All the rage

AT FIRST glance, the image of Andrea Dworkin in her trademark overalls couldn't contrast more starkly with that of Emmeline Pankhurst in her Edwardian tea-gowns and huge floppy hats. Credited with having won British women the vote, Pankhurst's agenda now seems perfectly mainstream, while Ms Dworkin has, perhaps unfairly, been consigned to the lunatic fringe of the women's movement. Yet in some ways Ms Dworkin's idealism and extremism put her closer to the Pankhursts than to today's pragmatic post-feminists.

Ms Dworkin, who has written a lyrical memoir, is a problematic figure for liberals because she sees the evil of pornography as greater than the good of free speech. To get rid of the one, she believes, it is worth compromising the other. Her concentration on the issue of porn (which she regards as an attack on women's civil rights), as well as on prostitution and on battered women (she bravely spoke out after being abused by her own husband), have caused many to assume, despite her denials, that she regards sexual violence as the paradigm for all gender relations.

Her focus on women as the victims of male sexuality puts her in a direct line of descent from the feminism of the late 19th century, which arose out of the campaigns against the Contagious Diseases Act. Ms Dworkin would understand why, at the height of the British government's crackdown on suffragette militancy in 1913, Christabel Pankhurst launched an offensive on male sexual depravity, attacking establishment figures for using prostitutes, and writing “The Great Scourge” to warn women to avoid marriage while men remained carriers of venereal disease.

Like Ms Dworkin, who began as a leftist and was briefly jailed for her part in a demonstration against the Vietnam war, the Pankhursts had their roots in the socialist radicalism of their day. Martin Pugh's monumental biography untangles the different personalities of the four Pankhurst women, and reveals an impressive but dysfunctional family. Emmeline, the mother, whom history would come to regard as the figurehead, was passionately idealistic but inept in the practicalities of domestic life. Her children grew up to believe that the only way to win love was to become involved in fighting for the cause.

Mr Pugh fascinatingly puts that cause in its historical context. The Pankhursts had a genius for publicity as well as an uncompromising willingness to use violent tactics and to risk death through hunger strikes. But they only represented one strand of a much broader suffrage movement. They increasingly excluded working-class women, and all men, from their essentially well-to-do, female support base. Their success in becoming so uniquely identified with the fight for the vote derives from their courage, energy and defiance, together with the chillingly single-minded commitment they brought to “the movement” and their ruthlessly autocratic, military ethos.

Christabel, the eldest, was a brilliant speaker, who, with her mother, took a violent swerve to the right at the time of the first world war, and—bizarrely—became an Adventist preacher after the suffragette movement was wound up. The more sympathetic Sylvia, an artist and the lover of Keir Hardie, remained loyal to her socialist principles, and went on to flirt with Leninism before becoming a champion of Ethiopian nationalism. Adela, the forgotten third sister, was bundled off to Australia after a family row, and pursued a political career there which lurched from left to right.

Now that it is nearly a century since the suffragettes' campaign began, it is possible for a painstaking researcher such as Mr Pugh to look at the Pankhursts with greater detachment than has previously been the case: they can be seen as humans rather than heroines. It will be interesting to see what future historians of the women's movement make of Ms Dworkin.