Memories of a Militant.
London: Edward Arnold, 1924. First edition. With 8 plates from portrait photographs of Christabel Pankhurst, Emmeline Pankhurst, Constance Lytton, Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence, and other important women’s suffrage figures. Fading to cloth at spine. Faded rectangular mark to cloth of front board, probably from a removed lending library label. Some toning to endpapers, but otherwise very clean throughout. A good, tight copy of a scarce and important work. Original purple cloth stamped in green and white (a color scheme often used by suffragists). Octavo. xi, 308 pp. 16 pp. publisher’s ads. Item #17267
Annie Kenney (1879-1953) was a suffragist and the right hand of Women’s Social and Political Union leaders Christabel and Emmeline Pankhurst. Unlike many suffrage leaders at the time, Kenney came from a working-class background: she was employed at a mill for fifteen years and, along with her suffrage activism, was also committed to trade union organizing and socialism. One of Kenney’s most important acts as a member of the WSPU was the historic interruption of a political meeting at the Manchester Free Trade Hall in 1905, when Kenney and Christabel Pankhurst unfurled a flag reading “Votes for Women” and demanded that Sir Edward Grey and Winston Churchill address the issue of women’s suffrage. Kenney was also a co-founder of the first branch of the WSPU, which she and Minnie Baldock (1864-1954) established in Canning Town, London in 1906. Kenney’s Memories of a Militant was the second autobiography by one of the militant suffragists, preceded only by Emmeline Pankhurst’s My Own Story (1914).
Price: $1,250.00