Robert Lee writes that the Finns were 20 years ahead of Britain in establishing universal suffrage for men and women; Harry Galbraith says that the Isle of Man granted votes for women as early as 1881; while John Hurdley writes that his suffragette grandmother would not want to be pardoned. Plus letters from Pam Lunn , Ian Bullock and Meg Howarth

Despite the fact that universal suffrage was only introduced much later, in 1928 (Which branch of feminism won women the vote? We all did, 6 February), the focus has been largely on Britain and its colonies. Perhaps the prospect of Brexit, the most devastating blow to Britain’s international standing and the welfare of its people for many decades, has reinforced our persistent isolationism and precluded any analysis of what was happening elsewhere, specifically in continental Europe. Everywhere the struggle for women’s suffrage was a challenge to the gendered meaning of political citizenship, but it was in Finland in 1906 that general suffrage was first established for men and women. In the elections to the new unicameral parliament (Eduskanta) in 1907, 19 women MPs were elected. Finland, at that time, was still a grand duchy within the Russian empire, with limited industrial development. Why did it take Britain over 20 years to achieve the same objective? What does it say about the conservative and patriarchal attitudes of the aristocracy and most upper-middle-class men? Are there not still important lessons to be learned from continental Europe in terms of gender equality as a means of addressing the relative backwardness of the British state?

Emeritus Professor Robert Lee

Birkenhead, Wirral

• As a Guardian subscriber and a Manxman I am used to seeing the Isle of Man portrayed in a critical light in your pages, particularly where taxation or motorcycle racing are concerned. It came as no surprise, therefore, when I read the letter from Mike Gavin (7 February) saying that the 1918 Representation of the People Act recognised for the first time the principle of universal suffrage. In the 1881 Election Act passed by Tynwald, the Manx parliament, its votes for women preceded the Westminster act by 37 years. Not too bad for such a backward, inward-looking place.

Harry Galbraith

Peel, Isle of Man

• There are moves afoot to secure pardons for suffragettes who suffered arrest and imprisonment for their militant actions. As the grandson of one of those women, I am wholly opposed to such moves. The whole point of the campaign was to get arrested and imprisoned to secure publicity and embarrass and wrong-foot the authorities – to the extent that my grandmother’s first attempt was declined by the prosecutors, so she committed a further act. She was proud of having spent a month in Holloway and never tried to hide it, and a pardon now or then would have negated her courage and determination. If the home secretary wants to help women, she could improve the disgraceful conditions for today’s female prisoners and detainees in such places as Yarl’s Wood. However a grovelling apology for force-feeding and other, probably illegal, outrages would not come amiss.

John Hurdley

Birmingham

• The matter of the violence (or “militancy”) of the suffragettes needs to be seen in its historical-political context. In the early 20th century there was a belief that the effectiveness of exercising the vote was because it could, ultimately, be backed up by force – and some of the agitation for wider male suffrage had been conducted with shows of force precisely with this in mind. Women were assumed to be unable to underpin the vote, were they to have it, with the necessary physical force to give it any validity. Indeed, they were taunted by Lord Haldane (then secretary of state for war), who accused them of using a policy of pinpricks, and asked why they did not do something serious. So they responded with an escalation of militancy and demonstrated that women certainly could back up their views with physical force.

Pam Lunn

Kenilworth, Warwickshire

• We should pause and reflect for a very long time before adopting Andy de la Tour’s advocacy of violence as a “legitimate and necessary tactic”. For one thing it gives too much prominence to the suffragettes of the WSPU in the struggle to enfranchise women rather than recognising the important contributions of all the other organisations mentioned by Rachel Holmes.

If one looks at the three longest-established socialist weeklies in July 1914 – just weeks before the outbreak of war and the total cessation of “votes for women” campaigning by the WSPU, though not by Sylvia Pankhurst – there is little or no support for the “arson campaign”.

The editorial of Justice, the oldest socialist paper, on 2 July, conceded that the WSPU’s tactics “did unquestionably bring the question of woman suffrage prominently to the front”. But it believed that extreme forms of militancy had “practically killed all public opinion and feeling on the subject of the suffrage altogether. Not the faintest general interest is taken in it”. Two weeks later on 16 July the same paper said that while the government’s response with forcible feeding and the “Cat and Mouse” act was, “a stupid blunder from first to last”, it was “impossible just now to get up any enthusiasm whatever for the suffrage, and will be increasingly so as long as tactics of personal violence and arson continue”.

In the Clarion, Hilda Thompson complained on 17 July that, with the paper’s circulation of 60,000, her recent attempt to generate enthusiasm for the suffrage campaign had resulted in just a few letters. “Not a dozen enthusiasts all told.” Even the Independent Labour party’s leader, usually more sympathetic to the WSPU, had asserted (on 2 July) that: “We need not say that we have no sympathy with the women who are committing acts of violence and incendiarism in the pathetic belief that they are furthering the ends of the woman suffrage movement.” They were the “greatest enemies of their own cause”. It’s by no means clear that such judgments were wrong.

Ian Bullock

Brighton

• We may, as Emily Thornberry says (Opinion, 5 February), “owe it to the suffragettes to keep campaigning for women” – but that doesn’t justify a statue of Sylvia Pankhurst in Islington. Ms Pankhurst’s London links are with Bow, in Tower Hamlets – where she did most of her campaigning – and Woodford Green, where she lived for more than 30 years (and where Clement Attlee also had a home, from 1945 to 1951). A statue in either of these areas or in Tavistock Square peace gardens to reflect this courageous woman’s opposition to the first world war would be more appropriate than one in Ms Thornberry’s Islington constituency, where there’s no record of the suffragette ever having spoken.

A statue on Clerkenwell Green – conceived without local consultation – seems to be a case of the ideological tail wagging the historic dog. I wonder what Sylvia would have made of such democratic shenanigans?

Meg Howarth

London

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