Shout, shouts,

Out with your soul

Dry with a wind for the dawn is breaking

March, march, swing you alone

Why close our banner and hope is breaking, love with this call?

Proclamation.

Whereas the Nation depends for its progress and existence upon the work and services of women as well as men.

Whereas the women of the nation have made clear their need for political rights and their desire to possess the parliamentary vote.

The Women's Freedom League calls upon the government to remove the sex disability which deprives qualified women of their just right of voting in the parliamentary elections.

The nation can never be free until the law recognises and establishes votes for women.

The demand is just, the reform inevitable delay is unwise and unjust. Loud and power is built,

under of freedom of voice of the Lord.

In the years leading up to the First World War, the long campaign to win political rights for women gained momentum and grew in militancy. I'm standing in a green park by the side of the Thames, next to the Palace of Westminster called the Victoria Gardens.

In front of me there's a statue of Emmeline Pankhurst,

one of the leading figures in the campaign that came to be called the suffragette movement and which eventually gained women the right to vote and to be members of Parliament.

It's a fitting place to start a journey to explore how the story of the suffragettes can be told from events and records within the buildings of Parliament themselves.

From here I'm going to climb high up into the Victoria Tower to visit the Parliamentary Archives and to hear some of the stories of the struggle they have to tell.

My name is Mary, Mary Taki Nagy. I'm an archivist here in the

Parliamentary Archives. We're going to see some of our Suffragette documents which are held

here in a tower, in particular the banner that was unfurled from the Ladies Gallery and the

House of Commons in 1908 and the police reports associated with that.

So now we're up in the Victoria Tower and we're looking at some of the documents associated with the suffragettes. They were particularly interested in Parliament of course

...