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The new film Suffragette, released in Australia on Boxing Day, begins with female activists smashing London shop windows and bombing the partially completed home of the chancellor of the exchequer. It dramatises the militant actions of feminists from 1905 until the outbreak of the first world war, as they sought the right for British women to vote.

Edwardian women appear genteel in photographs, but the tactics of the suffragettes transgressed feminine expectations of the era. Suffragettes disrupted debate in parliament and struggled with police in violent marches. One famously slashed a painting of a naked woman in the National Gallery and another even came at Winston Churchill on a train platform with a riding whip.

With England more than a decade behind New Zealand, which had granted women's suffrage in 1893, it was clear that polite and reasoned requests for women's political rights had not worked. Emmeline Pankhurst, leader of the suffrage movement, explained that unruly activism was essential:

If the general public were pleased with what we are doing, that would be a proof that our warfare is ineffective. We don't intend that you should be pleased.

Despite the sustained campaign, full suffrage for women was not achieved until 1928. More than a century on from the British suffrage campaign, the message that being pleasing is not the optimal route to political and social change remains just as pertinent.

Increasingly men are informing feminists that they would be more successful if they made their politics more palatable. The UN's HeforShe campaign, launched by the unthreatening Emma Watson, is often heralded as a positive way to involve men in work toward gender equality.

Both the idea that feminism needs to be appealing to men and that men should be central to its progress are anti-feminist ideas in themselves.

Regardless of their approach, feminists have always been characterised unfavourably for their social goals, looks, and refusal to defer to men.

Mocking cartoons of suffragettes showed them beating men to the ground with umbrellas or standing over their husbands and forcing them to clean the house. These caricatures took issue with the way that women's demands for the vote seemed to be upending the natural order in which men were physically dominant and women were best suited to domestic work. Others lampooned the unattractiveness of suffragettes: they were drawn as old, dowdy and either lacking in teeth or suffering from pronounced overbites.

Though the goals of feminists have evolved with increasing rights for women, the ideas at the core of anti-feminist debate remain consistent. Conforming to "pleasing" behaviour for women means they must stay inside the accepted bounds of femininity that are bundled with the very inequalities that feminists wish to transform.

Earlier in December, Saudi Arabian women obtained the right to vote and stand in municipal elections. There are many brave Saudi women challenging repressive and discriminatory laws. However, the country is a prime example of how slow change is when conformity to a male-controlled set of expectations is strictly enforced and the potential for equal rights depends solely on the benevolence of the group who holds power.

Though 17 women were elected to positions on one of 284 local councils, women comprised fewer than 10% of the total number of voters. The complex reasons for this disparity included far fewer voter registration centres for women (these are sex-segregated) and difficulty in supplying proof of residence for registration, as men usually own family homes and pay bills. Female candidates for election were impaired by the prohibition on women driving cars and bans placed on campaigning to members of the opposite sex.

The women of Saudi Arabia are required to be "pleasing" in their activism, given that they must obtain permission from men to hold a job, travel or get married. Radical tactics, like those of the British suffragettes, would be impossible, and measured methods have already transformed women's literacy and participation in higher education.

Within a western context, where the ability to vote is now around a century old in a number of countries, it is regressive to be told that feminist views must be marketable to men and that men must be at the forefront of feminism. The gender "war" that Pankhurst described now includes a far greater number of supportive male allies. Nevertheless, men should never be in command of the battle, nor should women need their "enemy" to welcome the loss of power that will accompany their defeat.
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Suffragette reminds us why it's a lie that feminists need men's approval | Michelle Smith

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The new film Suffragette, released in Australia on Boxing Day, begins with female activists smashing London shop windows and bombing the partially completed home of the chancellor of the exchequer. It dramatises the militant actions of feminists from 1905 until the outbreak of the first world war, as they sought the right for British women to vote.

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Femen protests often catch the law enforcement authorities off-guard, and can make officers seem silly, as they struggle to contain partially dressed women squiggling in their grasp. In response to their protests, Femen women have been beaten, jailed and threatened with death.

They have been dragged off all over: at the Vatican where they set off red smoke during the papal conclave to condemn "bloody" church history; at the European Parliament in Brussels where they pushed gay rights; on the Berlin Film Festival's red carpet where they denounced female circumcision in Africa; in Moscow where they tried to steal Mr. Putin's ballot on Election Day; at the Davos World Economic Forum where they decried income inequality; in Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris, where Femen has its second base.

They have called for "topless jihad" and a "women's spring" against Islam's treatment of women, and were deported from Turkey where they acted against domestic violence. In Belarus, where they protested the autocracy of President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko, they were arrested, taken into the woods, stripped and told they would be killed. "Remember the smell of your mothers," one participant recalled a security agent saying. "How happy you were," the agent taunted, "before you had the idea to come to Belarus."

In the most recent action, on Wednesday, three Femen members took off their tops outside the Justice Ministry in Tunis, in support of a Tunisian Femen member, Amina Sboui, also known as Amina Tyler, who had faced death threats after posting a topless picture of herself on the Web. She was later arrested on charges related to carrying a can of pepper spray while preparing to conduct a protest action. On Thursday, she was convicted and fined. She remains in prison as the authorities consider additional charges.

Like all Femen actions, the Tunisia event was carefully choreographed. The three activists, two French citizens and a German, were chosen because they were likely to get the best diplomatic assistance after they were arrested.

Femen's shock troops can be of any age but tend to be young and attractive; the group's leaders insist that members come to actions well groomed. The topless protests have been so effective at generating attention that they have obscured Femen's modest beginnings in 2006 as a feminist club focused on patriarchal traditions in Ukrainian society.

Anna Hutsol, then a student at the Khmelnytsky University for Economics, was outside the city's registration office, watching young brides and grooms arrive to get married and, for the women, start a life in which decisions once made by fathers would now fall to husbands.

