The Last Heroine Left?

Abstract

Emmeline Pankhurst understood the value of sports for politics. After she was elected to the School Board for the City of Manchester in 1900, she promoted physical education for children in Board Schools, which she hoped would result in a fitter British nation. The suffrage campaign helped extend the notion of mens sana in corpore sano to women’s lives. On the one hand, suffragettes and their sympathizers worked hard to prove that women had the physical and mental stamina to qualify for a say in how their country was run. On the other hand, if suffragettes’ critics maintained that the qualifier for the vote was brawn, then suffragettes questioned men’s right to vote on precisely that basis as not all men were physically able, for instance, to defend their country. Caird wryly pointed out that polling booths should be ‘provided with an automatic boxing machine, at once testing and registering the force of the candidate’s biceps’.¹ The confrontation between Ann Veronica and Ramage in a locked hotel room embodies both tactics of argument.