• In her excellent review of BBC One’s Suffragettes with Lucy Worsley (G2, 5 June), Julia Raeside avoids the most problematic aspect of the film: calling the more extreme violence that some of the women engaged in “terrorism”. Terrorism was not defined but associated with bombing and attacks on property. Most of the press of the day described such action as “outrages”, although some newspapers, such as the Pall Mall Gazette, referred to it as terrorism. Yet the state did not charge the women as terrorists but under the 1861 Malicious Injuries to Property Act.
What the film did not state was that, unlike so many of today’s terrorists, the suffragettes aimed to kill no one. Even in the mid-1970s, the aged suffragette Mary Leigh, one of the women featured in the film, recollected: “Mrs Pankhurst gave us strict orders … there was not a cat or a canary to be killed: no life.” Yet three suffragettes died as a result of state brutality towards them – Mary Pilsbury, Mary Clarke and Henria Williams. Constance Lytton was left partly paralysed for the rest of her short life after suffering two strokes.
June Purvis
University of Portsmouth
• Julie Raeside was quite right to praise Lucy Worsley’s programme, but it made no mention of the song specially composed for them by Emmeline Pankhurst’s friend, the composer Dame Ethel Smyth. The story goes that when Thomas Beecham went to Holloway prison to visit the composer he found her conducting the song – with a toothbrush – from a first-floor window while the suffragette inmates marched round the courtyard below singing The March of the Women. I hope that all those on Sunday’s march will sing it – it can be downloaded from imslp.org, the website of the International Music Score Library Project– though I doubt they will still be able to “obtain cards with the words and vocal parts (ordinary notation and tonic sol-fa), price one penny, from the Women’s Social and Political Union offices”.
Helen Keating
Gatehouse of Fleet, Dumfries and Galloway
• The subheading and the bottom letter were amended on 7 June 2018 to correct the spelling of Ethel Smyth’s name.
