The Suffragettes – Part one – Deeds not words

Origin Story

Podmasters

Society & Culture, News, News Commentary, History

4.8 • 655 Ratings

🗓️ 23 October 2024

⏱️ 63 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This week we begin the tumultuous story of the suffragettes. In 1903, Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst founded the Women’s Social and Political Union. Sick of waiting in vain for women’s suffrage, they decided to secure it by hook or by crook. By 1906, the so-called suffragettes were the most exciting, audacious activists in the land, with their banners of purple, white and green. They then took on the might of the British state with ingenious protests and hunger strikes before agreeing to an uneasy two-year ceasefire while parliament wrestled over whether to give women the vote. We conclude part one at the end of 1911, with political failure and the dawn of a new phase of militancy. Who were the Pankhursts and their inner circle? How did they interact with Millicent Fawcett’s moderate suffragists? Why were Liberal politicians so determined to deny women the vote? And could it all have worked out very differently? It’s a fiery story of courage, conflict and missed chances, as British women found their political voice for the first time. Origin Story will be live at the Tabernacle in London on the 7th of November for a special post-US election show. Tickets here. Get the Origin Story books on Fascism, Centrism and Conspiracy Theory Get exclusive extras like supporter-only Q&A editions when you back Origin Story on Patreon. 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 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to origin story.
0:10.8	In each episode, we take a word, idea or figure from history, explain its origins and talk about how it influences political discourse today.
0:17.6	I'm Doreen Linsky, author of the Ministry of Truth, and everything was Go, and three new
0:21.6	origin story books. And I am Ian Dunton, I'm a economist with the Iron newspaper and the author of
0:26.2	the same origin story books with Dorian, but just the better half. Let's the readers decide.
0:32.5	This week, we begin an epic two-parter on the suffragettes. Now, Ian, this was my idea, because I think this is perfect for us,
0:40.0	because we all think we know the story, we know the basics of the story,
0:44.8	but I found it endly sort of complicated and thought-provoking.
0:50.1	How did you find it?
0:52.3	Well, as you know, I went into the subject with some resistance, and then I got into it, and I was like, it's undeniably fascinating and dramatic, quite thrilling.
1:02.0	It's sort of like you get pulled.
1:03.4	I think we'll find over the course of the story in two directions.
1:05.7	On the one hand, you're emotionally become really quite excited for what's going on.
1:10.3	And on the other, intellectually and morally, you become increasingly disturbed by what's going on. And then the other intellectually and morally,
1:12.2	you become increasingly disturbed by what's going on.
1:15.4	And sometimes you can feel both of those things simultaneously.
1:18.0	Well, there was a really interesting thing that happened
1:20.1	when Sadiq Khan announced the new names of the London Overground lines,
1:23.2	one of them was a suffragette line.
1:24.8	And one historian said it is grossly offensive
1:27.3	to name a railway
1:28.1	line after a terrorist group, which is a little extreme way of putting it. And yet, I thought
	...

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