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Emmeline Pankhurst Women's Suffrage Speech Analysis

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Emmeline Pankhurst starts her argument by stating clearly that she is not there to advocate for women’s suffrage. She makes that clear in the first line of her speech. Pankhurst does not want to justify why it is necessary to fight for women’s suffrage, but wants to justify the way she and her fellow American suffragists fight for women’s suffrage. Pankhurst, as a militant suffragist, makes an analogy by saying that fighting for women’s suffrage is like fighting in a civil war. She makes it clear that she is only making this speech because she is considered to have no value in her society and is considered a threat to the community because of the women’s suffrage movements. This is why she wants to explain to the public why women have no choice …show more content…

This way, she is able to put forth an idea that women’s suffrage is something that is denied when it is a part of justice of law that every member of the society should be able to take privilege of. She compares the situation to the men of Hartford. Men of Hartford are citizens that have rights under their government. If their legislature laid a grievance upon their community and rejected to listen to its citizens, then the men of Hartford can simply ‘turn out that legislature and elect a new one,’ because that is how the democratic society is structured to resolve political matters. However, she suggests men to imagine a society where they were denied their political rights as citizens, where their demands and needs were ignored by the government. She argues that there would be only two ways to go about this situation: to conform to the legislature or to stand up to rightfully fight for their rights, just like how their forefathers have done when they were denied of their rights. Here she makes an emotional appeal by referring to the foundation of how America was formed. When denied their rights, their ancestors protested using revolution, as demonstrated in the Boston Tea Party. She replies to any misconceptions of her speech by telling her audience that she and her fellow suffragists don’t consider violence as their top choice. However, they are only left with the choice to become violent because otherwise, it would mean that women have to submit to the society’s judgement that women do not need rights to

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In the speech "Freedom or Death" (1913), Emmeline Pankhurst expresses the need for resistance towards American and British Governments as a result of the state 's denial of women 's voting rights. She describes the suffragist movement 's efforts of civil disobedience as a result of gender inequality and the urgent need to fight for women 's rights as human rights. In the speech, she discusses the significance of the term ‘militant’, an attribute suffrage women were given based on their radical actions during this time. Suffrage women were described as militant due to their confrontational reactions and support for women’s rights which was sometimes perceived to be an unfavourable political cause. Many at this time, negatively applied the term ‘militant’ to the suffrages.

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