Emmeline, Christabel, and Sylvia:

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XLI, Issue 12, 16 September 1908, Page 50

Emmeline, Christabel, and Sylvia:

THE SHRIEKING SISTERHOOD OF SUFFRAGETTES

FIVE thousand policemen found their capacity taxed to the utmost recently as they strove’ outside the Houses of Parliament in London to prevent a vast concourse of woman suffragists from surging into the Commons. Fur more than ithree hours multitudes of these demonstrators, mostly young, in, many cases •lovely, and in every instance more or iess violent, scuffled with constables, stood 'firm agai<nst charges of mounted police, smashed the windows of the Prime (Minister’s official residence and hurled •themselves in screaming detachments upon the Tiarriers, guarded by troops, that had been erected to forestall an invasion of the, lobbies, it was all the most impressive evidence yet afforded of that POSITIVE GENIUS FOR ORGANIZATION POSSESSED BY PANKHURST ’ LADIES, to which the rise and progress of (his campaign is ascribed in the British presfa. •Whether most credit is due to Mrs. Emaneline Pankhurst, the Manchester widow •Who did so much to 'found the Woman’* {Social and Political Union; or to her eldest daughter, Alisa Christabel Pankhunst. 4he fiery orator whose emotional eloquence has roused all England on the subject of votes for women; or to Miss (Sylvia Pankhurst. whose spirit of mar* ’tyrdom has sent her to jail again and again for the cause, seems to be a moot •point, The one established fact is that ibut for the Pankhurst family the gravity of the suffragist agitation, with its prospect of bomb-throwing as a phase of itlie immediate future, would long ere .this have been eclipsed by its purely Comical aspects. MRS. "’EMMELINE PANKHURST. THE Fi fFy year-old widow, ■whose masses of‘dark hair worn in "the pompaddhr style have few streaks of gray to belie the yohthful outlines of her face, is the soul of that faction which JiaS . just captured the movement and tuadir.it defiantly bellicose. In her suite ■of no’ less. than thirteen offices at Clement's’ Inn. she directs the labour of a score of young woihen typewriters, all working without, pay. and organises those window-smashing riots, those raids on the Houses of Parliament and those monster processions through ■ London streets which impart'such fresh piquancy to the (iilbertian generalization that (the policeman’s lot is not a happy one. Airs. Pankhurst, it has been disparagingly hinted, would, never have emerged triumphant from the bitter filed within the ranks of the suffragettes 'but for tie.; Irresistil>le seductiveness of her daughter < hristabel. who to the... learning of Hypatia adds many of Marie Antoinette’s graces and all the eloquence of Madame Roland. Sylvia, the other daughter, is komewhat deficient in the family fire, but has more sweetness than her sister. AH the ladies have been arrested frequently. The division of labour among the Pankhurst ladies allots to the mother ■the purely militant activities of the campaign, A large blackboard fastened to the wall behind Mrs. Emmeline Pankliurst’s desk affords her at a glance a chart of the disposition of the suffragist army from day to day. Lists of meetings arranged all over England for the day. the names of the speakers assigned to each, crosses against names of towns holding elections and hieroglyphics.of one kind or another reveal the thoroughness qvith which her capacity for detail enables Mrs. Pankhurst to do the work of administration. She personally directs, likewise, the work of harrassing cabinet ministers at their homes and at their offices, of compromising the dignity of the courts by protests against me'n-made laws, of arranging to have young women ■ferrested, and of blocking traffic in narjtow thoroughfares with forbidden assemblies. Thera is no apparent limit to the docility, the discipline and the devotion of the enthusiasts who have sc--oeded from “Uie old fogies’’ who deprecate the noisiness of Mra. Pankliurst’a f raeticality.

SHE IS A SLIGHT FIGURE OF A WOMAN, not very tall, noted for extreme reserve of manner in ordinary intercourse and for a certain aloofness of disposition that conveys an impression of coldness, not to say hardness. The expression of her countenance is described as ‘'sombre” in “The Woman Worker,” her eyes alone displaying much animation. They are of a steelish grey, set deeply in their sockets, surmounted by brows of that arched kind which betray the ascetic yet artistic type of character. Mrs. Pankhurst was educated in Paris, where she studied art and languages for some years and formed and intimacy with the daughter of that revolutionary journalist, Henri Roeliefort. Mrs. Pankhurst has described the spirit animating her in the suffragist movement as that of republican Fra,nee. She lit,l an overweening admiration for the genius of the late Louise Michel, although she does not accept that erratic woman’s political theories. Mrs. Pankhurst speaks French fluently. It is said that she never sleeps more than six hours in the twenty-four, and often not as many as four. She was at one time an enthusiastic vegetarian and she is still a total abstainer.

