Emily Davison

Emily Wilding Davison is known today as the suffragette who suddenly moved onto the race track at Epsom Downs on Derby Day, June 4, 1913, seemingly to stop the king’s horse. Her attempt was disastrous and she was mortally injured, dying four days later. Most of what is written about her focuses on this attempt—what lead her to it, what she hoped to gain, whether she realized the danger she would encounter as she moved into a field of running horses.

A militant suffragette who had endured multiple forcible feedings, Davison had twice tried to commit suicide while imprisoned in Holloway Gaol, because she believed that if she sacrificed herself she might save others from the brutality and humiliation of forced feeding and hasten the day when British women would have the same rights to vote as men. Her inscrutable action on June 4, 1913 has occasioned a great deal of speculation, but ironically very few modern scholars or critics have turned to the relatively large body of writing which she left behind among her unpublished papers and in her published work. She revealed her inner thoughts, her political beliefs, and her vision for a more just society in her essays, reviews, and her numerous letters to the editors of various British newspapers.

Emily Davison belonged to the WSPU, the Women’s Social and Political Union, a militant suffrage
organization of women who were ready to break the laws of England and to suffer the consequences of being convicted of disturbing the peace, of throwing stones at and breaking windows, and ultimately arson. They did so in part to generate news about their political ideology and to generate support for women’s suffrage. In addition to performing news-worthy deeds the WSPU sought to influence public opinion in favor of women’s suffrage by vigorous defense of its position expressed in letters to the editors of British newspapers. Emily Davison supported the WSPU both by her deeds and her words, submitting numerous letters to various newspapers and magazines explaining and defending the militant suffrage position on the need for women’s franchise.

This website contains the great majority of the letters she wrote, edited from a scrapbook annotated in her own hand, and from a notebook containing half a dozen unpublished draft letters. The collection is a guide to her thinking, to the evolving position of the WSPU in regard to militancy, and to the struggle for the vote up to the time of her death a year before the First World War broke out and put a stop to the suffrage campaign. Women were finally given the parliamentary vote in 1918, and fully enfranchised in 1929.

Carolyn Collette
Mount Holyoke College
April 29, 2013