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The Plymouth Law and Criminal Justice Review

Document Type

Article

Abstract

The release of the film Suffragette in October 2015, surprisingly the first major feature film on the women's suffrage movement, has raised public consciousness about the issue of women's rights and the role of the suffragettes in demanding votes for women with their call to arms of 'deeds, not words'. But decades before the Women's Social and Political Union was created in 1903 campaigners across the country had begun the struggle for emancipation for women. We argue that the film therefore needs to be seen in a wider context including the high level of male support for the cause and the fact it was not just a London or large city-based phenomenon. To support our claim this paper reviews the campaigns for women's suffrage in Plymouth and the South West in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We conclude with reference to the 'clever' arrest by Plymouth's Chief Constable, Joseph Davison Sowerby, of Mrs Emmeline Pankhurst as she attempted to land at Plymouth having sailed from New York on the liner Majestic.

Publication Date

2016-01-01

Publication Title

The Plymouth Law & Criminal Justice Review

Volume

8

Issue

1

First Page

84

Last Page

98

ISSN

2054-149X

Deposit Date

April 2011

Embargo Period

2024-11-04

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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