Ms. Hutsol herself had grown up mostly in a tiny village, Nova Ushytsa, a two-hour drive south of Khmelnytsky, where her parents still live. A hotbed of feminism it is not. When Ms. Hutsol arrived there one evening last week with visitors, her mother was milking a cow.

Ms. Hutsol's mother, Nina, said she believed her daughter was trying to help people, but neighbors did not see it that way. "The village people don't understand it," she said. "They say that their behavior is uncultured. They don't think this is a political activity, but I don't know how to explain it."

Neither Nina Hutsol nor Lyudmila Shevchenko recalled their daughters being particularly interested in politics. When Anna Hutsol started lamenting the future of Khmelnytsky's young women at a meeting of the local Center of Youth Prospects, and argued for creating a separate women's group, Sasha Shevchenko, an 18-year-old in the audience, was alarmed.

"I was really stupid," she said, recalling that first meeting. "I am just a normal Ukrainian girl. I didn't even know what feminist meant. I thought a feminist was an ugly woman with a mustache. She is lesbian and she hates men. If you ask girls on the street about feminism, they will tell you the same story."

As conversation unfolded among about 20 women, the need to fight for rights became clear. Some told of abusive fathers or boyfriends, or mothers who supported families while their husbands were home drunk. And then there was the pervasive prostitution and sex trafficking of post-Communist Ukraine.

Oksana Shachko knew some issues firsthand. Her mother, an orphan who longed for a family, had married, at 18, a man who turned out to be an alcoholic. She quickly had two children - locking her into circumstances shared by many Ukrainian women.

Together, Ms. Hutsol, Ms. Shevchenko and Ms. Shachko set up a feminist club, the New Ethics committee. They wore pink, and held marches, fully clothed. After minor success drawing attention to two women who suffered medical malpractice at a local hospital, they realized they were being ignored.

So in 2008 they moved to Kiev, , where after impassioned debate, they eventually made the decision to take off their clothes to draw more attention, and renamed themselves Femen. They were joined by Inna Shevchenko (no relation to Sasha) who has since left Ukraine because of criminal charges pending from an action in which she sawed down a large crucifix with a chain saw. she wore goggles but not top.

In an interview before she left, Inna Shevchenko recalled the attempt to focus on sexual exploitation. "We were trying to say the truth," she said. "But no one was interested in it, and we understood that this society, this country, is not ready to listen to women. But everyone wants to look at them, especially if they are naked," she added. "We understood O.K., if we are not able to talk, we will show."

"With our protests, we created a new understanding of our nakedness," she continued. "We said to the world, now, it can be my hands, controlling by me. It's not anymore in man's hands."

Not everyone understands, or agrees. Some critics have accused them of contributing to the same objectification of women's bodies that they claim to protest, and that their feminist ideology is fuzzy. Others say they are imposing their brand of radical feminism on women in the Middle East and Africa - in cultures where a more subtle approach would be more effective and safer.

In Khmelnytsky, Sasha Shevchenko heard her elementary school principal, Nadezhda M. Orlovskaya, explain why a graduate serving in the army deserved a photo in the school lobby but its most famous alumna did not. Ms. Orlovskaya praised her former pupil for trying to help women but criticized Femen's tactics and disputed the group's portrayal of women in Ukraine as oppressed. "What I don't like is that you show up in public naked, barefoot, etc.," she said. Adopting a mocking tone, she puffed out her bosom. "I still have something to boast of, too."

Ms. Orlovskaya and even Lyudmila Shevchenko said they believed that Femen was backed by secret big-money interests, a charge for which there is no obvious evidence. The women say the group is financed by selling Femen souvenirs and by private donations.

Sasha Shevchenko did not argue with Ms. Orlovskaya, and seemed intent on focusing on Femen's declared enemies, not on critics. She said it may take a revolution, perhaps with some bloodshed, to improve the lives of women oppressed by Islam or by dictators, or who are pressured into prostitution. And to train a new generation.

"I decided for myself to be a woman, to be a girl who will open eyes for other women, for other girls," she said. "Because I know myself - Ukrainian girls are stupid. We don't have sexual education in schools. In universities, we don't have feminist education. We don't know even what feminism is."

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Ukraine's Bare-Breasted Feminist Shock Troops

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Femen protests often catch the law enforcement authorities off-guard, and can make officers seem silly, as they struggle to contain partially dressed women squiggling in their grasp. In response to their protests, Femen women have been beaten, jailed and threatened with death.

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Following the arrest of FEMEN activists after the pro gay demonstration in Rabat, The Ministry of Interior Affairs of Morocco decided on expulsion of the activists from the country. As it was stated in official communique of the Ministry, the FEMEN kiss in support of gay prisoners in Morocco is a "provocation that constitues an unacceptable offense for all moroccan society , by all ways". Following that, FEMEN appreciates the decision of the ministry on expulsion of the activists that will give them more opportunities to protest discriminative and homophobic nature of moroccan law that constitues an unacceptable offense for all progressive world and humanism in general, in all ways.
In gay we trust!

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Following the arrest of FEMEN activists after the pro gay demonstration in Rabat, The Ministry of Interior Affairs of Morocco decided on expulsion of the activists from the country. As it was stated in official communique of the Ministry, the FEMEN kiss in support of gay prisoners in Morocco is a "provocation that constitues an unacceptable offense for all moroccan society , by all ways".

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Women gained the right to vote in 1920 with the passage of the 19 Amendment. On Election Day in 1920, millions of American women exercised this right for the first time. For almost 100 years, women (and men) had been fighting for women's suffrage: They had made speeches, signed petitions, marched in parades and argued over and over again that women, like men, deserved all of the rights and responsibilities of citizenship. The leaders of this campaign-women like Susan B. Anthony, Alice Paul, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucy Stone and Ida B. Wells-did not always agree with one another, but each was committed to the enfranchisement of all American women.
READ MORE: The 19th Amendment
Susan B. Anthony, 1820-1906

Library of Congress

Perhaps the most well-known women's rights activist in history, Susan B. Anthony was born on February 15, 1820, to a Quaker family in the northwestern corner of Massachusetts. Anthony was raised to be independent and outspoken: Her parents, like many Quakers, believed that men and women should study, live and work as equals and should commit themselves equally to the eradication of cruelty and injustice in the world.

