This week we finish the story of the suffragettes. We pick up the narrative in 1912, when parliament’s failure to deliver women’s suffrage triggered a new phase of violent escalation. No suffragette was more extreme than Emily Wilding Davison, whose death at the hooves of the King’s horse turned a liability into a martyr. Meanwhile, the whole country was convulsed by arson and bomb plots and the Pankhursts’ autocratic leadership was alienating some of their closest allies, including members of their own family. It took the First World War to stop the “reign of terror” and ultimately give women the vote.

Was violence morally justified when peaceful solutions failed? Did it hasten suffrage or threaten to derail it? What might have happened if the war had not intervened? What do the strange and divergent afterlives of the suffragettes tell us about the movement? And what can modern activists like Just Stop Oil learn from the suffragettes?

Behind the sanitised, sentimentalised version of the story lies a thorny tale of the validity and efficacy of violence in a just cause, taking Edwardian Britain to the edge of chaos.

Origin Story will be live at the Tabernacle in London on the 7th of November for a special post-US election show. Tickets here.

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Reading List

Diane Atkinson – Rise Up Women!: The Remarkable Lives of the Suffragettes (2018)

Helen Lewis – Difficult Women: A History of Feminism in 11 Fights (2020)

Joyce Marlow (editor) – Suffragettes: The Fight for Votes for Women (2015)

Glenda Norquay (editor) – Voices and Votes: A Literary Anthology of the Women’s Suffrage Campaign (1995)

Christabel Pankhurst – Pressing Problems of the Coming Age (1924)

Christabel Pankhurst – Unshackled: The Story of How We Won the Vote (1959)

Sylvia Pankhurst – The Suffragette: The History of the Women’s Militant Suffrage Movement 1905-10 (1911)

Sylvia Pankhurst – The Suffragette Movement: An Intimate Account of Persons and Ideals (1931)

Mary R. Richardson – Laugh a Defiance (1953)

Fern Riddell – ‘Sanitising the Suffragettes’ (2018)

Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Produced by Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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