“I am here as a soldier who has temporarily left the field of battle in order to explain – it seems strange it should have to be explained – what civil war is like when civil war is waged by women.”

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These words, spoken by prominent women’s suffrage campaigner Emmeline Pankhurst in 1913 to an audience in the US state of Connecticut, describe the fight that many women took up during the early years of the 20th century. In her now-infamous ‘Freedom or death’ speech, Pankhurst spoke of the numerous hardships suffered by imprisoned women and the torture endured by campaigners who chose to go on hunger strike. Her name (along with her daughters Sylvia and Christabel) endures as one of the most famous of the Edwardian era.

Authors

Elinor EvansDigital editor

Elinor Evans is digital editor of HistoryExtra.com. She commissions and writes history articles for the website, and regularly interviews historians for the award-winning HistoryExtra podcast

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