Il femminismo e i diritti delle donne
The suffragettes and
Emmeline Pankhurst
The suffragette movement was born around the second half of the nineteenth century in the United Kingdom, when women began to demonstrate for the right to vote. They saw the right to vote as an opportunity to make their way into the political life of a state. The first women’s protests followed the publication of Olympe de Gouges' Declaration of Women’s Rights and they were not always peaceful. In fact it often happened that they started as peaceful protests, but then ended in violence because of the intervention of the police. Many women tried to include men in their projects as the only ones who couldcould intervene at a poli-
-tical level, but with little success. Others fought using books, posters or less commonly newspapers. Emmeline Pankhurst was one of the leading figures in the feminist suffragette movement. At only fourteen years old she was involved in the suffragette movement and seven years later married a man who, like her, wanted the right to women. In the following years Emmeline had 5 daughters and also took part in numerous activist groups including the "Franchise Woman’s League" group she founded and to which she managed to approach many women from different social classes. In 1903, Emmeline Pankhurst founded the WSPU, an acronym for Women’s Social and Political Union, a foundation
through which she and her daughters fought for women’s suffrage. This association, however, was based on "deeds not words", so very often the actions they performed included destruction of windows and assaults on officials. There were many condemnations of the young women participating in the
in the WSPU, but they did not get discouraged and organized a hunger strike: some women said that the authorities have come to the point of holding them by force with their mouths open to feed. In fact, the girl went so far as to use fires as a weapon of protest; she also expelled two of her sisters, Adela Pankhurst and Sylvia Pankhurst, from the association because they considered the
protest tactics inappropriate and excessively violent. During the First World War, however, the demonstration activities were interrupted so that Great Britain could have the necessary support to
fight against the enemy. Emmeline and Christabel urged the young women to help the state from an industrial point of view. That’s how the patriotic movement of "White feathers" was born. Following the end of the war in 1918, the "Representation of the People Act 1918" granted voting rights to men over 21 years old and women over 30 years old. The years of her seniority passed, and she died on 14 June 1928, a few weeks before the British government granted voting rights to women over 21. Two years after her death, she was commemorated with a statue of her in the Victoria Tower Gardens. In 1999 the American newspaper "Time" judged Pankhurts as one of
the "most important people of the XX century", saying that she "shaped an idea of woman for our time, shook society into a new model from which there would be no more chance to go back".