2010.54.2175

• female
• gender

The top of the poster has a black and white photograph that has at right a male police officer grabbing and carrying a woman down the street. It appears the woman is being carried against her will; she has a plaintive expression on her face. At left three male figures in suits and hats are walking along side the officer and looking at the female figure with apparent anger. The bottom of the poster has the text: "It always seems to me when anti-suffrage members of the Government criticize militancy in women that it is very like beasts of prey reproaching the gentler / animals who turn in desperate resistance when at the point of death...Ladies and gentlemen, the only recklessness the militant suffragists have shown about human / life has been about their own lives and not about the lives of others, and I say here and now that it never has been and never will be the policy of the Women's Social / and Political Union recklessly to en endanger human life. We leave that to the enemy. There is something that governments care for far more than human life, and that / is the security of property, and so it is through property that we will strike the enemy. From henceforward the women who agree with me will say, 'We disregard / your laws, gentlemen, we set the liberty and the dignity and the welfare of women above all such considerations, and we shall continue this war as we have done in / the past; and what sacrifice of property accrues will not be our fault. It will be that Government who admits the justice of our demands, but refuses to con- / cede them...' / Be militant each in your own way. Those of you who can express your militancy by going to the House of Commons and refusing to leave without satisfaction, as / we did in the early days - do so... Those of you who can express your militancy by joining us in our anti-Government by-election policy - do so. Those of you who can / break windows - break them. Those of you who can still further attack the secret idol of property, so as to make the Government realize that property is as greatly / endangered by women's suffrage as it was by the Chartists of old - do so. / And my last word is to the Government: I incite this meeting to rebellion! . Take me, if you dare, but if you dare I tell you this,... you will not keep me in prison. / Emmeline Pankhurst / October 17, 1912".