Women didn't win the right to vote with just polite rhetoric, the WSPU were downright militant and engaged in active acts of vandalism such as smashing windows, arson, detonating pipe bombs, sabotaging communication lines, holding demonstrations and plotting to kidnap of members of Parliament with Pankhurst saying the groups goal was to make England and every department of English life insecure and unsafe.
In one day British Prime Minister Herbert Asquith narrowly missed being cut in half by an axe thrown by one of their members and then had to be dragged from a burning theatre after they set fire to it during a speech.
At least five people were killed and 24 injured and 250 suffragettes were imprisoned where they engaged in hunger strikes and were subject to force-feeding but it kick-started the process which eventually led to women's suffrage and general agreement that, yes, women were members of society and all it took was protesting and disturbing meetings of old white dudes.
They learnt Jiu-Jitsu after watching colleagues get beaten and sometimes even killed by the police and some got so good at it that they became Pankhurt's own personal bodyguards armed with clubs, following her the length and breadth of the country but they were not above trying to outwit and embarrass the hostile male population men who heckling and trying to oppress them.
The WSPU had some great, pre-written lines ready to spit out at open-air meetings such as the classic answer to one elderly man who shouted that if the female speaker was his wife he would poison her and the retort: 'and if I were your wife I’d take it'.
It was a hard struggle and all they wanted was for powerful men to give them the vote or explain to their mothers, wives, girlfriends and daughters why they didn't believe in equality for women.
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