Name

Unit 8  Suffragettes Class

Date

Start thinking
1 Answer the questions.
1 Do men and women have equal rights in your country?

2 How old do you have to be to vote in your country? Can everyone over this age vote?

3 Do you know when women were first allowed to vote in your country?

Comprehension check
2 Watch the video. Choose the correct answers.
1 Emmeline Pankhurst became interested in women’s rights when she was …
a fourteen. b eighteen. c twenty-one.
2 Emmeline was arrested after a demonstration she organized at the …
a Prime Minister’s house. b Houses of Parliament. c Derby race course.
3 Women finally got the same voting rights as men in …
a 1914. b 1918. c 1928.

3 Watch the video again. Number the events a–j in the correct order 1–10.
a Richard Pankhurst died.
b The First World War started.
c Women over the age of thirty were allowed to vote.
d Emmeline Pankhurst died.
e The Women’s Social and Political Union was started.
f Women got the same voting rights as men.
g Emmeline was arrested and went to prison.
h Emmeline got married.
i Emmeline went to a lecture about the Woman’s Suffrage Movement.
j Emily Davidson jumped in front of the King’s horse at the Derby.

4 Complete the summary. Write a word or a number in each gap.

When Emmeline Pankhurst was born in 1858, women didn’t have the right to 1  . In 1878, Emmeline
married Richard Pankhurst, who was a 2 and a supporter of women’s 3  . Emmeline and
her daughters started a suffragette group and took part in many 4  . But when their protests failed,
Emmeline said that the women should start to break the 5 in order to send a stronger message. She
was arrested by the police, but when she came out of prison, she told the members of her group that they would
have to be even more 6  . The death of a suffragette at the Derby drew a lot of 7 to their
struggle.

5 Work in pairs. Answer the questions.

1 What do you think a woman’s life was like in 1857 in the UK?
2 Why do you think the demonstrations of 1908 failed?
3 Do you think the suffragettes were right to break the law? Why / why not?

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 Vocabulary
6 Match a word in A to a word in B. Then complete the sentences.
A war life-long worthwhile equal civil hunger

B strike effort rights disobedience dream cause

1 People fight for when two groups of people are treated differently.
2 is a peaceful form of political protest, such as refusing to pay taxes.
3 A person goes on when they refuse to eat anything as a form of protest.
4 A country puts all of its resources into a when it wants to win the conflict.
5 A is something that you have always wanted to do.
6 People think a is very important and often donate money to support it.

7 Rewrite the sentences. Replace the words in bold with the correct form of the phrases below.
break the law change your attitude fight oppression give up the struggle
rise to the challenge pass an act
1 In 1964, the US Government made a law which allowed all African-Americans to vote.

2 The women were arrested because they did something illegal.

3 When the protest failed, they decided to stop fighting for the cause.

4 People thought differently about women after the end of the First World War.

5 Some groups of people are still struggling for freedom in many countries around the world.

6 When their leader told them to fight, they showed that they could do it.

Extension
Work in groups. You are going to discuss the following statement: ‘Should prisoners be allowed to vote?’
One group will be against the statement and the other group will be in favour of the statement.
1 Choose one person in your group to write. In your group, think of as many arguments (for or against) as
possible and write them down.
2 Now choose the five best arguments. Prepare a short speech presenting your arguments. Give examples
where possible. Use the expressions in the box to help you.
3 Your teacher or chairperson will start the debate. One person in your group will give a short speech,
presenting the group’s arguments. He / she should talk for about three minutes.
4 When both groups have finished their speeches, you can respond to each other’s arguments.
5 At the end of the debate, the teacher or chairperson will hold a vote. Decide if you are against or in favour of
the statement, based on the arguments of each group. You don’t have to agree with the opinion of the group
that you were in.

Useful language: Talking about permission

The government allows / doesn’t allow …
… lets / doesn’t let …
… permits / doesn’t permit …
Prisoners are / aren’t allowed to …
… can / can’t …
… may / may not …
… are / aren’t able to …

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 Unit 8  DVD teacher’s notes

Video summary
The video is about the suffragette (the right to vote) movement in the UK in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. The video explores the life of Emmeline Pankhurst, the leader of the movement, and the
struggle the suffragettes had to get the vote for women. This video links to page 101 of the Student’s Book.

Background culture notes

Emmeline Pankhurst was the leader of the British suffragette movement, which helped women win the right to
vote. In 1878, she married a lawyer, Richard Pankhurst, who was twenty-four years older than her and known for
supporting women’s right to vote. After her husband died in 1898, Emmeline founded the Women’s Social and
Political Union (WSPU) with the aim of getting the vote for women. The group attracted attention for smashing
windows and assaulting police officers, and some of its members were sent to prison several times. In prison,
some of them went on hunger strike to protest for better conditions. When Emmeline’s daughter, Christabel,
became the leader, the group became more violent, and members started using arson as a tactic. However, the
group stopped all violent protest when the First World War started in 1914. In 1918, after the war ended, the UK
parliament gave women over the age of thirty the right to vote, but Emmeline wanted complete equality. Just
one month after she died, the Representation of the People Act 1928 was passed. This allowed women to vote at
twenty-one – the same age as men.

Start thinking
1 Read the questions with the class and elicit answers from individual students. Encourage students
to give a personal response and use their suggestions to start a class discussion.
Answer key
Students’ own answers.

