The women’s suffrage movement in Britain was greatly influenced by thinkers and activists from a range of 19th century social justice movements. The portraits in this section represent a sampling of these historical figures.
More information about these individuals can be found via links that follow the gallery of images below.
A number of prominent figures in American civil rights movements were frequent visitors to Britain in the mid 19th century. Abolitionists Sarah Parker Remond (1826 – 1894)and her brother Charles Lenox Remond (1810 – 1873) were well-known speakers throughout the UK. In 1840 Charles visited London as a delegate of the American Anti-Slavery society and remained to tour the rest of the British Isles seeking support in the fight against American slavery. Sarah followed in 1858, and remained for the next three years giving speeches about racial discrimination that stressed the sexual exploitation of Black women under slavery. William Lloyd Garrison(1805-1879) another well-known American abolitionist actively supported women’s suffrage in both America and Britain, regularly publishing articles and speeches promoting women’s rights and supporting women’s involvement in abolitionist causes. The abolitionist Frederick Douglass (1818- 1895) also traveled throughout the United Kingdom advocating for racial equality, and lending his voice to the campaign for women’s suffrage. Later, towards the turn of the century, his compatriot, anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells (1862 – 1931)visited Britain, introducing strategies borrowed from the Black protest movement in the US to social reformers in the UK.
From France the radical socialist politics of the Paris Commune filtered into British thinking as a number of Communard refugees sought refuge in the UK after the suppression of the Commune. The anarchistic thinking of feminist Louise Michel, (1830 – 1905) who defended the barricades in 1871 and became a political migrant in London after 1890, would have informed British socialist interests. Likewise, Henri Rochefort(1831 – 1913) a journalist and noted polemicist agitating in favour of the Commune, also in exile in London, would have inspired the radicalism of the WSPU.
At home in London, the Pankhurst family entertained a wide range of British-born social activists with sympathies to women’s suffrage. The patriarch, Richard Pankhurst (1834 – 1898) was himself an early supporter of women’s rights, and, as a Liberal MP established a National Society for Women’s Suffrage (1867) and authored the Married Women’s Property act of 1882, years before the WSPU was established. Jenny Julia Eleanor Marx, (1855 – 1898) daughter of Karl Marx, was a socialist activist and literary translator who was invited to speak to a gathering at the Pankhurst family home in London prior to 1900. Trade unionist and Labour Party co-founder Keir Hardie (1856 – 1915) a close friend of both Mr. and Mrs. Pankhurst, lent expertise and advice to the WSPU and allied suffrage movements. Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence (1867 – 1954) and her husband Frederick William Pethick-Lawrence (1871 – 1961) the WSPU’s primary patrons, publicists and financial administrators from 1906 to 1912, brought a substantial strategic and economic capital into growing the organization.
Dame Millicent Garrett Fawcett (1847 – 1929), feminist, author and politician was leader of the larger more established, National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (also known as suffragists). In February 1907 her group organized a large 3000-woman march called the ‘United Procession of Women’, later called, the Mud March. It was the first time that this type of public event was engineered supporting suffrage and it inspired the WSPU’s own version the following year.
The direct actions of women’s rights champion and social reformer, Josephine Butler (1828 – 1906)who regularly organized large scale public gatherings of citizens sympathetic to her cause and used pamphleteering campaigns to repeal the Contagious Diseases Act (1969) likewise inspired some of the strategies adopted by the WSPU.
It is also likely that the militant wings of the WSPU took lessons from the Irish Independence Movement, specifically the tactics used in Charles Stewart Parnell‘s (1846 – 1891)political crusades supporting Irish Independence: boycotting and obstructionism. A Protestant, Anglo/Irish landowner and British MP, who paradoxically (for a member of his class), rose to become the nationalist leader of the Home Rule League and leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party, Parnell agitated for labour protests by Irish tenant farmers. Acting on Parnell’s advice, tenants on a farm managed by Captain Charles Boycott (for absentee landlord, Lord Erne) stopped worked in his fields, stables and houses and orchestrated a campaign of social shunning. Parnell was also known for reviving an old parliamentary weapon – obstructionism – interrupting debate by introducing procedural rules and delaying tactics to slow the passage of legislation.