Emmeline Pankhurst

              E
mmeline 
P
ankhurst


yours Truly E. Pankhurst





American Lecture Tour

Emmeline Pankhurst


PREVIOUS to 1914 Mrs. Pankhurst might fairly enough have been introduced to an American audience as the 
English Suffragette Leader,
 the woman who, when all constitutional means had been denied the suffragists of Great Britain, had again and again stormed the historic House of Commons at the head of an army of women demanding votes.  This description of Mrs. Pankhurst, even previous to August, 1914, would have been incomplete, to those who know her best.  For many years before the suffragette agitation began Mrs. Pankhurst was a striking figure in the social and political life of her native city of Manchester.




In national politics, Mrs. Pankhurst was well known before she had passed her first youth, her sympathies with the masses at first leading her to join the Labour Party on the executive board of which she served for several years.  In her maturity Mrs. Pankhurst became a member of the Liberal Party, but always a critical member, preaching a practical democracy to which the majority of the voters of her party had never attained.




Emmeline Pankhurst has always been an unusual, a superior woman, with a mind and a vision far beyond that of the common man or woman.  But when the world war came, when Great Britain, in August, 1914, threw in its lot with heroic Belgium and with valiant France, then, at that time, Emmeline Pankhurst became a truly great woman, one of the leading statesmen of her country and her time.




Mrs. Pankhurst was in France when the war burst upon the world.  She was resting there after a stormy period of imprisonment in Holloway jail, having, for the dozenth time or more, endured the horrors of the hunger and thirst strike against which the British authorities admitted themselves helpless.  Yet, with the first gun fire of the war, Mrs. Pankhurst declared a truce of all suffrage militancy, left her refuge in France, went back to London and offered her services to the Government.  With her daughter Christabel, whose name and activities have with her own long been inseparable, she began to study the vast problems of mobilizing industry in factories and on the soil, in order that the life of England, during the war, should go on with as little suffering as possible.




Great Britain, for all her peerless navy, was almost as unprepared for war as the United States.  She had a small army, insufficiently officered, a war office entirely surrounded with red tape, and industries controlled by labor unions in which a dangerous pacifist element was apparent.  Mrs. Pankhurst and her daughter perceived instantly that if an army was to be raised and maintained an army of women would have to be mobilized in industry.  It was the Pankhursts who first persuaded Premier Lloyd George to establish training schools for women in munitions works.  It was they who first preached the gospel of a woman's land army and encouraged the thousands of 
farmerettes
 who left their homes and made the soil of England produce more than it had before in centuries.




England had its labor troubles during the war, as all the world knows, and up and down the length of England and Wales went Mrs. Pankhurst and her daughter, fighting strikes, pitting their brains and eloquence against the fulminations of labor agitators and German agents.  How they broke the coal strike in Wales, how they helped to keep the munitions factories going at full speed during four desperate years cannot be told in this brief pamphlet.  Every English statesman from Mr. Lloyd George to the newest member of Parliament, knows and appreciates the work done by Emmeline Pankhurst and her brilliant daughter during the war.  Everyone admits that the triumph of woman suffrage in the United Kingdom was, to a great extent, due to their patriotic efforts.




And now the world war is over and the German menace is forever dead.  At least so the superficially minded reason.  Mrs. Pankhurst knows that the war is not over, that democracy is not yet achieved, that the world is not yet safe for women and children and the home.  A menace greater than German militarism is yet to be slain, and this frail, fine, courageous, eloquent Englishwoman has gone forth to battle with the horrors of Bolshevism.




To miss what Emmeline Pankhurst has to say on Bolshevism as she saw it in Russia, as she has seen its shadow crossing Great Britain and the United States, is to miss hearing one of the greatest speakers of the time, one of the few real orators living in the world.  To call Mrs. Pankhurst an orator is by no means to describe her manner in speaking.  She is not grandiloquent.  She is gentle, appealing, logical, and beyond words convincing.  Hundreds who have gone out of curiosity to hear the 
militant Mrs. Pankhurst
 have been won to a life-long allegiance to her, not only as a great speaker but as a woman, in the truest sense, fascinating and enthralling.




Her speaking tours have been highly successful from every standpoint and this, perhaps her last lecture tour in America, will surpass them all in the amount of territory covered and the number of people addressed.




Subjects of Mrs. Pankhurst's Addresses



The Woman Voter Versus Bolshevism


What I Saw In Russia


How Women Helped to Win the War


Woman's Part in Politics


Civilization in Danger:  How Women Can Help to Save It


Class Co-operation Versus Class War


Women and Post War Problems




American Lecture Tour Under the Exclusive Direction




The Affiliated Lyceum and Chautauqua Bureaus




PORTLAND


PITTSBURGH


BOISE


ATLANTA


DALLAS


BOSTON


CHICAGO


CALGARY, ALTA.


CLEVELAND


TORONTO, ONT.