Did you know? Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton lived in a part of upstate New York that would become known as the "Burnt District" or the "Burned-Over District" because it was home to so many religious revivals, utopian crusades and reform movements: They swept through the region, people said, as unstoppably as a forest fire.

Before she joined the campaign for woman suffrage, Anthony was a temperance activist in Rochester, New York, where she was a teacher at a girls' school. As a Quaker, she believed that drinking alcohol was a sin; moreover, she believed that (male) drunkenness was particularly hurtful to the innocent women and children who suffered from the poverty and violence it caused. However, Anthony found that few politicians took her anti-liquor crusade seriously, both because she was a woman and because she was advocating on behalf of a "women's issue." Women needed the vote, she concluded, so that they could make certain that the government kept women's interests in mind.

In 1853, Anthony began to campaign for the expansion of married women's property rights; in 1856, she joined the American Anti-Slavery Society, delivering abolitionist lectures across New York State. Though Anthony was dedicated to the abolitionist cause and genuinely believed that African American men and women deserved the right to vote, after the Civil War ended she refused to support any suffrage amendments to the Constitution unless they granted the franchise to women as well as men.

This led to a dramatic schism in the women's rights movement between activists like Anthony, who believed that no amendment granting the vote to African Americans should be ratified unless it also granted the vote to women (proponents of this point of view formed a group called the National Woman Suffrage Association), and those who were willing to support an immediate expansion of the citizenship rights of former slaves, even if it meant they had to keep fighting for universal suffrage. (Proponents of this point of view formed a group called the American Woman Suffrage Association.)

This animosity eventually faded, and in 1890 the two groups joined to form a new women's suffrage organization, the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Elizabeth Cady Stanton was NAWSA's first president; Anthony was its second. She continued to fight for the vote until she died on March 13, 1906.

Alice Paul, 1885-1977

Bettmann Archive/Getty Images

Alice Paul was the leader of the most militant wing of the woman-suffrage movement. Born in 1885 to a wealthy Quaker family in New Jersey, Paul was well-educated-she earned an undergraduate degree in biology from Swarthmore College and a PhD in sociology from the University of Pennsylvania-and determined to win the vote by any means necessary.

While she was in graduate school, Paul spent time in London, where she joined the suffragist Emmeline Pankhurst's radical, confrontational Women's Social and Political Union and learned how to use civil disobedience and other "unladylike" tactics to draw attention to her cause. When she returned to the United States in 1910, Paul brought those militant tactics to the well-established National American Woman Suffrage Association. There, as the chair of NAWSA's Congressional Committee, she began to agitate for the passage of a federal suffrage amendment to the Constitution like the one her hero Susan B. Anthony had wanted so badly to see.

On March 3, 1913, Paul and her colleagues coordinated an enormous suffrage parade to coincide with-and distract from-President Wilson's inauguration. More marches and protests followed. The more conservative women at NAWSA soon grew frustrated with publicity stunts like these, and in 1914 Paul left the organization and started her own, the Congressional Union (which soon became the National Woman's Party). Even after the U.S. entered World War I, the NWP kept up its flamboyant protests, even staging a seven-month picket of the White House.

For this "unpatriotic" act, Paul and the rest of the NWP suffragists were arrested and imprisoned. Along with some of the other activists, Paul was placed in solitary confinement; then, when they went on a hunger strike to protest this unfair treatment, the women were force-fed for as long as three weeks. These abuses did not have their intended effect: Once news of the mistreatment got out, public sympathy swung to the side of the imprisoned activists and they soon were released.

In January 1918, President Wilson announced his support for a constitutional amendment that would give all female citizens the right to vote. In August, ratification came down to a vote in the conservative Southern state of Tennessee. The battle over ratification in Tennessee was known as the "War of the Roses" because suffragists and their supporters wore yellow roses and "Antis" wore red. While the resolution passed easily in the Tennessee Senate, the House was bitterly divided. It passed by one vote, a tie-breaking reversal by Harry Burn, a young red-rose wearing representative who had received a pro-suffrage plea from his mother. On August 26, 1920, Tennessee became the 36th state to ratify the amendment, making it law.

In 1920, Alice Paul proposed an Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the Constitution. ("Men and women," it read, "shall have equal rights throughout the United States.") The ERA has never been ratified.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 1815-1902
WATCH: The Seneca Falls Convention
Elizabeth Cady Stanton was one of the foremost women's-rights activists and philosophers of the 19th century. Born on November 12, 1815, to a prominent family in upstate New York, Elizabeth Cady was surrounded by reform movements of all kinds. Soon after her marriage to abolitionist Henry Brewster Stanton in 1840, the pair traveled to the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London, where they were turned away: Female delegates, they were told, were unwelcome.

This injustice convinced Stanton that women needed to pursue equality for themselves before they could seek it for others. In the summer of 1848, she-along with the abolitionist and temperance activist Lucretia Mott and a handful of other reformers-organized the first women's-rights convention in Seneca Falls, New York. Some 240 men and women gathered to discuss what Stanton and Mott called "the social, civil, and religious condition and rights of women." One hundred of the delegates-68 women and 32 men-signed a Declaration of Sentiments, modeled on the Declaration of Independence, declaring that women were citizens equal to men with "an inalienable right to the elective franchise." The Seneca Falls Convention marked the beginning of the campaign for woman suffrage.

Like Susan B. Anthony, Stanton was a committed abolitionist; however, she too refused to compromise on the principle of universal suffrage. As a result, she campaigned against the ratification of the 15th Amendment to the Constitution, which guaranteed Black men the right to vote but denied it to women.

