ABSTRACT
When war broke out in August 1914, Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst, the leaders of the militant Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), hailed it as the great apocalypse. The war was the logical fulfilment, they reasoned, of suffragette prophecies of imminent world disaster consequent on male domination and vice. European governments had rejected the aid of women and had thereby brought the war upon themselves. Mrs Pankhurst and her daughter were in St Malo, France, when Great Britain announced its entrance into the conflict, and Christabel immediately drafted her ideas into an article to send to London for publication in the 7 August edition of the Suffragette:
A dreadful war-cloud seems about to burst and deluge the peoples of Europe with fire, slaughter, ruin-this then is the World as men have made it, life as men have ordered it. A man-made civilization, hideous and cruel enough in time of peace, is to be destroyed…. This great war…is Nature’s vengeance-is God’s vengeance upon the people who held women in subjection, and by doing that have destroyed the perfect human balance Only by the help of women as citizens can the World be saved…. Women of the WSPU, we must protect our Union through everything. It has great tasks to perform, it has much to do for the saving of humanity.1
