Emmeline Pankhurst Women's Suffrage Speech

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This speech was given on November 13th, 1913 by Emmeline Pankhurst, who has been called the mother of British suffragette movement, in Hartford, Connecticut. She was on a fundraising tour across the United States and it became her most famous talk. She addressed to an audience filled with men but also women such as Katherine Houghton Hepburn (mother of the movie star) who was also a leader of the American suffrage, an audience assembled by Connecticut Women's Suffrage Association. Pankhurst's intentions were to justify the aggressive tactics the movement had taken and to encourage women to join their forces, it was also known her aim was also to increase fundraising to go on fighting for their cause. The lecture is a political text with a …show more content…

After her husband's death, she created the Women's Social and Political Union along several colleagues in 1903, which had the main purpose of taking direct action to win the vote. This organisation gained recognition for its high-profile tactics and violent acts such as bombing and arson. Her daughters, specially Christabel and Sylvia, also joined the WSPU and its cause. Their motto was “Deeds, not words” also written on Emily Davison's tombstone. Her involvement with the movement got her arrested on numerous occasions and she also went on hunger strikes which ended with unfortunate episodes of force-feeding which she explains in the …show more content…

Pankhurst explains that women want to be able to choose whomever represents them and she does that with a metaphor of the men of Hartford. Emmeline Pankhurst follows her speech referring the Tea Party at Boston, which was a political protest in which the Sons of Liberty destroyed an entire shipment of tea into Boston Harbour because the taxes had been increased by the British Government. That event become iconic in American history. With that reference, she wants to make the audience know how important is to fight for your beliefs and also how women had sacrificed for good causes, she jokes about the fact that men did not do the same with their whiskey. She states how the word militant is directly related to the suffrage movement. It says at first they did not take any of these so called violent measures but men against them were militant and after women were brutally mistreated they gladly accepted the name. She also compares the cause with two babies, one who cries and whines and the other one who is always calmed, and she explains you need to be loud to be heard by the ones in