Notable Women in the Suffragette Movement in 20th Century Britain: Background information when reading The Hourglass Factory

Notable Women in the Suffragette Movement in 20th Century Britain

This article relates to The Hourglass Factory

In her novel, The Hourglass Factory, Lucy Ribchester has included some notable figures and episodes from the history of the women's suffrage movement in early 20th century Britain.

Emmeline Pankhurst
Emmeline was born in Manchester, England in 1858, to a family with radical political leanings. At the age of twenty-one, she married Richard Pankhurst, a lawyer and advocate of women's rights. They had five children, several of whom later became active in the suffrage movement. Richard Pankhurst died suddenly in 1898 but Emmeline did not lose her appetite for reform. In 1903 she founded the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU), an organization committed to activism to promote the cause of votes for women. Their activities included window-smashing, arson and hunger strikes. Emmeline was arrested, imprisoned and then force-fed when she refused to eat. A staunch supporter of the British cause during World War I, Emmeline, with her daughter Christabel, dissolved the WSPU in 1917 and instead formed The Women's Party, encouraging all women to support the war effort. In 1918 suffrage was granted to women over 30 and in 1928 – the year that Emmeline died - the age was lowered to 21, matching the voting rights of men.

Christabel Pankhurst
As Lucy Ribchester notes in The Hourglass Factory, in 1912, when the novel is set, Christabel Pankhurst was living in Paris to avoid arrest. Born in 1880, Christabel earned a law degree from Manchester University - although she could not practice law because she was female. She worked closely with her mother in the founding of the WSPU and was arrested several times. The British government responded to hunger striking by suffragettes by introducing what was known as the The Cat and Mouse Act. This allowed them to release hunger striking women and then re-imprison them when they had regained their health: hence Christabel's re-location to Paris. In 1918, Christabel was nearly elected to the House of Commons, losing narrowly by less than 1000 votes. In 1921 she moved to California. She died there in 1958.

Constance Lytton
Pivotal to Frankie solving the mysteries at the heart of The Hourglass Factory, is the story of Constance Lytton. Born Lady Constance Bulwer-Lytton in 1869, Constance Lytton rejected her upper-class background and joined Emmeline Pankhurst's WSPU. Finding that because of her aristocratic connections she was not subjected to the same prison treatment as her fellow suffragettes, Constance disguised herself as a poor seamstress. When she was next arrested she gave the police a false name, Jane Warton. In prison, Lytton was force-fed seven times and after her release she wrote Prison and Prisoners (1914), a publication that brought huge public attention to the maltreatment of suffragettes within the prison system. She died in London in 1923.

Emmeline Pankhurst addresses a crowd in 1913.
Christabel Pankhurst
Constance Lytton at a protest in 1910.

Filed under People, Eras & Events

This "beyond the book article" relates to The Hourglass Factory. It originally ran in April 2016 and has been updated for the March 2017 paperback edition. Go to magazine.