Mrs. Pankhurst had the good fortune to marry a man in sympathy with her revolutionary ideas. He was an eminent barrister in Manchester who worked •hard for what is called the emancipation of woman. To him must be given credit for 'the "married woman's property act," a measure drafted by Dr. Pankhurst at his wife’s entreaty, for the purpose of giving wives the independent control of their odn estates. It became law after much vehement discussion, in which Dr. and Mrs. Pankhurst distinguished themselves just, before his somewhat untimely death. The. widow found herself in embarrassing circumstances with fqur young children at the height of a municipal campaign, in which she led a local woman’s suffrage agitation from which the present movement has grown. Mrs. Pankhurst set about- organizing the Women’s Social and Political Union, which was at first a mere group of about a dozen quite unknown women who met in lier parlour. To-day this .society is the most conspicuous factor in the political life of England. Mrs. Pankhurst is so deficient in magnetic personal qualities that only her gift for command and the dominating instinct of her character coiild maintain her present boundless influence over the thousands of women who obey her with a positively blind devotion, even to the point of living on bread and water in prison. The irreconcilable conflict of temperament between herself and the leader of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies led to her .secession, with an immense body of followers, from

the pacific repose of its propaganda. No sooner, however, had Mrs. Pankhurst invited imprisonment by proclaiming her cause from the housetops, chalking "totes for Women” on the portals of politicians and pulling the coat-tails of the officially prominent than she had to contend with revolt in her own ranks. Her dictatorial exaction of implicit oliedience and, it is even insinuated, her unaffected contempt for every opinion but her own, revealed a defective appreciation of the value of team work. In the wake of the Pankhurst circus, therefore, may be found an attractive side show in the form of the Women’s Freedom League. Thus it comes about that there exists to-day three great organizations urging votes for women in England, the peculiarity of Mrs. Pankhurst’s personality being held responsible for the rivalries and recriminations within suffragette sisterhoods that inflame the furies of the fray with the franchised foe. ON THE PLATFORM MRS. PANK HURST REVEALS A STRIKING GIFT FOR RETORT, a taste for shirt waists of ornately embroidered pattern and a voice too weak to be audible very far. She has herself well under control, according to one study of her temperament in the London “News.” “HER EXTRAVAGANCES ARE CONSIDERED. THEY ARE NEVER TOUCHED WITH THE TAINT OF HYSTERIA.” She manifests no eccentricities of ideation. such as a belief in metempsychosis or a devotion to fads. She frequently goes to church, and is a very fine cook.

Airs. Pankhurst professes, moreover, a peculiar regard for the sanctity of the marriage tie and has taken pains to hold aloof from her. organisation all women noted for ladical views of sex relations. To an interviewer recently she Said that Geprge Eliot was a fine genius with sufficient- intellectual humility to atone in later life for her ill-considered trifling with the sanctity of wedlock. In various ways Airs. Pankhurst has manifested tendencies to conservatism of thought. She has had a practical training in administrative work in various offices of responsibility under the municipal government of her native city of Manchester, where she served on the school board, on the board of guardians of the poor, and as registrar of births and deaths. M ithin the past year she has shown some tendency to nervous prostration, and it is a more or less open secret in the suffragette .camp that she has had to put down witn an iron hand one more revolt against her authority. Far more emotional than her mother, •with infinitely finer powers of address and possessing the inestimable advantages of youth and good looks. Miss Christabel Pankhurst, who is at this time twenty-eight years old, might be called the suffragette fanatic. She expresses at all times A PROFOUND CONTEMPT FOR MEN. The relations between Christabel Pankhurst and her mother are extremely affectionate, for the young lady is and seems always to have been Ute' model of

