Christabel Pankhurst, Unshackled: The Story How We Won the Vote (London: Hutchinson, 1959)

Vet.Pol.1

The struggle for gender equality in the UK

The library holds hardly any books connected to the suffragette movement of the late 19th and
early 20th centuries. Among the few is this first edition of the posthumously published memoir
of Dame Christabel Pankhurst (1880-1958). June Purvis describes her as a determined advocate for women’s rights:

As the daughter of the suffragette leader Emmeline Pankhurst (1858-1928), Christabel was exposed to the political meetings at her parents’ home from an early age. Especially the educational disadvantage of women had a lasting effect on her. Although Christabel did succeed in ‘[graduating] with a first-class honours degree in law’ from Manchester University in 1906, as a woman she was not admitted to the Bar. Having joined the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), co-founded by her mother, as ‘chief organizer’, she became ‘a confident, fearless, and imaginative strategist’. Not everyone, however, was happy with the direction and style of Christabel’s leadership in the increasingly radicalised fight to establish the right to vote for women. For some time, Christabel was in exile in France to avoid imprisonment in England. After women received a partial right to vote and were allowed to stand for election as MPs in 1918, Christabel tried twice to become the first female MP. Both attempts were unsuccessful and she turned her focus to religion and writing. It took another ten years until women finally received the same voting rights as men in the UK in 1928. Christabel moved to the USA in 1939, where she died in 1958.

At Oxford University gender equality lagged behind the national development. The first colleges for women (Somerville College and Lady Margaret Hall) were founded in 1879, but women could not take degrees until 1920. Moreover, only as late as 1959 did the colleges for women receive full collegiate status despite having received royal charters over thirty years earlier. The first male colleges admitted female undergraduates in 1974; St John’s followed suit in 1979. It took a further
forty years until, in 2019, Oxford University admitted as many female as male undergraduate students for the first time.