Emmeline vs Millicent

[matgb]

Emmeline Pankhurst's Birthday | Jennie Rigg

Today is Emmeline Pankhurst's birthday. Emmeline Pankhurst gets a lot of credit. She's got a statue outside parliament and everything. A lot of the credit she gets, she doesn't deserve. By the time women actually got the vote, the WSPU had been disbanded. So my post for Emmeline Pankhurst's birthday isn't going to be about her.

It's about Millicent Fawcett, who you really should have heard of and who really really deserves the credit for getting the franchise extended. Pankhursts? Shouted a lot, annoyed people and had good publicists.

Go read, because while not written the way I was going to write it, is the post I was going to write tomorrow morning, she just stole my research...

Comments

[watervole]

I hadn't know that Fawcett founded Newnham.

In interesting woman - she deserves to be better known.

[matgb]

Yeah, I knew a fair bit about her work from reading around suffrage, but reading the other night finding out some of the other stuff she did was impressive--bestselling economics writer would normally be enough to be remembered by on its own.

[birguslatro]

Further reading: Kate Sheppard...

[matgb]

Hmm, the intro paragraph calls her a suffragette, but throughout the rest she meets with suffragists and used peaceful means. Not knowing much about NZ history, would suffragist be the better term?

The more I read and encounter how the tactics of the suffragettes were unhelpful I dislike the way they get credit everywhere, but in NZ the terms may not be as distinct?

[birguslatro]

Hmm. Well, the 'suffragette' term wasn't coined (by the Daily Mail) until after the WSPU was formed in 1903, so kind of irrelevant here, given NZ women won the vote in 1893. But I would assume Sheppard was more in tune with the more mainstream UK suffragists than with the WSPU.

And yes, I don't think there's much distinction here between suffragist and suffragette.