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The Great War and the Charge of Pessimism
Pankhurst invariably attributed her general openness in 1918 to the message of Christ's return to the disillusioning effect that the Great War had had on her. In 1923 she said of the war: ‘many of us believed when it began that it was the war that would end all war. How could any one have lived in that fool's paradise?’ In 1926 a report summarized a portion of a speech of hers as follows: ‘The War shattered her ideals, and she found herself without a philosophy of life.’ A direct quotation from the same account has her declaring that ‘the War brought us face to face with the “changelessness of human nature”.’ In other words, she had been assuming gradual, unceasing human progress, but the war disabused her of that assumption. Pankhurst made this point explicitly in her journal, Present and Future:
In all this, the inconvenient fact is not perhaps remembered, as it should be, that humanity cannot lift itself by its own boot straps, and also that the brightest dawns and noon of human civilisation have ever been followed by twilight and night… . ‘Progress’ and ‘evolution’ are disappearing from current philosophies of the future. The world-war and after-war experience have convinced many that progress is not sure and continual, and recent archaeological research has taught more plainly than ever that ancient, now-dead civilisations were remarkably progressive, and in many ways rivalled our own …
In The Uncurtained Future, she gave a simple, clear account of the impact of the war: ‘The outburst of war in 1914 shattered my illusions. Till then, a better world had seemed near … Life would never again be the same. The world as we knew it was finished.’
Her message, of course, was literally apocalyptic, and the overtones of that word were sometimes warranted. She warned in 1923: ‘Human methods of abolishing war will end in the Battle of Armageddon!’ As will be shown in chapter six, Pankhurst is often portrayed as having thrown in the towel and given up on feminism and social reform when she ought to have continued faithfully to give her time and energy to such causes.
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