After the fight over the 14th and 15th Amendments, Stanton continued to push for women's political equality-but she believed in a much broader vision of women's rights. She advocated for the reform of marriage and divorce laws, the expansion of educational opportunities for girls and even the adoption of less confining clothing (such as the pants-and-tunic ensemble popularized by the activist Amelia Bloomer) so that women could be more active. She also campaigned against the oppression of women in the name of religion-"From the inauguration of the movement for woman's emancipation," she wrote, " the Bible has been used to hold her in the 'divinely ordained sphere'"-and in 1895 published the first volume of a more egalitarian Woman's Bible.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton died in 1902. Today, a statue of Stanton, with fellow women's rights activists Susan B. Anthony and Lucretia Mott, stands in the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol.
WATCH: The 19th Amendment
Lucy Stone, 1818-1893

Lucy Stone, born in Massachusetts in 1818, was a pioneering abolitionist and women's-rights activist, but she is perhaps best known for refusing to change her last name when she married the abolitionist Henry Blackwell in 1855. (This tradition, the couple declared, "refuse[d] to recognize the wife as an independent, rational being" and "confer[red] on the husband an injurious and unnatural superiority.")

After she graduated from Oberlin College in 1847, Stone became a traveling lecturer for the American Anti-Slavery Society-advocating, she said, "not for the slave only, but for suffering humanity everywhere. Especially do I mean to labor for the elevation of my sex." She continued her activism on behalf of abolitionism and women's rights until 1857, when she retired from the anti-slavery lecture circuit to care for her baby daughter.

After the Civil War, advocates of woman suffrage faced a dilemma: Should they hold firm to their demand for universal suffrage or should they endorse-even celebrate-the 15th Amendment while they kept up their own campaign for the franchise? Some suffragists, such as Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, chose the former, scorning the 15th Amendment while forming the National Woman Suffrage Association to try and win the passage of a federal universal-suffrage amendment. Stone, on the other hand, supported the 15th Amendment; at the same time, she helped found the American Woman Suffrage Association, which fought for woman suffrage on a state-by-state basis.

In 1871, Stone and Blackwell began to publish the weekly feminist newspaper The Woman's Journal. Stone died in 1893, 27 years before American women won the right to vote. The Woman's Journal survived until 1931.

Ida B. Wells, 1862-1931

R. Gates/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Ida B. Wells, born in Mississippi in 1862, is perhaps best known for her work as a crusading journalist and anti-lynching activist. While working as a schoolteacher in Memphis, Wells wrote for the city's Black newspaper, The Free Speech. Her writings exposed and condemned the inequalities and injustices that were so common in the Jim Crow South: disfranchisement, segregation, lack of educational and economic opportunity for African Americans, and especially the arbitrary violence that white racists used to intimidate and control their Black neighbors.

Wells's insistence on publicizing the evils of lynching, in particular, won her many enemies in the South, and in 1892 she left Memphis for good when an angry mob wrecked the offices of The Free Speech and warned that they would kill her if she ever came back. Wells moved north but kept writing about racist violence in the former Confederacy, campaigning for federal anti-lynching laws (which were never passed) and organizing on behalf of many civil rights causes, including woman suffrage.

In March 1913, as Wells prepared to join the suffrage parade through President Woodrow Wilson's inaugural celebration, organizers asked her to stay out of the procession: Some of the white suffragists, it seemed, refused to march alongside Black people. (Early suffrage activists had generally supported racial equality-in fact, most had been abolitionists before they were feminists-but by the beginning of the 20th century, that was rarely the case. In fact, many middle-class white people embraced the suffragists' cause because they believed that the enfranchisement of "their" women would guarantee white supremacy by neutralizing the Black vote.) Wells joined the march anyway, but her experience showed that to many white suffragists, "equality" did not apply to everyone.

Wells continued to fight for civil rights for all until she died in 1931.
READ MORE: 5 Black Suffragists Who Fought for the 19th Amendment-And Much More
Frances E.W. Harper (1825-1911)

Born to free Black parents in Maryland, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper was orphaned while she was still very young. She was raised by her aunt and uncle, William Watkins, an abolitionist who set up his own school, the Watkins Academy for Negro Youth. Harper attended the academy, began writing poetry as a teenager and later became a teacher at schools in Ohio and Pennsylvania. Barred from returning to Maryland by an 1854 law mandating that free Blacks who entered the South would be forced into slavery, she moved in with her uncles' friends, whose home served as a station on the Underground Railroad.

Through her poetry, which dealt with issues of slavery and abolition, Harper became a leading voice of the abolitionist cause. She began traveling the country, lecturing on behalf of anti-slavery groups, and advocating for women's rights and temperance causes. She also continued to write fiction and poetry, including short stories and a novel, Iola Leroy (1892), one of the first to be published by a Black woman in the United States.

In the latter half of the 19th century, Harper was one of only a few Black women included in the growing women's rights movement. In 1866, she delivered a famous speech at the National Woman's Rights Convention in New York, in which she urged white suffragists to include Black women in their fight for the vote. During the debate over the 15th Amendment (which Harper supported), she and other abolitionists split with white suffragist leaders Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, and helped form the American Women Suffrage Association (AWSA). In 1896, Harper and others founded the National Association of Colored Women Clubs (NACWC), which advocated for a number of rights and advancements for Black women, including the right to vote.

Mary Church Terrell (1863-1954)

Terrell grew up in an affluent family in Tennessee; her formerly enslaved parents both owned successful businesses, and her father, Robert Reed Church, was one of the South's first Black millionaires. After graduating from Oberlin College, she began working as a teacher in Washington D.C, and became involved in the women's rights movement. She joined Ida B. Wells-Barnett in her anti-lynching campaign in the early 1890s, and later co-founded the National Association of Colored Women Clubs (NACWC) with Wells-Barnett and other activists. Terrell served as the organization's first president until 1901, writing and speaking extensively on women's suffrage as well as issues such as equal pay and educational opportunities for African Americans.

