce and inheritance). The group's political aims and ambitions caused it to fall apart.

Emmeline Pankhurst at the podium, 1905, in front of
the WSPU slogan, "Deeds Not Words."

By the time Richard Pankhurst died in 1898, Christabel had joined her mother in the suffrage cause (as would Sylvia and Adela).

In 1903, disillusioned with established suffrage organizations and tired of the parliamentary promises that failed to result in action, Pankhurst and a group of like-minded women founded the Women's Social and Political Union--a militant group whose activities soon moved from non-violent to violent, a group whose chosen motto was "Deeds Not Words."

Christabel was arrested in 1905 for spitting at a police officer, Sylvia and Adela the next year for protesting outside parliament. Refusing to pay fines, women were sent to prison for their political activities.

By 1908, the group had rallied a crowd of 500,000 in Hyde Park. Protestors threw rocks at the windows of 10 Downing Street; twenty-seven women, including Emmeline Pankhurst, were arrested, convicted, and sentenced to six weeks imprisonment. And women added hunger striking to their list of militant tactics--arrested again in October 1908, this time for producing an inflammatory handbill, Emmeline and the women imprisoned with her began a hunger strike (she is reported to have endured ten hunger strikes during one eighteen-month period.) Authorities responded by force feeding. Mary Clarke, Pankhurst's sister, was one of several women who died as a result of these brutal procedures. (For an essay from The Guardian describing the forcible feeding of women imprisoned for their militancy, click here.)

Afraid of the increasing violence, Emmeline Pankhurst's daughter Adela left the WSPU in 1911; her sister Sylvia also expressed her doubts. Undaunted, in 1912, Emmeline Pankhurst and her WSPU continued their window-smasing campaign, and Pankhurst spent another period in prison, undergoing yet another hunger strike. After her release, she went even further, advocating arson attacks--this resulted in Sylvia, too, leaving the WSPU. 

The outbreak of the first world war, in 1914, halted the activities of both the militant WSPU and the more moderate National Union of Suffrage Societies (and members like Millicent Fawcett and Elizabeth Anderson). Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst worked on behalf of the war effort (Adela and Sylvia were both committed pacifists).

After the war, in 1918, women--or, at least, some women--finally gained the right to vote. The 1918 Representation of the People Act, passed in February, gave women who were at least thirty years old the right to vote if they were property owners. (According to the UK Parliamentary website: "The age 30 requirement was to ensure women did not become the majority of the electorate. If women had been enfranchised based upon the same requirements as men, they would have been in the majority, due to the loss of men in the war.")

Although it is frequently said that Pankhurst ultimately witnessed the passage of the 1928 Representation of the People Act--the "Equal Franchise Act" that removed the various qualifications on women and granted them the same right to vote as men--she did not. Emmeline Pankhurst died on 14 June 1928--the bill was introduced into Parliament in March, but it did not pass and become law until 2 July 1928. 

There are many excellent biographies of Emmeline Pankhurst, so rather than suggesting a book about her, I'll link to work by her. You can read her autobiography via Project Gutenburg (click here) or at the Internet Archive (click here).

You can also read one of her great speeches, "Freedom or Death," delivered in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1913.

On 6 March 1930, a statue of Pankhurst was unveiled,
Victoria Tower Gardens
(with Westerminster in the background)

The sculpture today.

Update, February 2018: In honor of the centenary of some British women at last gaining the right to vote (the 1918 Representation of the People Act, 6 February 1918), the BBC's History Extra podcast has produced two excellent episodes: "The Suffragettes" and "The Pankhursts." Enjoy!

Update, 22 June 2025: From The Guardian: "Campaign for British Suffragette Hero Is Hit by Funding Crisis." Because of course it is--as Amelia Hill notes in her article, 

Mary Clarke, who was the sister of Emmeline Pankhurst, helped found the Women’s Social and Political Union and was imprisoned three times.

But she has been all but forgotten: there is no public memorial to her and she is not among the 59 suffragettes named on the Millicent Fawcett plinth in Parliament Square.

Mary Clarke took part in the Black Friday protests of 18 November 1910. She was arrested and imprisoned in Holloway prison, undertook a hunger strike, and was forcibly fed. She died three days after her release from prison.

Update, 1 August 2025: Another mention of the effort to fund a monument for Mary Clarke, but no new information: see the editorial offering "The Guardian View on Statues: New Monuments Reflect Changing Values and Reinvigorate the Public Realm."