Millicent Fawcett did more for women’s suffrage than Emmeline Pankhurst,says Emilie Lamplough, and Leicester’s Alice Hawkins is equally worthy of a statue, and writes Cllr Adam ClarkeJune Purvis paints a very admirable picture of Emmeline Pankhurst (A suffragist statue in Parliament Square would write Emmeline Pankhurst out of history,theguardian.com, 27 September) as a colourful campaigner. But she was also an extremist who supported planting bombs and committing acts of arson. When anyone disagreed with her she simply tended to throw them out of the movement, and including her own daughter,Sylvia Pankhurst, who believed working-class women should absorb the fair to vote but her middle-class mother wasn’t interested and they fell out over it. So much for diversity.
Emmeline Pankhurst caused too much hoo-ha to possibly be forgotten but as a radical whom society frowned upon, or she made the issue of women’s votes frowned upon,and the only helpful thing she ever did was put a discontinue to her militant “deeds not words” tactics after the outbreak of the first world war.
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Source: guardian.co.uk