Terrell joined Alice Paul and other members of the National Women's Party in picketing for women's voting rights outside Woodrow Wilson's White House. In her view, Black women should be dedicated to the suffrage cause, as "the only group in this country that has two such huge obstacles to surmount...both sex and race."

As a co-founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored Peoples (NAACP), Terrell remained an outspoken fighter on behalf of civil rights after passage of the 19th Amendment. In her 80s, she and several other activists sued a D.C. restaurant after being refused service, a legal battle that led to the court-ordered desegregation of the capital's restaurants in 1953.
READ MORE: A Timeline of the Fight for All Women's Right to Vote

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Women gained the right to vote in 1920 with the passage of the 19 Amendment. On Election Day in 1920, millions of American women exercised this right for the first time.

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There was Ethel Moorhead who threw an egg at Winston Churchill; Adela Pankhurst, who hid up a chimney to escape arrest in a Dundee Theatre and 'General' Flora Drummond who rode the streets of Edinburgh on a horse. Contrary to popular belief, the women of Scotland were not shy of taking part in suffragette activity, as a new exhibition at the Scottish Parliament shows.

Many of the items have been loaned by Norman Watson who has been collecting stories and ephemera of the suffrage movement for many years. He took Helen Ross on a tour of the exhibits which are on display in the entrance hall.

Disclaimer Scottish Parliament

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BBC - Radio 4 Woman's Hour -Scottish Suffragettes

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There was Ethel Moorhead who threw an egg at Winston Churchill; Adela Pankhurst, who hid up a chimney to escape arrest in a Dundee Theatre and 'General' Flora Drummond who rode the streets of Edinburgh on a horse.

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Pankhurst was a leading British women's rights activist, who led the movement to win the right for women to vote.

Emmeline Goulden was born on 14 July 1858 in Manchester into a family with a tradition of radical politics. In 1879, she married Richard Pankhurst, a lawyer and supporter of the women's suffrage movement. He was the author of the Married Women's Property Acts of 1870 and 1882, which allowed women to keep earnings or property acquired before and after marriage. His death in 1898 was a great shock to Emmeline.

In 1889, Emmeline founded the Women's Franchise League, which fought to allow married women to vote in local elections. In October 1903, she helped found the more militant Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) - an organisation that gained much notoriety for its activities and whose members were the first to be christened 'suffragettes'. Emmeline's daughters Christabel and Sylvia were both active in the cause. British politicians, press and public were astonished by the demonstrations, window smashing, arson and hunger strikes of the suffragettes. In 1913, WSPU member Emily Davison was killed when she threw herself under the king's horse at the Derby as a protest at the government's continued failure to grant women the right to vote.

Like many suffragettes, Emmeline was arrested on numerous occasions over the next few years and went on hunger strike herself, resulting in violent force-feeding. In 1913, in response to the wave of hunger strikes, the government passed what became known as the 'Cat and Mouse' Act. Hunger striking prisoners were released until they grew strong again, and then re-arrested.

This period of militancy was ended abruptly on the outbreak of war in 1914, when Emmeline turned her energies to supporting the war effort. In 1918, the Representation of the People Act gave voting rights to women over 30. Emmeline died on 14 June 1928, shortly after women were granted equal voting rights with men (at 21).

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Pankhurst was a leading British women's rights activist, who led the movement to win the right for women to vote. Emmeline Goulden was born on 14 July 1858 in Manchester into a family with a tradition of radical politics. In 1879, she married Richard Pankhurst, a lawyer and supporter of the women's suffrage movement.

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BBC - History - British History in depth: Women’s Rights Quiz

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What it was like to be a woman in Victorian Britain? When could women keep their earnings for themselves - test your knowledge to find out.

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Suffragette: tough questions disenfranchised despite earnest attempt

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Historians still debate whether the violence of the women’s suffrage movement was justified. This movie commendably focuses on a working-class suffragette, but doesn’t attempt to make any of the really tough calls

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The suffragettes  Emmeline Pankhurst 1858 - 1928

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Suffragette Official UK Trailer 1 2015 - Carey Mulligan Meryl Streep Drama HD

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Women gained the right to vote in 1920 with the passage of the 19 Amendment. On Election Day in 1920, millions of American women exercised this right for the first time. For almost 100 years, women (and men) had been fighting for women's suffrage: They had made speeches, signed petitions, marched in parades and argued over and over again that women, like men, deserved all of the rights and responsibilities of citizenship. The leaders of this campaign-women like Susan B. Anthony, Alice Paul, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucy Stone and Ida B. Wells-did not always agree with one another, but each was committed to the enfranchisement of all American women.
READ MORE: The 19th Amendment
Susan B. Anthony, 1820-1906

Library of Congress

Perhaps the most well-known women's rights activist in history, Susan B. Anthony was born on February 15, 1820, to a Quaker family in the northwestern corner of Massachusetts. Anthony was raised to be independent and outspoken: Her parents, like many Quakers, believed that men and women should study, live and work as equals and should commit themselves equally to the eradication of cruelty and injustice in the world.

Did you know? Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton lived in a part of upstate New York that would become known as the "Burnt District" or the "Burned-Over District" because it was home to so many religious revivals, utopian crusades and reform movements: They swept through the region, people said, as unstoppably as a forest fire.

Before she joined the campaign for woman suffrage, Anthony was a temperance activist in Rochester, New York, where she was a teacher at a girls' school. As a Quaker, she believed that drinking alcohol was a sin; moreover, she believed that (male) drunkenness was particularly hurtful to the innocent women and children who suffered from the poverty and violence it caused. However, Anthony found that few politicians took her anti-liquor crusade seriously, both because she was a woman and because she was advocating on behalf of a "women's issue." Women needed the vote, she concluded, so that they could make certain that the government kept women's interests in mind.

