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Article Excerpt
ON JUNE 4, 1913, A TALL, SLENDER, 40-YEAR-OLD WOMAN WITH RED hair and green eyes stood quietly at the rail of the Epsom Downs race track, waiting for the running of the English Derby. Her name was Emily Wilding Davison and she was a member of the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU). Under her coat she carried two suffrage flags. As the first group of horses passed her and a second rounded the corner, she slipped under the rail and ran onto the track. Newsreel films show her running toward the king's horse and throwing up her hands, perhaps to stop the horse, perhaps to protect herself. In an instant, woman, horse, and jockey are on the ground. Only Davison was seriously hurt; the horse walked off the track and the jockey, Herbert Jones, recovered quickly from his injuries. Kicked in the head, Emily Davison died four days later without regaining consciousness (cf. Stanley and Morley, 1988).
Her spectacular death made Davison one of the most famous and controversial of British suffragettes. Her friends and colleagues in the suffrage movement hailed her as having risked her life to call attention to the "great hardships and privations endured by women by reason of their exclusion from any political status" (E. Pethick-Lawrence, quoted in "Suffragette Outrage at the Derby," 1913: 1). Anti-suffragists, equally quickly, questioned her sanity and characterized her actions as "reckless fanaticism," "desperately wicked," "entirely unbalanced," "mad," "demented," and "an act of criminal folly" ("A Memorable Derby," 1913: 9; "The Distracting Derby," 1913: 8; "The Derby Suffragette," 1913: 8). When Davison died on the eighth, the debate entered a new phase. The leaders of the WSPU hailed her as a hero and a martyr who had sacrificed her life to call the government to account for its treatment of women and advance the cause of women's rights. She had been, according to Emmeline Pankhurst, "one of our valiant soldiers," who had "gladly laid down her life for the cause of women's freedom" (E. Pankhurst, 1913: 8). It was just the beginning of a campaign to claim and honor Davison as a martyr, a campaign that culminated in an enormous funeral procession through London on June 14. Opponents of the enfranchisement of women and especially of the militant tactics of the suffragettes rejected the WSPU's claims of martyrdom and continued to argue that Davison had been insane or suicidal or both.
Debate over Davison's death continued for three quarters of a century, as historians, like Davison's contemporaries, took sides on her intentions, psychological health, and militant career. Only recently has opinion coalesced around the notion that she was willing to die, but hoped she would not--that is, she was not suicidal (she had, for instance, purchased a round-trip ticket from London to Epsom) (Stanley and Morley, 1988; Sleight, 1988). I agree with the conclusion, but it leaves the willingness of women like Davison to risk their lives for the suffrage cause, as well as the general issue of martyrdom, unaddressed. In this paper I discuss these issues by focusing on the WSPU's rhetoric, its claims about Davison's death, Davison's own writings about death and sacrifice, the kind of martyrdom her death may have been, and the difficulty of distinguishing between sacred and secular martyrdom.
EMILY WILDING DAVISON'S LIFE
Frustrated by a decades-long campaign for the vote that seemed to be moving at a glacial pace, Emmeline Pankhurst founded the Women's Social and Political Union in Manchester, England, in 1903. Possessed of enormous energy and political acumen, Pankhurst and her followers adopted a set of steadily escalating tactics to gain public attention and force the government to grant women the right to vote. In the beginning the WSPU held public rallies and demonstrations with brass bands and choirs, spoke from soapboxes at county fairs, wrote letters to newspapers, and interrupted political meetings with questions about suffrage for women, questions that were often followed by the arrest and imprisonment of the questioners. (The members of the WSPU, when confronted with a choice of paying a fine or going to jail, always elected to go to jail.) When these activities produced no change in government policy, the group turned what had heretofore been a peaceful campaign for the vote into one of open conflict, physical confrontation, and life-and-death struggles between men and women. Women broke windows, set fire to corner mailboxes, carved "Votes for Women" in golf greens, damaged works of art, destroyed orchid collections, and burned unoccupied country mansions. In turn, young men (frequently referred to as hooligans and toughs) and members of the police taunted, chased, and beat up the women; political stewards inflicted bodily injuries when they ejected them from political meetings; the government refused to treat them as political prisoners; and prison officials subjected them to forcible feeding when they continued their protests by going on hunger strikes in jail (cf. Pugh, 2000; Purvis, 2000; Rosen, 1974; Vicinus, 1985).
The charismatic Emmeline Pankhurst and the excitement of direct action drew women from all social classes to the WSPU. (The WSPU's motto was "Deeds not Words.") At its height the organization appears to have had around 5,000 members, although anti-suffragists estimated the membership at 8,374 in 1909 (Pugh, 2000: 211). Each of them challenged the gender norms of society and many were prepared to risk their health and lives for the cause. On one end of the spectrum were working-class women like Hannah Mitchell, who combined work for the labor and women's movements until she quite literally collapsed from exhaustion. On the other end were members of the aristocracy like Lady Constance Lytton, the daughter of Earl Lytton, the viceroy of India, and a lady-in-waiting for Queen Victoria, who disguised herself as a working-class woman and engaged in civil disobedience to demonstrate the disparate treatment meted out to working-class and upper-class women in jail, despite her known heart ailments (Mitchell, 1968: 168-69; Lytton and Warton, 1914; "Want of Frankness," 1913: 572). In between the working-class and aristocratic women, thousands of women from the middle ranks of British society joined the Union. Emily Davison was one of them.
When Davison joined the WSPU in 1906, it had moved its headquarters from Manchester to London and the Daily Mail had dubbed its members and other militant suffragists "suffragettes" (the diminutive was not meant as a compliment) (Daily Mail, 1906). Davison was 34, well educated, single, a member of the Anglican Church, politically committed to both the labor and the women's cause, and employed as a teacher. She had received honors and a first-class pass in English literature and language from Oxford University (Oxford allowed women to take exams, but did not grant them degrees until 1920), and a B.A. with honors in classics and mathematics from London University. (Colmore, 1913: 15). Despite her academic credentials and what Rebecca West called her "pyrotechnic intelligence," Davison had moved from one insecure teaching position to another, none of them at the level for which her education had prepared her (West, 1982: 178). When she died, several pro-suffrage newspapers remarked on the lack of opportunities for women like her. "In a normal nation," the Daily Herald wrote, "Miss Davison's life might have gone on from distinction to distinction, a record of fine achievement throughout. In the Britain that murders mind, [and] thwarts and degrades so much brave humanity, it was largely one of protest culminating in martyrdom" ("Miss Davison's Sacrifice," 1913: 8).
Davison juggled teaching and the WSPU for three years before she decided to devote all of her time to the movement. The decision allowed her to commit herself fully to the union's activities and to participate in the kinds of civil disobedience that entailed arrest and incarceration. (1)
Davison threw herself...
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