Suffragettes and Suffragists
With the Suffragettes being in the limelight at present (this year marks the centenary of the death of Emily Davison), I’ve looked around for poetry about them.
The first ones I found seemed to be modern takes on something the authors knew little about – see Kidpub which describes the poem they quote as ‘weird’ or Wattpad which at least has some history and knows the difference between Suffragettes and Suffragists.
The Wordsmith’s Forge is more serious with her poem Say Something for the Suffragettes, which lists the main players in the campaign:
If you’re a woman and you vote,
these are the ones who gave you a voice —
And Teen Ink has an interesting one, Suffragette, about force feeding:
But the force feeding law makes me feel sick with fear,
Just then I hear footsteps – oh my God! They’re here!
I found a few others on the web, but not many.
This has made me wonder if other great political movements do or do not inspire poetry. I shall have to investigate.
e a m harris 
Sylvia Pankhurst wrote some of the songs, didn’t she? Designed a lot of the banners and was an all round wonderful woman but I couldn’t find any poems by her. But did find plenty of quotes…all of which should be required reading!
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I didn’t know these things about her. Thank you for the information. I have discovered that my history lessons as school were very sparse compared to the reality of the lives of the people we studied. The Pankhursts took up several lessons but there was no mention of their writing, designing etc – so really we were only told part of their story.
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