In 1853, Anthony began to campaign for the expansion of married women's property rights; in 1856, she joined the American Anti-Slavery Society, delivering abolitionist lectures across New York State. Though Anthony was dedicated to the abolitionist cause and genuinely believed that African American men and women deserved the right to vote, after the Civil War ended she refused to support any suffrage amendments to the Constitution unless they granted the franchise to women as well as men.

This led to a dramatic schism in the women's rights movement between activists like Anthony, who believed that no amendment granting the vote to African Americans should be ratified unless it also granted the vote to women (proponents of this point of view formed a group called the National Woman Suffrage Association), and those who were willing to support an immediate expansion of the citizenship rights of former slaves, even if it meant they had to keep fighting for universal suffrage. (Proponents of this point of view formed a group called the American Woman Suffrage Association.)

This animosity eventually faded, and in 1890 the two groups joined to form a new women's suffrage organization, the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Elizabeth Cady Stanton was NAWSA's first president; Anthony was its second. She continued to fight for the vote until she died on March 13, 1906.

Alice Paul, 1885-1977

Bettmann Archive/Getty Images

Alice Paul was the leader of the most militant wing of the woman-suffrage movement. Born in 1885 to a wealthy Quaker family in New Jersey, Paul was well-educated-she earned an undergraduate degree in biology from Swarthmore College and a PhD in sociology from the University of Pennsylvania-and determined to win the vote by any means necessary.

While she was in graduate school, Paul spent time in London, where she joined the suffragist Emmeline Pankhurst's radical, confrontational Women's Social and Political Union and learned how to use civil disobedience and other "unladylike" tactics to draw attention to her cause. When she returned to the United States in 1910, Paul brought those militant tactics to the well-established National American Woman Suffrage Association. There, as the chair of NAWSA's Congressional Committee, she began to agitate for the passage of a federal suffrage amendment to the Constitution like the one her hero Susan B. Anthony had wanted so badly to see.

On March 3, 1913, Paul and her colleagues coordinated an enormous suffrage parade to coincide with-and distract from-President Wilson's inauguration. More marches and protests followed. The more conservative women at NAWSA soon grew frustrated with publicity stunts like these, and in 1914 Paul left the organization and started her own, the Congressional Union (which soon became the National Woman's Party). Even after the U.S. entered World War I, the NWP kept up its flamboyant protests, even staging a seven-month picket of the White House.

For this "unpatriotic" act, Paul and the rest of the NWP suffragists were arrested and imprisoned. Along with some of the other activists, Paul was placed in solitary confinement; then, when they went on a hunger strike to protest this unfair treatment, the women were force-fed for as long as three weeks. These abuses did not have their intended effect: Once news of the mistreatment got out, public sympathy swung to the side of the imprisoned activists and they soon were released.

In January 1918, President Wilson announced his support for a constitutional amendment that would give all female citizens the right to vote. In August, ratification came down to a vote in the conservative Southern state of Tennessee. The battle over ratification in Tennessee was known as the "War of the Roses" because suffragists and their supporters wore yellow roses and "Antis" wore red. While the resolution passed easily in the Tennessee Senate, the House was bitterly divided. It passed by one vote, a tie-breaking reversal by Harry Burn, a young red-rose wearing representative who had received a pro-suffrage plea from his mother. On August 26, 1920, Tennessee became the 36th state to ratify the amendment, making it law.

In 1920, Alice Paul proposed an Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the Constitution. ("Men and women," it read, "shall have equal rights throughout the United States.") The ERA has never been ratified.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 1815-1902
WATCH: The Seneca Falls Convention
Elizabeth Cady Stanton was one of the foremost women's-rights activists and philosophers of the 19th century. Born on November 12, 1815, to a prominent family in upstate New York, Elizabeth Cady was surrounded by reform movements of all kinds. Soon after her marriage to abolitionist Henry Brewster Stanton in 1840, the pair traveled to the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London, where they were turned away: Female delegates, they were told, were unwelcome.

This injustice convinced Stanton that women needed to pursue equality for themselves before they could seek it for others. In the summer of 1848, she-along with the abolitionist and temperance activist Lucretia Mott and a handful of other reformers-organized the first women's-rights convention in Seneca Falls, New York. Some 240 men and women gathered to discuss what Stanton and Mott called "the social, civil, and religious condition and rights of women." One hundred of the delegates-68 women and 32 men-signed a Declaration of Sentiments, modeled on the Declaration of Independence, declaring that women were citizens equal to men with "an inalienable right to the elective franchise." The Seneca Falls Convention marked the beginning of the campaign for woman suffrage.

Like Susan B. Anthony, Stanton was a committed abolitionist; however, she too refused to compromise on the principle of universal suffrage. As a result, she campaigned against the ratification of the 15th Amendment to the Constitution, which guaranteed Black men the right to vote but denied it to women.

After the fight over the 14th and 15th Amendments, Stanton continued to push for women's political equality-but she believed in a much broader vision of women's rights. She advocated for the reform of marriage and divorce laws, the expansion of educational opportunities for girls and even the adoption of less confining clothing (such as the pants-and-tunic ensemble popularized by the activist Amelia Bloomer) so that women could be more active. She also campaigned against the oppression of women in the name of religion-"From the inauguration of the movement for woman's emancipation," she wrote, " the Bible has been used to hold her in the 'divinely ordained sphere'"-and in 1895 published the first volume of a more egalitarian Woman's Bible.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton died in 1902. Today, a statue of Stanton, with fellow women's rights activists Susan B. Anthony and Lucretia Mott, stands in the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol.
WATCH: The 19th Amendment
Lucy Stone, 1818-1893

Lucy Stone, born in Massachusetts in 1818, was a pioneering abolitionist and women's-rights activist, but she is perhaps best known for refusing to change her last name when she married the abolitionist Henry Blackwell in 1855. (This tradition, the couple declared, "refuse[d] to recognize the wife as an independent, rational being" and "confer[red] on the husband an injurious and unnatural superiority.")

