It has been suggested recently that the extreme behaviour of the suffragettes delayed the introduction of votes for women as the government before WW1 did not wish to be seen to be bowing to the tactics of violence used by sufragettes. After the war, they granted women the vote as a 'reward' for their work during the war
There was a second movement for votes for women, a non-violent group called the suffragists, one of whose leaders was Millicent Fawcett, after whom the Fawcett Society was named. Although the Suffragettes have hogged the limelight because of their extreme actions, the suffragist movement had many more adherents than the suffragettes. 2,000 suffragettes to 50,000 suffragists.
Reading Millicent Fawcett's biography on Wikipedia en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millicent_Fawcett I would suggest that in her life she did more for the rights of women than all the Pankhurst family rolled together. She was involved in campaigns to curb child abuse by raising the age of consent, criminalizing incest, cruelty to children within the family, to end the practice of excluding women from courtrooms when sexual offences were under consideration, to stamp out the 'white slave trade', and to prevent child marriage and the introduction of regulated prostitution in India. (I quote from Wikipedia) to name but a few.
The Suffragists did the hard work and achieved success by showing their worth. The Suffragettes were just 'virtue signallers'
Discuss!!