From militant suffragette at the beginning of the 20th century to campaigner against colonialism in Africa after World War II, British Sylvia Pankhurst dedicated her life to fighting oppression and injustice.
suffragettes
A Labour government would officially apologise and pardon the suffragettes for the miscarriages of justice they suffered in fighting for women’s right to vote in Britain, said Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.
Miss Muriel Matters
Robert Wainwright
ABC Books, 2017
376 pages
In 1909, Muriel Matters planned to rain on the parade of King Edward VII to the ceremonial opening of parliament. She aimed to drop a shower of “Votes for Women” leaflets on his head from a chartered air balloon trailing streamers in the white, gold and green of the Women’s Freedom League (WFL).
Lady Constance Lytton: Aristocrat, Suffragette, Martyr
Lyndsey Jenkins
Biteback Publishing, 2015
282 pages
When Lady Constance Bulwer-Lytton was arrested in 1909 for protesting outside British parliament, and went on prison hunger-strike, for demanding women’s right to vote, she was, to prevent an embarrassing political fuss, released early.
This avoided the spectacle of one of Britain’s best-connected aristocrats being subjected to the government’s policy of force-feeding hunger-striking suffragettes.
In the Social Contract, published in 1762, Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote that, “man is born free, and everywhere is in chains”. The French Revolution determined to remedy this state of affairs and its chosen instrument was a constitution setting out “natural, imprescriptible and inalienable rights”.