After she graduated from Oberlin College in 1847, Stone became a traveling lecturer for the American Anti-Slavery Society-advocating, she said, "not for the slave only, but for suffering humanity everywhere. Especially do I mean to labor for the elevation of my sex." She continued her activism on behalf of abolitionism and women's rights until 1857, when she retired from the anti-slavery lecture circuit to care for her baby daughter.

After the Civil War, advocates of woman suffrage faced a dilemma: Should they hold firm to their demand for universal suffrage or should they endorse-even celebrate-the 15th Amendment while they kept up their own campaign for the franchise? Some suffragists, such as Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, chose the former, scorning the 15th Amendment while forming the National Woman Suffrage Association to try and win the passage of a federal universal-suffrage amendment. Stone, on the other hand, supported the 15th Amendment; at the same time, she helped found the American Woman Suffrage Association, which fought for woman suffrage on a state-by-state basis.

In 1871, Stone and Blackwell began to publish the weekly feminist newspaper The Woman's Journal. Stone died in 1893, 27 years before American women won the right to vote. The Woman's Journal survived until 1931.

Ida B. Wells, 1862-1931

R. Gates/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Ida B. Wells, born in Mississippi in 1862, is perhaps best known for her work as a crusading journalist and anti-lynching activist. While working as a schoolteacher in Memphis, Wells wrote for the city's Black newspaper, The Free Speech. Her writings exposed and condemned the inequalities and injustices that were so common in the Jim Crow South: disfranchisement, segregation, lack of educational and economic opportunity for African Americans, and especially the arbitrary violence that white racists used to intimidate and control their Black neighbors.

Wells's insistence on publicizing the evils of lynching, in particular, won her many enemies in the South, and in 1892 she left Memphis for good when an angry mob wrecked the offices of The Free Speech and warned that they would kill her if she ever came back. Wells moved north but kept writing about racist violence in the former Confederacy, campaigning for federal anti-lynching laws (which were never passed) and organizing on behalf of many civil rights causes, including woman suffrage.

In March 1913, as Wells prepared to join the suffrage parade through President Woodrow Wilson's inaugural celebration, organizers asked her to stay out of the procession: Some of the white suffragists, it seemed, refused to march alongside Black people. (Early suffrage activists had generally supported racial equality-in fact, most had been abolitionists before they were feminists-but by the beginning of the 20th century, that was rarely the case. In fact, many middle-class white people embraced the suffragists' cause because they believed that the enfranchisement of "their" women would guarantee white supremacy by neutralizing the Black vote.) Wells joined the march anyway, but her experience showed that to many white suffragists, "equality" did not apply to everyone.

Wells continued to fight for civil rights for all until she died in 1931.
READ MORE: 5 Black Suffragists Who Fought for the 19th Amendment-And Much More
Frances E.W. Harper (1825-1911)

Born to free Black parents in Maryland, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper was orphaned while she was still very young. She was raised by her aunt and uncle, William Watkins, an abolitionist who set up his own school, the Watkins Academy for Negro Youth. Harper attended the academy, began writing poetry as a teenager and later became a teacher at schools in Ohio and Pennsylvania. Barred from returning to Maryland by an 1854 law mandating that free Blacks who entered the South would be forced into slavery, she moved in with her uncles' friends, whose home served as a station on the Underground Railroad.

Through her poetry, which dealt with issues of slavery and abolition, Harper became a leading voice of the abolitionist cause. She began traveling the country, lecturing on behalf of anti-slavery groups, and advocating for women's rights and temperance causes. She also continued to write fiction and poetry, including short stories and a novel, Iola Leroy (1892), one of the first to be published by a Black woman in the United States.

In the latter half of the 19th century, Harper was one of only a few Black women included in the growing women's rights movement. In 1866, she delivered a famous speech at the National Woman's Rights Convention in New York, in which she urged white suffragists to include Black women in their fight for the vote. During the debate over the 15th Amendment (which Harper supported), she and other abolitionists split with white suffragist leaders Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, and helped form the American Women Suffrage Association (AWSA). In 1896, Harper and others founded the National Association of Colored Women Clubs (NACWC), which advocated for a number of rights and advancements for Black women, including the right to vote.

Mary Church Terrell (1863-1954)

Terrell grew up in an affluent family in Tennessee; her formerly enslaved parents both owned successful businesses, and her father, Robert Reed Church, was one of the South's first Black millionaires. After graduating from Oberlin College, she began working as a teacher in Washington D.C, and became involved in the women's rights movement. She joined Ida B. Wells-Barnett in her anti-lynching campaign in the early 1890s, and later co-founded the National Association of Colored Women Clubs (NACWC) with Wells-Barnett and other activists. Terrell served as the organization's first president until 1901, writing and speaking extensively on women's suffrage as well as issues such as equal pay and educational opportunities for African Americans.

Terrell joined Alice Paul and other members of the National Women's Party in picketing for women's voting rights outside Woodrow Wilson's White House. In her view, Black women should be dedicated to the suffrage cause, as "the only group in this country that has two such huge obstacles to surmount...both sex and race."

As a co-founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored Peoples (NAACP), Terrell remained an outspoken fighter on behalf of civil rights after passage of the 19th Amendment. In her 80s, she and several other activists sued a D.C. restaurant after being refused service, a legal battle that led to the court-ordered desegregation of the capital's restaurants in 1953.
READ MORE: A Timeline of the Fight for All Women's Right to Vote

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Women gained the right to vote in 1920 with the passage of the 19 Amendment. On Election Day in 1920, millions of American women exercised this right for the first time.

