preview

What Is The Purpose Of Emmeline Pankhurst's Suffrage Speech

Decent Essays

In her speech, Emmeline Pankhurst, a female militant suffragist, primarily speaks for the women’s rights, including the women suffrage, by taking extreme, powerful, stance, or tone, establishing a structure that focuses on evoking empathy from men, and using various persuasive techniques. Her powerful, extreme (yet admirable), tone can be seen throughout the whole passage. How she uses the personal pronouns plays a key role in interpreting her tone and her stance. In detail, the use of pronoun “I,” which is made very frequently, really shows how confident she is about the reasoning she is providing the audience with. In her beginning paragraph, there does not exist a single independent clause that does not start with, or contain, “I …show more content…

She adds onto this powerful emphasis by connecting that her occupation is a soldier with the allusion of the current circumstance to the “civil war,” and that she had “temporarily left the field of battle.” She continues to allude the women’s situation to the civil war, speaking of the “inevitableness of revolution and civil war” that men has brought and justifying the women’s action if they were to adapt “revolutionary methods in order to win the rights of citizenship.” Additionally, she begins to express the unjustly inferior position of women by offering the probable ease that she would have enjoyed, due to the absurd superiority of men’s social position, if she were a man: she repeatedly makes use of the hypothetical statement by ending with “if I were a man” as well as stating phrases such as “meaning men” and “being a men” in the middle. Furthermore, the effects attained from these repetitions are reinforced by her sarcasm: “I come from a country which professes to

Get Access