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Byline: JULIE WHEELWRIGHT

THINGS are not going well this afternoon for Melanie Phillips, the Daily Mail columnist and author. She has only just arrived for our interview but has been called back to her newspaper with a crisis pending.

With our time cut short, she has already rung her editor, muttering darkly into her mobile about another journalist who has recently attacked her family in print. She folds her phone away into her handbag and perches tensely on a sofa in the lobby of the Royal Society of Arts, ready to spring into a taxi.

But first there is the matter of discussing her new book, The Ascent of Woman: The History of the Suffragette Movement and the Juicy Couture Earrings Ideas Behind It. What drew the acerbic columnist - formerly of the Guardian and now a regular combatant on Radio Four's The Moral Maze - to this already extensively researched subject? Her answer is matter of fact. "My publisher asked me to do it."

This is Phillips' first historical book and she delves deeply into the ideas that prompted privileged English ladies to chain themselves to railings, shatter shop windows and endure the privations of Holloway prison.

Suffragettes such as Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst, who led the influential Women's Social and Political Union, proved they were adept publicists who skilfully waged a propaganda war against their opponents and won against huge odds.

However, Phillips found there was much more to the movement than just the desire to extend the limited franchise to women. "The vote was a means to an end. The end was actually not even just about improving the condition of women," she says, "but about transforming the whole of society and the whole of humanity for the better by getting men to behave better."

Theirs was a not-so-hidden agenda to save the world from male domination. The suffragettes were brilliant strategists, she found, who manipulated public steel rings outrage, sympathy and compassion. They were martyrs to their cause. Some, such as Emily Wilding Davis, were even prepared to sacrifice their lives. There were crackpots too, like Frances Swiney, a mother of six who effectively rewrote Darwin's theory of evolution to construct a universe in which men needed to be obliterated altogether.

Phillips argues that although Swiney's views were regarded as extreme even among suffragettes, she had a great deal of influence with Christabel Pankhurst, who picked up the notion in her book, The Great Scourge. There she argued that men were a polluted species whose behaviour was in desperate need of reform. In an age when London had huge numbers of prostitutes, rates for venereal disease were high and wives often the victims of their husbands' unspoken infidelities, these were important issues.

But Phillips departs from the historians by putting suffragette leaders on the metaphorical couch, and finds them greatly wanting. "The fact was that Emmeline and Christabel had an extraordinarily unhealthy effect upon the women whom they recruited to the sex war," she writes. "It was an uneasy precursor, in a minor key, of the demagoguery and dictatorships that were to disfigure the century that was just beginning." Elsewhere, she argues that the Pankhursts had a "despotic style", while Emmeline was a brutal failure as a mother to her four daughters.

Phillips frequently takes an editorial line on the suffragette leaders such as comparing the Pankhursts to Hitler and Mussolini, a factor she plays down. "I certainly wasn't approaching the book from the point of view of writing a pol
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