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In early 20th century Britain, the cause of female suffrage was usually ignored by the press and dismissed by politicians. To gain support for their right to vote, suffragettes turned away from peaceful protest and embraced militant tactics that grew to include window breaking and arson. Their fight for equality escalated in violence in 1912 and 1913.

Here are six real-life suffragettes (plus one man) who fought to give women the right to vote:

Emmeline Pankhurst

Photo: Jimmy Sime/Central Press/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

In 1903, when she was a 45-year-old widow, Emmeline Pankhurst founded the WSPU, whose slogan became "deeds not words." In her work for the group, she gave speeches that encouraged militant action. She declared in 1913, "Militancy has brought woman suffrage where we want it, that is, to the forefront of practical politics. That's the justification for it."

Between 1908 and 1914, Pankhurst was imprisoned 13 times. She would be released after going on hunger strikes, but the police pursued her again once her health had recovered. This cycle only ended with the advent of World War I, when Pankhurst directed WSPU members to support the war effort. In 1918, after the war, Pankhurst was pleased to see women granted limited suffrage.

Hannah Mitchell

Born to a poor family in 1872, Mitchell grew up resenting unfair treatment such as being made to darn her brothers' socks while they got to relax. However, as an adult she initially considered the fight for female suffrage a middle-class issue: as there was a property requirement for voters, expanding the franchise would do little for women like her.

Instead, Mitchell, who'd worked as a domestic servant and seamstress, devoted her energies to the Independent Labour Party - until she came to feel that the ILP was more focused on universal male suffrage. By 1904, Mitchell had joined the Women's Social and Political Union, the group headed by Pankhurst whose members became known as suffragettes.

After disrupting a political meeting in 1906, Mitchell was charged with obstruction and given a three-day sentence. Working-class suffragettes with family obligations often found spending time in custody to be difficult - unlike most middle and upper-class women, they had no servants to handle cooking and cleaning while they were away. Mitchell was no exception to this rule - though her husband was a Socialist, he ignored her wishes and paid her fine so she could leave jail after one day. As she noted in her autobiography, The Hard Way Up: "Most of us who were married found that "Votes for Women" were of less interest to our husbands than their own dinners. They simply could not understand why we made such a fuss about it."

Mitchell left the WSPU in 1907 - in part because she was hurt that Pankhurst didn't visit when she was recovering from a breakdown - but continued to fight for suffrage with the Women's Freedom League.

Barbara and Gerald Gould

Photo: Museum of London/Heritage Images/Getty Images

One real-life couple who both supported female suffrage was Barbara Ayrton Gould and her husband Gerald. Barbara, who'd studied chemistry and physiology at University College, London, became a member of WSPU in 1906 and was a full-time organizer for the group by 1909. Barbara and Gerald got married in 1910.

Gerald supported women's suffrage with actions like writing a pro-suffrage pamphlet entitled The Democratic Plea. In March 1912, Barbara participated in an attention-grabbing bout of smashing store windows in the West End of London. After this, Barbara spent time in prison; in 1913, she went to France for a time to avoid being rearrested.

Frustrated by WSPU leadership, Barbara left the group in 1914. However, the Goulds didn't abandon their quest for women's suffrage: On February 6, 1914, they were among the founders of the United Suffragists, which welcomed both men and women as members. That group ended its campaign when 1918's Representation of the People Act gave women limited suffrage.

Edith Garrud

Suffragette Edith Garrud was born in 1872. While protesting, suffragettes often faced harassment and attacks, both from the police and members of the public. But thanks to Garrud's martial arts instruction, which she was offering to suffragettes by 1909, many learned how to defend themselves with jiu-jitsu.

In addition to "suffrajitsu," as this training came to be nicknamed, Garrud also organized a protective force - called "The Bodyguard" - to keep Pankhurst and other suffragette leaders safe and out of police custody. Besides their martial arts skills, women on protective duty learned to wield clubs they kept hidden in their dresses.

Olive Hockin

One target of suffragette ire was chancellor of the exchequer David Lloyd George. In February 1913, suffragettes bombed an empty house that was being built for Lloyd George.

The actual perpetrator(s) of the bombing were never found - instead, Pankhurst was arrested after declaring, "The authorities need not look for the women who did what was done last night. I accept full responsibility for it." However, police considered Olive Hockin one of the prime suspects.

Though Hockin wasn't charged with the Lloyd George bombing, police raided her home in March 1913 after a suffragette paper with her name and address was found at the site of an arson attack on the Roehampton Golf Club. Inside her apartment, they found a "suffragette arsenal" that included acid, a fake license plate, stones, a hammer and wire cutters.

Emily Wilding Davison

Photo: Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Emily Davison, who was born in 1872, joined the WSPU in 1906, and soon was devoting all her energy to the fight for suffrage. Her militant actions included attacking a man with a whip when she mistook him for George, stone-throwing and arson. (Davison has sometimes been labeled as one of the suffragettes who bombed George's house in 1913, but records indicate the police did not view her as a suspect.)

Davison was jailed nine times for her militancy. During her time behind bars, she was subjected to 49 force-feedings (many suffragettes were force-fed when they started hunger strikes in prison). In an article, she wrote that these feedings were a "hideous torture."

Davison's last militant act took place at the Epsom Derby in June 1913. There, she ran in front of, and was subsequently trampled by, the king's horse; she died a few days later. Davison's true intentions have been debated: Some feel she wanted to become a martyr, others believe she only aimed to make a statement by placing the suffragette colors of purple, white and green on the king's horse. The fact that Davison had a return train ticket in her purse and was planning a vacation in France indicate she didn't intend to commit suicide, but there is no definitive answer.

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7 People Who Fought to Give Women the Right to Vote

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In early 20th century Britain, the cause of female suffrage was usually ignored by the press and dismissed by politicians. To gain support for their right to vote, suffragettes turned away from peaceful protest and embraced militant tactics that grew to include window breaking and arson.