"We are here, not because we are law-breakers; we are here in our efforts to become law-makers"
About this Quote
A courtroom becomes a campaign stage the moment Pankhurst flips the charge sheet into a manifesto. The line is engineered to disarm the state’s favorite story about militants: that suffragettes were merely unruly women in need of discipline. By insisting "not because we are law-breakers", she refuses the moral downgrade that turns political dissent into personal deviance. Then she tightens the screw: "we are here...to become law-makers". The audacity is grammatical as much as political. The first clause speaks the language of defense; the second detonates it, recasting trial and punishment as evidence of exclusion from power.
The intent is pragmatic: to make public opinion see law itself as the issue. Pankhurst doesn’t plead for sympathy; she exposes a rigged system in which half the population is expected to obey rules they had no hand in making. That’s the subtext: legality is not the same as legitimacy. When the franchise is denied, obedience becomes a one-way contract, and "order" starts to look like a mechanism for keeping women in their place.
Context sharpens the blade. Early 20th-century Britain treated suffragette disruption as criminality, not politics, and used prison, force-feeding, and public shaming to enforce that framing. Pankhurst answers with a clean rhetorical reversal: the state can label them offenders, but history will judge them as founders. It’s a threat wrapped in civics. Today’s lawmakers, she implies, are temporary; the definition of "the law" is up for grabs.
The intent is pragmatic: to make public opinion see law itself as the issue. Pankhurst doesn’t plead for sympathy; she exposes a rigged system in which half the population is expected to obey rules they had no hand in making. That’s the subtext: legality is not the same as legitimacy. When the franchise is denied, obedience becomes a one-way contract, and "order" starts to look like a mechanism for keeping women in their place.
Context sharpens the blade. Early 20th-century Britain treated suffragette disruption as criminality, not politics, and used prison, force-feeding, and public shaming to enforce that framing. Pankhurst answers with a clean rhetorical reversal: the state can label them offenders, but history will judge them as founders. It’s a threat wrapped in civics. Today’s lawmakers, she implies, are temporary; the definition of "the law" is up for grabs.
Quote Details
| Topic | Equality |
|---|---|
| Source | Quotation attributed to Emmeline Pankhurst; recorded on Wikiquote: "We are here, not because we are law-breakers; we are here in our efforts to become law-makers." |
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