Comprehension check
2 Answer key
1  a  2 b  3 c

3 Answer key
1 i  2 h  3 a  4 e  5 g  6 j  7 b  8 c  9 d  10  f

4 Answer key
1 vote  2 lawyer  3 rights  4 demonstrations  5 law  6 violent  7 attention

5 Students’ own answers.

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 Vocabulary
6 Answer key
1 equal rights
2 Civil disobedience
3 hunger strike
4 war effort
5 life-long dream
6 worthwhile cause

7 Answer key
1 passed an act
2 broke the law
3 give up the struggle
4 changed their attitudes
5 fighting oppression
6 rose to the challenge

Extension
Stage 1: Preparation before the class
• Write on the board: Should prisoners be allowed to vote?
• Tell students they are going to have a debate to discuss the statement. Explain that half of them will be in favour
of the statement and half of them will be against it.
Stage 2: Procedure in the class
• Divide students into groups of about eight. Ask them to move their desks together, if possible.
• Divide each group into Group A and Group B. Tell students that Group A will be in favour of the statement and
Group B will be against it.
• Ask students in their A or B groups to brainstorm arguments to support their opinion. Name one person in each
group as the secretary to make a note of their ideas.
• Ask students to choose their five best arguments. Explain that they need to expand their arguments by thinking
of examples to illustrate the points.
• They should then write their speech. Tell them to use the useful expressions in the box to help them.
• Tell each group to choose one person to speak for their group. Then tell each Group A to join each Group B.
• Choose one student to act as the chairperson in each AB group. Explain that the chairperson should start the
debate by introducing the statement and then ask the speaker from Group A to speak first.
• After three minutes, the chairperson should thank the first speaker and ask the speaker from Group B to give
their speech.
• After three minutes, the chairperson should thank the second speaker and ask the students in Group B to ask
Group A some questions about their speech.
• After three minutes, the chairperson should invite the students in Group A to ask Group B some questions about
their speech.
• After three minutes, the chairperson should hold a vote. Ask the students to hold up their hands if they are in
favour of the statement and count the number. Then ask the students to hold up their hands if they are against
the statement and count the number.
• Ask the chairperson of each group for the result of the vote in their group.
Extra ideas
Tell students to search for ‘Should prisoners be allowed to vote?’ on the internet. They should find a range of
websites that list the advantages and disadvantages of this.

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 Unit 8 DVD scripts  Suffragettes
In a park, next to the Houses of Parliament in London, there’s a statue of a woman called Emmeline Pankhurst. She
grew up during a time when women in England couldn’t vote. In fact, if it hadn’t been for women like Pankhurst, this
would never have changed. She was a suffragette and dedicated her entire life to fighting for the right to vote.
When Emmeline was fourteen years old, she attended a lecture on the Women’s Suffrage Movement. If she hadn’t
gone to this lecture, her life could have been very different, but the meeting inspired her to become a hard-working
suffragette.
A few years later, when she was twenty-one, Emmeline married a lawyer called Richard Pankhurst. He was also a
supporter of women’s rights and helped to form various political parties dedicated to fighting oppression. Sadly, he
died suddenly in 1898.
Emmeline and her daughters, Christabel and Sylvie, continued the struggle for equal voting rights for women. In 1903,
they started a group called the ‘Women’s Social and Political Union’. There were many other suffragette groups in the
country at this time, but this was one of the largest and most militant.
In 1908, there were big demonstrations for women’s rights, but nothing changed. The Pankhursts were very
disappointed. Emmeline felt that they would have had more success if they had acted more aggressively. She
advocated civil disobedience and called for women to break the law, if it was necessary and worthwhile.
She organized a demonstration at the Houses of Parliament in London where she was arrested and sent to prison
for a month. In 1910, the police arrested 156 women at another demonstration outside the Prime Minister’s house in
Downing Street. But women still didn’t get the vote.
Emmeline and Christabel decided that if civil disobedience was to be a success, the group would have to become
more violent. A lot of suffragettes rose to this challenge. They weren’t violent towards people, but they broke windows
and started fires as acts of opposition. Many members of the group were arrested and sent to prison, but that didn’t
always mean they gave up the struggle – some women continued to support the cause by going on hunger strike. The
suffrage movement was not always popular, and a lot of people were upset by the violent campaign. Emmeline herself
spent years hiding from the police.
In 1913 a suffragette called Emily Davidson died when she jumped in front of the King’s horse at a famous race called
the Derby. This drew a lot of attention to the struggle for women’s rights, both positive and negative. But in 1914, the
First World War started, and the group stopped their campaign in support of the war effort. The war changed attitudes
to women, and Emmeline started working with the government.
Finally, in 1917, the British government changed the voting law to enable women over the age of thirty to vote. Men
could vote at twenty-one.
For Emmeline, this was not enough. She persisted in her demands for fully equal rights between men and women.
Sadly, she never saw this happen. She died in June 1928 when she was sixty-nine years old. If only she had lived for
one more month, she would have seen her life-long dream come true. In July 1928, the government passed the
Representation of the People Act, which finally gave women the same rights to vote as men.
The struggle for women’s suffrage was one of the most powerful political movements of modern times. It united
women from all backgrounds and nationalities and inspired other civil rights movements for years to come.

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