The Pankhursts Provide a Clew

The observer was H. W. Nevinson and the young lady was Sylvia Pankhurst. Woman would hardly refrain from evolving because the Pankhursts were no longer a united family: on the contrary, she would probably continue the process at a dizzier speed. Mrs. Emmeline Pankhurst herself lingered, unobserved, until the Wellington Gates were opened to admit police reinforcements; then she slipped through with a number of spectators, made her way to the very gates of the Palace, was seized at the last minute by a huge Inspector, and carried bodily into a taxi. Mrs. Pankhurst was released after her ninth hunger strike, but on the 15th she was arrested again–the tenth time since her sentence to three years’ penal servitude in April, 1913–and underwent her tenth hunger strike. Only Sylvia, the single realist among the suffrage leaders, maintained that war was a disaster.

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