Freedom OR Death PEC NOTA: 10 PDF

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Comentario de texto del discurso "freedom or death", uno de los 6 textos a comentar en la PEC o en el examen....

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Freedom or Death Emmeline Pankhurst

Commentary The speech “Freedom or Death” was given by Emmeline Pankhurst on the 13th of November in 1913, when she was on tour in the United States of America. Specifically, the speech took place in the capital city of Hartford, Connecticut. It is an important detail since Hartford is near Boston, where the Boston Tea Party took place.

In 1913 women’s right to vote had not been obtained in any place in the world yet, but gradually several countries such as England and the USA were experimenting the appearance of illustrated, feminist and educated women that pushed the patriarchal society intending to earn the right to vote and have a voice in the parliament. At that time in England, the government have just passed a legislation called the “Cat and Mouse Act”, trying to suffocate the women’ riots. Emmeline Pankhurst was a British political activist, born in Manchester in 1858. She was probably politically influenced by her parents. Her father took part in campaigns against slavery and her mother used to take Emmeline to feminists meetings when she was very young. In 1879 she married Richard Pankhurst, a socialist and a defender of women’s suffrage. With him, she founded in 1889 the Women’s Franchise League, in order to secure the women’s vote in local elections. She became a widow in 1898 and continued her political activities, founding in 1903 the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) in 1903. Her and WSPU actions took women to prison several times. They went on hunger strikes until being almost dead, which resulted in violent force-feeding and the “Cat and Mouse” act, in which the starving women prisoners would be released until be recovered and then imprisoned again. The fact that “Freedom or death” was pronounced in Hartford adds an important symbolic nuance to the entire speech. In one hand, the person who introduced Ms Pankhust to the audience was Katharine Hepburn, then the president of the Connecticut Woman Suffrage Movement (CWSM) and a similar preeminent feminist figure just like herself. In the other hand, Boston and the state of

Connecticut was a key place to the American Independence Revolution against the English crown, and Emmeline uses several parallelisms with the Boston Tea Party, a political protest in which shipments of tea were thrown into the sea. The speech is titled “Freedom or Death”, which clearly creates a gap between the position of the suffrage movement in the United States of America and the situation in England. In the USA, the movement is treated as advocacy in which women explain why should they have the right to vote. Ms Pankhurst opens her text explaining to her audience why the militant action was reasonable and justified, “what civil war is like when civil war is waged by women”. She makes clear that she wouldn't have to explain her cause if she had been born a man but “since I am a woman it is necessary to explain why women have adopted revolutionary methods in order to win the rights of citizenship”. She calls herself a soldier, and uses vocabulary concerning war and battle “I am not only here as a soldier temporarily absent from the field at battle..”, underling the fact that her fight is a civil war and not a bunch of hysterical women as the media pictured them. Also, she reaffirms her authority to the audience by explaining her situation in her country and the penalties she had lived herself “according to the law courts of my country, it has been decided, is of no value to the community at all; and I am adjudged because of my life to be a dangerous person, under sentence of penal servitude in a convict prison”. She concludes the introduction with a very powerful message “women are human beings”.

In the following paragraphs, Emmeline interacts directly with her audience by asking what it would happen if men in Hartford had a grievance, and the government repeatedly ignored them. Then she refers to the recent history of the USA when they achieved the Independence, mentioning the tea party at Boston and making a connection between women’s situation with the vote and the American people right to emancipate. These part of the speech makes the American male conformed audience feel identified with the women’s cause and makes them feel involved within the meeting.

She makes an analogy between the women’s need to fight for her rights and two babies: a patient baby and an impatient baby. Using this metaphor she arguments that the only way for them to be heard is “to make more noise than anybody else” since the impatient crying baby would be the one attended first.

Emmeline points out how men always have sacrificed women in their fights and revolutions “When your forefathers threw the tea into Boston Harbour, a good many women had to go without their tea. It has always seemed to me an extraordinary thing that you did not follow it up by throwing the whiskey overboard; you sacrificed the women; and there is a good deal of warfare for which men take a great deal of glorification which has involved more practical sacrifice on women than it has on any man.” After this assertion, she uses a metaphor “but you cannot make omelettes without breaking eggs” to justify the use of aggressive means and explains what women have been doing in England, breaking the telegraph communication wires and proving that the limit of their actions is decided only by them. One of the main differences between any revolution in History and Emmeline’s cause, as she explains, is the pattern of powerless against the powerful. They are not in an industrial revolution, women belong to every class and it is impossible for men to locate it.

In the following paragraphs, Emmeline takes pride and how the government believed prison would stop women’s fight, and it only encouraged more women to the cause. The text emphasises the courage and determination of the women fighting for equality. “Not by the forces of civil war can you govern the very weakest woman. You can kill that woman, but she escapes you then; you cannot govern her. No power on earth can govern a human being, however feeble, who withholds his or her consent.” She accentuates the women fortitude in the hunger strikes by assuring that “there are very few men today who would be prepared to adopt a hunger strike for any cause” and notifies the audience about the horrible means of “feeding sane, resisting human beings by force”.

The last paragraph is a very powerful conclusion due to the use of repetition “I come in the intervals of prison..”, “I come after…”,“I come to ask..” and the strong message to keep fighting until the vote is achieved. Emmeline Pankhurst undoubtedly was an important figure for the 1st wave of feminism. In this speech, she demonstrated her wit by choosing the right words considering her audience and constantly using metaphoric language to persuade and convince the American people of Hartford. She sacrificed herself for her cause several times and she never gave up. It was a great shame that she did not see with his own eyes the culmination of his work. I would say that nowadays she continues to be a known and revered woman inasmuch as she was played by the marvellous Meryl Streep in the film Suffragette(2015), being more accessible for the contemporary audience to meet her. In the western world, Universal suffrage was achieved almost a century ago depending on the country, but we must not forget that there are still many countries where women cannot even leave home if it is not in the company of a man. We took for granted the women’s right to vote and raise their voices but at the same time, there are many voices that are still offended when they do and try by all means to silence them. The world had changed since Emmeline Pankhurst fought for what now would see as a basic human right and still, we have a long way to go until we achieved equality not only of gender but of any aspect of the human being.

Bibliography 

Emmeline Pankhurst. Great speeches of the 20th century: Emmeline Pankhurst's Freedom or death. The Guardian. 27 Apr 2007. Web. 02 Dec. 2019. https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2007/apr/27/greatspeeches

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N.P. Women's suffrage in the United Kingdom. Wikipedia the free encyclopedia. Last edited 3 Dec 2019. Web. 7 Dec. 2019. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_suffrage_in_the_United_Kingd om N.P. Suffragette. Wikipedia the free enciclopedia. Last edited 7 Dec 2019. Web. 7 Dec 2019. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suffragette Pettinger, Tejvan. “Biography Emmeline Pankhurst”, Oxford, UK. www.biographyonline.net, 11th June 2013. Updated 8 February 2018.

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Millet, Eva. Emmeline Pankhurst y el voto femenino. La Vanguardia. 30 Aug. 2019. Web. 7 Dec. 2019. https://www.lavanguardia.com/historiayvida/historiacontemporanea/20190827/47310171304/emmeline-pankhurst-y-el-votofemenino.html...