ABSTRACT
When Christabel Pankhurst died in 1958, aged seventy-seven, many tributes were paid to her younger days when she had been the Chief Organiser of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), the most notorious of the various groupings campaigning for the parliamentary vote for women in Edwardian Britain. For Christabel Pankhurst, the subordinate status that women experienced in Edwardian society was due to the power of men and so she saw the separatist WSPU, which only admitted women as members, as an important vehicle for women to foster a sense of sisterhood that would enable them to stand on their own two feet and articulate their demands. Strachey had been a keen supporter of the main suffrage grouping, the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, which, under the leadership of the liberal feminist leader Millicent Garrett Fawcett, engaged in constitutional, law-abiding tactics such as petitions to parliament and polite discussion with sympathetic male supporters.
