Emmeline Pankhurst

Emmeline Pankhurst, born Emmeline Goulden on 15 July 1858 in Manchester’s Moss Side district, was a political activist who built the British suffragette movement. Her efforts contributed to women gaining the vote in Great Britain and Ireland in 1918, partly because of her involvement in the White Feather Campaign. *Time* magazine ranked her among the 100 Most Important People of the 20th Century in 1999, noting that “she shaped an idea of women for our time” and “shook society into a new pattern from which there could be no going back.” Her aggressive tactics drew heavy criticism, and historians remain divided on whether those methods were effective, but her work is widely seen as essential to securing women’s suffrage in the UK.

She was raised by politically active parents in Manchester. At age 16, she first encountered the women’s suffrage movement. She helped create the Women’s Franchise League, which pushed for voting rights for both married and unmarried women. After that group dissolved, she tried to join the left-leaning Independent Labour Party through her friendship with socialist Keir Hardie, but her local branch initially refused her membership because she was a woman. While serving as a Poor Law Guardian, she was horrified by the harsh conditions she saw in Manchester’s workhouses.

In 1903, Pankhurst founded the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), an all-female suffrage group committed to “deeds, not words.” The WSPU operated independently of political parties and often clashed with them. The group became known for physical confrontations: members smashed windows and attacked police officers. Pankhurst, her daughters, and other WSPU activists were repeatedly jailed, where they went on hunger strikes to demand better treatment and were frequently force-fed. As her eldest daughter Christabel took over WSPU leadership, tensions with the government escalated. Eventually, the group turned to bombings and arson, prompting more moderate organisations to condemn the Pankhurst family. In 1913, several prominent members left the WSPU, including Pankhurst’s younger daughters Adela and Sylvia. Emmeline was so angry that she “gave [Adela] a ticket, £20, and a letter of introduction to a suffragette in Australia, and firmly insisted that she emigrate.” Adela did so, and the family rift never healed. Sylvia became a socialist.

When the First World War broke out, Emmeline and Christabel immediately halted their activism to support the British government’s stance against the “German Peril.” Emmeline organised a large march called the Women’s Right to Serve demonstration to highlight women’s contributions to the war effort. She and Christabel pushed women to work in industrial production and encouraged young men to enlist.

The Representation of the People Act of 1918 gave the vote to all men over 21 and to women over 30. This age gap was meant to prevent men from becoming a voting minority due to the massive number of war deaths. Pankhurst then turned the WSPU into the Women’s Party, focused on advancing women’s equality in public life. In her later years, worried about what she saw as the threat of Bolshevism, she joined the Conservative Party. In 1927, she was chosen as the Conservative candidate for Whitechapel and St Georges. She died on 14 June 1928, just weeks before the Conservative government’s Representation of the People (Equal Franchise) Act 1928 gave all women over 21 the vote on 2 July 1928. A statue in Victoria Tower Gardens, next to the Houses of Parliament, was unveiled in her honour two years later.

She was born on Sloan Street in Moss Side, Manchester, on 15 July 1858. Though her birth certificate says otherwise, she believed and later claimed her birthday was a day earlier, on Bastille Day (14 July). Most biographies, including those by her daughters, repeat this claim. Feeling a connection to the female revolutionaries who stormed the Bastille, she said in 1908: “I have always thought that the fact that I was born on that day had some kind of influence over my life.” Her family had a long history of political agitation. Her mother, Sophia, was from the Isle of Man and descended from men charged with social unrest and slander. In 1881, the Isle of Man became the first part of the British Isles to let women vote in its own national elections (the Isle does not send members to the UK Parliament). Her father, Robert Goulden, was a self-made man who rose from errand boy to manufacturer, coming from a humble Manchester family with its own political background. Robert’s mother, a fustian cutter, worked with the Anti-Corn Law League, and his father was press-ganged into the Royal Navy and was present at the Peterloo massacre, where cavalry charged and broke up a crowd demanding parliamentary reform.

The Gouldens’ first son died at age three, but they had ten other children; Emmeline was the eldest of five daughters. Soon after her birth, the family moved to Seedley, where her father had co-founded a small business. He was also active in local politics, serving several years on the Salford town council. He enthusiastically supported dramatic organisations like the Manchester Athenaeum and the Dramatic Reading Society, and owned a theatre in Salford for several years, where he played lead roles in several Shakespeare plays. From her father, Goulden absorbed an appreciation of drama and theatrics, which she later used in her activism. The Gouldens involved their children in social activism. As part of the movement to end US slavery, Robert welcomed American abolitionists into their home.