A VETERAN POLITICIAN.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIV, Issue 19626, 3 May 1927, Page 5

A VETERAN POLITICIAN.

Mrs. Emmeline Pankhurst is a woman of many parts. She has in her day been denounced and praised perhaps more than any other woman of her generation, but nobody will deny her courage, her indefatigable energy, or her fanaticism. She is now over 70 years of age and has been adopted unanimously as the Conservative candidate for Whitechapel aod St. George's in the East, and her aim is to extend the women's franchise in Britain, so that the vote will be given to women at 21 instead of 30. Some months ago Lady Astor offeree,! to give up her seat in Parliament to Mrs. Pankhurst, but the veteran leader decided to accept no favours and to enter the field on her own merits It was as far back as 190.3 tha- in conjunction with Mrs. Pethick Lawrence she founded the Women's Social and Political Union. She was the autocrat of the movement and in 1908 launched the militant campaign, which split the ranks of suffragists into two camps—th. militant and the nonmilitant,. The storv of t.he outbreaks and tho imprisonments has been toid many times, perhaps nowhere more effectively than in Sir Harry Johnson's book, "Mrs. Warren's Daughter," the story of Vivie Warren, the heroine of Bernard Shaw's play, ai'ter her breach with her mother. The Government was at its wits' end how to deal with the rebels, and there is no saying how matters would liavo ended if the outbreak of war in 1914 had not turned Mrs. Pankhurst into a recruiting agent, and a most successful one, too. Quite undramatically, and in a way that must have been disappointing to Mrs. Pankhurst and her daughters, a limited franchise was granted to the women of Great Britain in 1918. Mrs. Pankhurst's efforts to spread thft militant doctrine in the United States met with no success, and in IQI3 she was sent back as an undesirable alien, but in Juno, 1918, sh. was allowed to enter and speak on the spirit animating England and France. A visit to Russia caused her to conduct an anti-Bolshevik campaign on her return to England. From the days before the suffrage campaign. Mrs. Pankhurst has always been keenly interested fn social reform and the care of children. In private life she is said to be lovable and attractive, dressing with a distinctive elegance suited to her years and tn hnve little patience with the lipstick and rouge pot.