Christabel Pankhurst's definition of militancy in terms of purity and the destruction of “the bad and the old” argues for the modernity of the militant British women's suffrage movement. The future she envisions breaks from the past – defined as “bad,” “old,” and “ugly” – and allows women to join the ranks of the modern vanguard described as “the good and the new.” Through this definition, Pankhurst whitens women as citizens by writing them into national narratives of progress. These narratives repeat the past by reproducing imperial and national structures of power. They do this by excluding cultural and racial differences (the “bad” and the “old”) and sexual desire (the impure) as less than modern. This exclusion shores up the racial and gendered boundaries that define modern subjects, and then these subjects, in turn, define their actions as historical progress (“the good and the new”).