Britain was far more militant than its counterpart in the United States.

The movements for female suffrage in Britain and the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries had many common links, but there were some significant differences between them. For one thing, British women seeking the vote called themselves “suffragettes,” while Americans preferred the more gender-neutral “suffragists.” A far more important difference was the degree of militancy of the two movements. Under the leadership of Emmeline Pankhurst and the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), thousands of suffragettes demonstrated in the streets, chained themselves to buildings, heckled politicians, broke store windows, planted explosive devices and engaged in other destructive activities in order to pressure Britain’s Liberal government to give women the vote. In a particularly gruesome (and public) display, Emily Wilding Davison was fatally trampled by a racehorse owned by King George V when she tried to pin a sash advertising the suffragette cause to the horse’s bridle during the Epsom Derby in 1913. More than 1,000 suffragettes were imprisoned between 1908 and 1914; when they engaged in hunger strikes to draw public attention to their cause, prison officials responded by force-feeding them. Such militant tactics ceased when World War I broke out, as Pankhurst and the WSPU threw all their support behind the patriotic cause. In 1918, the British government granted suffrage to all women over the age of 30, ostensibly in recognition of women’s contributions to the war effort.