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ON JUNE 4, 1913, A TALL, SLENDER, 40-YEAR-OLD WOMAN WITH RED hair and green eyes stood quietly at the rail of the Epsom Downs race track, waiting for the running of the English Derby. Her name was Emily Wilding Davison and she was a member of the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU). Under her coat she carried two suffrage flags. As the first group of horses passed her and a second rounded the corner, she slipped under the rail and ran onto the track. Newsreel films show her running toward the king's horse and throwing up her hands, perhaps to stop the horse, perhaps to protect herself. In an instant, woman, horse, and jockey are on the ground. Only Davison was seriously hurt; the horse walked off the track and the jockey, Herbert Jones, recovered quickly from his injuries. Kicked in the head, Emily Davison died four days later without regaining consciousness (cf. Stanley and Morley, 1988).
Her spectacular death made Davison one of the most famous and controversial of British suffragettes. Her friends and colleagues in the suffrage movement hailed her as having risked her life to call attention to the "great hardships and privations endured by women by reason of their exclusion from any political status" (E. Pethick-Lawrence, quoted in "Suffragette Outrage at the Derby," 1913:1). Anti-suffragists, equally quickly, questioned her sanity and characterized her actions as "reckless fanaticism," "desperately wicked," "entirely unbalanced," "mad," "demented," and "an act of criminal folly" ("A Memorable Derby," 1913:9; "The Distracting Derby," 1913: 8; "The Derby Suffragette," 1913: 8). When Davison died on the eighth, the debate entered a new phase. The leaders of the WSPU hailed her as a hero and a martyr who had sacrificed her life to call the government to account for its treatment of women and advance the cause of women's rights. She had been, according to Emmeline Pankhurst, "one of our valiant soldiers," who had "gladly laid down her life for the cause of women's freedom" (E. Pankhurst, 1913: 8). It was just the beginning of a campaign to claim and honor Davison as a martyr, a campaign that culminated in an enormous funeral procession through London on June 14. Opponents of the enfranchisement of women and especially of the...