ABSTRACT
When war broke out in August 1914, Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst, the leaders of the militant Women’s Social and Political Union, hailed it as the great apocalypse. The Pankhursts’ support for the British war effort stemmed from a complex mix of patriotic discourses, feminist ideas, and personal styles. The Pankhursts couched their decision to take up anti-German banners within a gendered interpretation of the war, in which they defined Germany as a masculine nation and Britain and her allies as feminine. In re-examining the Pankhursts’ patriotic discourses during the war, this chapter highlights a theme which has been developed by the work of many others: that the ideology ‘feminism’ is a product of, and must be understood within, the specificities of historical time and place. The ‘feminine’ representations of certain nations and their peoples in Britannia reveal the Pankhursts’ radical vision of a thoroughly gendered political sphere, in which women’s interests were implicitly tied to national politics and international diplomacy.