a dutiful daughter. From her tenderert years she was, as a writer in “The Ladies' Realm" assures us, "eonseerated to the sacred cause of downtrodden womanhood” by her widowed mother. Christabel Pankhurst received a university training and equipped herself by long study for her father’s profession of barrister, but her sex made it legally impossible to call her to the bar. She has been called, in some flattering accounts of her career, “a dreamy beauty,” with languishing dark eyes and a most graceful figure. She coils her masses of dark hair plainly on either side of her face as a rule, and she is credited with a pair of extremely shapely arms. Her most riveting characteristic is fieriness of phraseology in the harangues she delivers at stret corners and on door steps. She must be in vigorous health, for she often marches mile after mile in outdoor demonstrations, winter and summer, with' no trace at all of fatigue. The statement that she wears bloomers beneath her well-fitting skirt is authoritatively denied. Like her mother, indeed, she affects a conventional garb, and she presided over the great meeting in London last month in a most elegant hat. When she wishes io display contempt for any sister in the cause, she cries: “You argue like a man.” She is somewhat lacking in her mother's aptitude at repartee, and has been put to confusion on the platform by the circumstance. “The wife of this gentleman,” she said, for example, at one great gathering, “is a prisoner for our cause in Holloway jail.” “That,” interrupted somebody in Ilia rear, “is why he looks so happy now.” Aliss Christabel flashed scorn from her eyc s during the will laughter th»t

succeeded this sally, but was unable to extinguish the heckler, as her mother would certainly have done, with a crushing rejoinder. The young lady’s physical strength, on the other hand, enables her to emerge triumphantly from her fisticuffs with policemen. She can box capitally, and on more than one occasion has knocked the helmet off a “bobby’s” head, and even taken off his belt and flourished it threateningly in his face. She originated the expedient, so much in vogue, of chaining herself to the railings of official residences and padlocking her waist. '■ Policemen striving’ to release martyrs in such durance are .TABBED WITH HATPINS. The young lady has resolved, it further appears, never to marry until the triumph of the cause of votes for women, an act of renunciation compared by her admirers with St. Cecilia’s vow of perpetual virginity. The militant methods to which she resorts are affirmed by Aliss Christabel and her friends to be very ijistasteful to herself. Her digposition is even affirmed lo be naturally shy, and there are limes when she ca:i scarcely find courage to address a meeting, for her tendency to stage fright, is inveterate. Nor is it an unusual sight for a whole vast audience to behold Miss Christabel in tears as she tells of the sufferings of suffragettes. Iler own ordeals in fliis line have been many and severe. She lias found herself stripped of all her tilings in jail and reduced to «, diet of dry bread, tea, mA

potatoes. She has had to spend weeks In solitary confinement, her only occupation being the sewing of letter Harriers’ bags. For one hour on each day throughout a recent term in jail she was walked backwards and forwards with other prisoners in a yard in the prison enclosure. For reading she had the Bible and a book called "A Healthy Home,” which, as she subsequently told one of her audiences, was of no use to her there. She asked for a Shakespeare. There was but one volume in the prison, and that was engaged. She asked for pen and paper that she might write down her meditations. They were refused. She asked that gallant champion of the cause of votes for women, Mr. Cobden-Sanderson, to apply to the Home Secretary on her behalf to be allowed the use of pen and paper and ink “wherewith to deliver herself of her thoughts burning within her all day and all night and unutterable.” She made no complaint for herself, adds Mr. Cob-den-Sanderson, recording these circumstances in ' the London “Telegraph,” “but in isolation prayed for the cause of woman.” Will that prayer be answered ? It is the query of Mr. Cobden-Sanderson. “Is there no soul of woman really, no anything in the world? A world of shadows only No man of heart, of genius, to bid all legislation stop, and the world’s vain turmoil cease till woman shall have stepped, with the help of man, to where man stands, that, hand in hand and heart in heart, they may together elimb the steep path of life?” To which might be added a scarcely less moving plea by Miss Beatrice ITarraden, the novelist, who discerns in Miss Christabel Pankhurst one of those rare souls born into this world _ every thousand years to command the homage of mankind. Betw’een Miss Christabel Pankhurst and Miss Sylvia Pankhurst there exists somewhat the contrast discerned by the Vicar between his eldest daughter and his youngest. Christabel overwhelms at the first meeting- by the irrestible magnetism of her womanhood. Sylvia pleases through sweetness of. manner,'and a tantalising maiden . .bashfulness. Where Christabel is fiery and eoinpelling, Sylvia remains persuasive!, and convincing. Christabel is intellectual and eloquent. Sylvia says very little and overpowers nobody with her prodigious mentality. : If Christabel deserves to go down to posterity as the Juno of woman suffrage,' SYLVIA MUST BE DEEMED THE JOAN OF ARC OF THE MOVEMENT. She inspires refined ladies to tolerate Srison diet by living upon it herself, he has, like Portia, studied somewhat of the law, but, like Christabel, she is not allowed to practice it. She cannot make speeches like those of her sister, but she can, like her mother, make bread, nefl,. :ae fther