Emmeline Pankhurst is one of the best known figures in the long fight for women's suffrage. June Purvis, professor of women's and gender history at the University of Portsmouth, has produced a scholarly and highly readable study, setting a standard which will be hard to emulate. It is destined to become the definitive biography, although it will not please everyone, writes Margaret Ward
Her intention is to provide a corrective to the dominant view of the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU), one which has been influenced by Sylvia Pankhurst's socialist-feminist interpretation in her 1931 account The Suffragette Movement. This new study contains research of the highest quality, yet in her insistence on characterising Emmeline's later views, not as a right-wing shift, but as a continuation of a gender perspective, Purvis fails to convince.
We are used to hearing of the saintly Richard Pankhurst as a radical politician and labour supporter, but Purvis makes it clear that it was his wife who first joined the Independent Labour Party. Emmeline found early fame as a public speaker in a campaign for free speech in Boggart Hole Clough, barred to the ILP.
Husband and wife's joint interest in politics was the central issue around which family life revolved. The two eldest daughters, Christabel and Sylvia, thrived in this atmosphere; Adela and Harry found life more difficult, and were always to need more maternal attention than their mother was capable of bestowing. When Richard Pankhurst's death in 1898 left his 40-year-old widow with no money and four children to bring up, the knowledge she had gained as Poor Law Guardian in Manchester was put to good use. She became Registrar of Births and Deaths, a position she held for 10 years, until the prospect of jail led her to resign. Her understanding of the sexual abuse of women was gained from first-hand knowledge.
The gradual build-up of momentum that led to the eventual outcome of a virtual war between the suffragettes and government is an important corrective to those who claim militancy was misguided. Pankhurst, always keen on direct action, never held back from the fray, learning how to throw stones before marching on 10 Downing Street.
By 1913, the situation had been complicated by Ulster Unionist opposition to Home Rule. Feminists railed against double standards. Carson remained free while inciting Ulster men to violence, yet Pankhurst was dragged off to jail, escorted by 12 taxis, each filled with four plain-clothes men. She was hunted like a fugitive, staying at the houses of those brave enough to take her in.
One wonders what would have happened if the first World War had not intervened. Emmeline and Christabel became "patriotic feminists", a stance that Purvis goes to lengths to explain. The Pankhurst autocracy became more high-handed. Mary Leigh (famous in Ireland for her attack on Asquith and Redmond), a loyal militant, was banished for asking a question at a public meeting: "I denounce you as a pro-German and I wish to forget that such a person ever existed." To explain Pankhurst's vehement pro-war and anti-Bolshevik stance on the basis of her life-long admiration of the French Revolution is hardly credible. Nor is the claim that it was the socialism of men she rejected - when she had no difficulty in embracing "Empire and Imperialism". One feels bound to concur with Sylvia's query to Adela: "Can those two really be sane?"
There are poignant moments in her relationships with family and friends. The death of her surviving son, Harry, aged 20, a lonely figure who shared the commitment to women's suffrage; the death of her loyal sister, Mary, a forgotten heroine of the WSPU, who quietly left the family meal at Christmas to collapse with a burst blood vessel, two days after being released from prison. The Pankhursts attracted the loyal and unassuming, whom they tended to take for granted. Adela summed up their turbulent relationships: "It was the family attitude - Cause first and human relations nowhere." There is a brief discussion of the prevalence of lesbianism among the suffragettes, although Purvis dismisses rumours of Emmeline's relationship with Ethel Smyth. One of Sylvia's failings was that she was not, as Smyth sighed, "an Amazon".
By the end of the war, women aged over 30 had won the right to vote and to stand for parliament. It was hard for Emmeline to accept that the British public had rejected her beloved Christabel. She travelled to Canada, becoming a Canadian citizen, continuing her mission to build up the imperial race and earning a living lecturing on "social hygiene". She adopted the babies of women who had become pregnant during the war, and they went out to live with her.
HER restlessness was startling. Her health poor, they moved to Bermuda before an ill-advised venture, a tea shop on the French Riviera, forced her back to the generosity of friends in England. Her indomitable spirit remained intact. When the 46-year-old Sylvia gave birth outside marriage, she was appalled. Sylvia came to visit, but her mother walked out.
Purvis believes this scandal hastened her death. Emmeline Pankhurst died in June 1928, one month before her 70th birthday, the prospective Conservative Party candidate for the Whitechapel area of London.
Emmeline Pankhurst: a biography. By June Purvis. Routledge, 448 pp. £25 sterling
Margaret Ward is an historian and assistant director of the Belfast think-tank, Democratic Dialogue