"We are not ashamed of what we have done, because when you are in a state of war with an enemy who will listen to no arguments, who will take no action, you have to find other methods, and that is all we have done. You have two choices. You must either give us women the vote, or you must put us in prison. We have chosen to go to prison. We have chosen to make more sacrifice than you ask of soldiers. You have said that it is right and proper to die for political convictions, and so we women, in organised revolt against the state, have made that declaration. We say we are not making war on human life. We are making war on the institutions which have unjustly denied us the rights of citizenship, which have refused to listen to the constitutional means which we have used for fifty years. We are in revolt against your laws, not against your lives."

Emmeline Pankhurst, speech delivered in Hartford, Connecticut, USA, 13 November 1913. Pankhurst was on a fundraising and speaking tour of America. She was co-founder and leader of the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU).