LETTER: More more to suffrage subject

Can I suggest he uses Google or Wikipedia to check his facts next time?

I have been researching the facts on this subject for some months and feel I should respond. In short, Mrs Pankhurst was a patriot who supported the war effort.

Suffragettes (militants) and suffragists (non-militants) all took up the tasks the men had to leave on being called up.

One of her daughters, Sylvia Pankhurst, started the first soup kitchen for starving families left to cope when their men had to go to the front.

The fight for suffrage (the right to vote) was a long one; the first petition was presented to Parliament in 1834. There were many more.

Seventy years later, reasoned argument and huge peaceful marches and rallies, filling London, were still ignored. A peaceful ‘Pilgrims’ march passed through Littlehampton, Worthing, and Shoreham to Brighton en route to London for one of these rallies.

In those days, men’s protests, such as the miners’, often turned violent, but violence was done to the women, many times before the ‘Suffragettes’ started to damage property. Note – property.

There is much more to this subject, such as why these women saw the vote as so important, apart from the injustice of their own position. Years before, Mrs Pankhurst’s husband had tried to alleviate the conditions for workers and the poor which were terrible, and she was later a Poor Law Guardian herself, shocked at the terrible conditions in the workhouse.

Angela Tester, Bayford Road, Littlehampton

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