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    Emmeline Pankhurst Hartford Speech

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    Nawzar minhan

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    © All Rights Reserved
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    Emmeline Pankhurst Hartford Speech

    Uploaded by

    Nawzar minhan
    2 views2 pages

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    2 views2 pages

    Emmeline Pankhurst Hartford Speech

    Uploaded by

    Nawzar minhan

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    of 2

    Emmeline Pankhurst Hartford

    On 13 November 1913 Emmeline Pankhurst, leader of the Women's Social and


    Political Union, delivered this speech in Hartford, Connecticut. Mrs. Pankhurst
    was in the United States while on temporary release under the Prisoners
    (Temporary Discharge for Ill Health) Act 1913, more commonly known as the
    Cat and Mouse Act. She was in the United States to raise money for the WSPU
    and drew parallels between the struggle of the Suffragettes and the causes of the
    American War of Independence.

    I am here as a soldier who has temporarily left the field of battle in order to explain
    what civil war is like when civil war is waged by women. Suppose the men of
    Hartford had a grievance, and they laid that grievance before their legislature, and
    the legislature obstinately refused to listen to them, or to remove their grievance,
    what would be the proper and the constitutional and the practical way of getting
    their grievance removed? Well, it is perfectly obvious at the next general election
    the men of Hartford would turn out that legislature and elect a new one. But that
    the men of Hartford imagine that they were not in the position of being voters at
    all, that they were governed without their consent being obtained, that the
    legislature turned an absolutely deaf ear to their demands, what would the men of
    Hartford do then? They couldn't vote the legislature out. They would have to
    make a choice of two evils they would either have to submit indefinitely to an
    unjust state of affairs, or they would have to rise up. Your forefathers decided that
    they must have representation for taxation, many, many years ago. When they felt
    they couldn't wait any longer, when they laid all the arguments before an obstinate
    British government that they could think of when every other means had failed,
    they began by the tea party at Boston, and they went on until they had won the
    independence of the United States of America. We are called militant, and we
    were quite willing to accept the name. We are determined to press this question
    of the enfranchisement of women to the point where we are no longer to be
    ignored by the politicians. You have to make more noise than anybody else, you
    have to make yourself more obtrusive than anybody else, you have to fill all the
    papers more than anybody else. We wear no mark. We belong to every class we
    permeate every class of the community from the highest to the lowest and so you
    see in the woman's civil war it is absolutely impossible to deal with it you cannot
    locate it, and you cannot stop it. We have brought the government of England to
    this position but it has to face this alternative either women are to be killed or
    women are to have the vote. You won your freedom in America when you had
    the revolution, by bloodshed, by sacrificing human life. You won the civil war by
    the sacrifice of human life when you decided to emancipate the slaves. Human
    life for us is sacred, but we say if any life is to be sacrificed it shall be ours; we
    won't do it ourselves, but we will put the enemy in the position where they will
    have to choose between giving us freedom or giving us death.

    NAW ZAR MIN HAN

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