My Own Story

About this book

Emmeline Pankhurst, the leader of the militant campaign for women's right to vote in Britain, tells how she founded the Women's Social and Political Union in Manchester in 1903 with the motto 'Deeds, not words'. After years of peaceful petitions had been ignored, the suffragettes interrupted politicians, marched, broke windows and set fire to empty buildings; hundreds were imprisoned, went on hunger strike and were force-fed. She describes her own arrests and her defence of militancy as the only language the government would hear.

Context and significance

Pankhurst (1858–1928) published the book in 1914, just as the First World War led her to suspend the campaign; British women won the vote in stages in 1918 and 1928. Read it with John Stuart Mill's The Subjection of Women and the memoirs of the American suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Eighty Years and More.

About the author