The Suffragettes

On 13 October 1905 Christabel Pankhurst may or may not have spat in a policeman's face. If, as she later insisted, no actual saliva was involved, then, in any event, she feigned this transaction with such verisimilitude as to achieve her calculated aim of being arrested for a technical assault. In high spirits, she had announced when leaving the house that day, ‘I shall sleep in prison to-night!’ Her loyal follower, Annie Kenney, had been her accomplice, and was also arrested. Thus the militant phase of the British campaign for women's suffrage began.

Pankhurst was a founding member of the Women's Social and Political Union (W.S.P.U.), and although her mother, Emmeline Pankhurst, was considered its titular head, her eldest daughter was often considered its primary strategist and decision-maker. Sylvia Pankhurst, Christabel's younger sister, testifies, ‘Mrs Pankhurst, to whom her first-born had ever been the dearest of her children, proudly and openly proclaimed her eldest daughter to be her leader.’ The W.S.P.U. inaugurated militancy – a euphemism for civil disobedience – as a tactic in the campaign and, continuing in this vein, succeeded (along with a few other organizations that left it or were purged out of it) in dominating the subsequent discussion of the politics of women's suffrage, and in capturing the attention of the public. Pankhurst, looking back on the fight once it had been won,commented on an interview she and other W.S.P.U. members had had with A. J. Balfour, the Conservative leader, in 1905. They had asked him why his party had not done anything for them:

The new approach by a largely younger group of women prompted the Daily Mail to find a distinguishing name for them, the ‘Suffragettes’, a sobriquet which W.S.P.U. women were happy to own. Pankhurst recalled: