Emmeline Pankhurst
She liked to say she was born on Bastille Day, then spent her life storming the establishment from a Manchester drawing room.
Published
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Quick Facts
- Born
- 15 July 1858, Moss Side, Manchester (she preferred to celebrate Bastille Day, 14 July)
- Died
- 14 June 1928, London
- Known for
- Founding the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) in 1903
- Motto
- "Deeds not words"
- Founded at
- Her home at 62 Nelson Street, Manchester
- Famous prison record
- Arrested repeatedly and jailed in Holloway, including a three-year sentence in 1913
- Her mark in stone
- Statues in Victoria Tower Gardens, Westminster (1930) and St Peter's Square, Manchester (2018)
- Cruel timing
- Died weeks before women won the vote on equal terms with men in 1928
The Bastille Day birthday
Emmeline Pankhurst told people she was born on 14 July, the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille. The date was a little neater than the truth: her birth was in fact on 15 July 1858. But it tells you how she saw herself. She grew up in Moss Side, Manchester, in a household full of radical talk. Her father, Robert Goulden, was a calico printer, and her parents took her to anti-slavery and women's suffrage causes. At 14 she went with her mother to a meeting where Lydia Becker, the great suffrage campaigner, spoke. She later said it set her course. She was sent to school in Paris, then came home and, in 1879, married Richard Pankhurst, a barrister 24 years her senior and a fierce supporter of votes for women.
The woman who started a revolution in her front room
For years Emmeline was a reformer, not a rebel. She helped found the Women's Franchise League in 1889, ran a furnishing shop in Hampstead, and after Richard's death in 1898 worked as a registrar of births and deaths in Manchester. Patience ran out. In October 1903 she gathered a group of women at her home on Nelson Street and founded the Women's Social and Political Union. Its motto, "Deeds not words", was a direct jab at decades of polite petitioning that had got nowhere. The press gave her followers a nickname in 1906. The Daily Mail coined "suffragettes" as a sneer. They took it up proudly.
Windows, prison and the Cat and Mouse Act
The WSPU grew louder and bolder. Members heckled politicians, chained themselves to railings, smashed windows and, later, set fire to empty buildings and postboxes. Pankhurst was arrested again and again, and she went to Holloway more than once. When suffragette prisoners went on hunger strike, the government force-fed them, then passed the 1913 Temporary Discharge for Ill Health Act. It let prisoners be released when weak and rearrested once they had recovered. Everyone called it the Cat and Mouse Act. Pankhurst was repeatedly caught up in it. In 1913 she was sentenced to three years' penal servitude after a bomb attack on a house being built for David Lloyd George. She served only a small part of it, thanks to hunger strikes and releases. That same year she crossed the Atlantic and gave her famous speech in Hartford, Connecticut, which has become known as "Freedom or Death".
A family at war with itself
Her campaign was also a family story, and not always a happy one. Her daughter Christabel was her chief strategist. Sylvia, an artist, built up a more working-class movement in London's East End and fell out with her mother. Adela was pushed out and eventually emigrated to Australia. When the First World War began in 1914, Emmeline suspended the militant campaign and threw the WSPU behind the war effort. Many suffragettes were furious. Others, including the government, were relieved. She also adopted four girls during the war years, "war babies" born to unmarried mothers, a surprising domestic note in a life of public combat.
What changed, and what she missed
In 1918 the Representation of the People Act gave the vote to women over 30 who met property qualifications. Historians still argue about how much was due to the militants and how much to the war and to the constitutional suffragists, but few deny that Pankhurst made the issue impossible to ignore. Her politics shifted in later life. She moved towards the Conservatives, and in 1927 she was chosen as a prospective candidate for Whitechapel and St George's in London. She never stood. She died on 14 June 1928, just weeks before the Equal Franchise Act gave women the vote on the same terms as men. She is buried in Brompton Cemetery, London.
Where to find her today
At Victoria Tower Gardens beside the Houses of Parliament stands a statue of Pankhurst, unveiled in 1930, looking towards the building she spent her life trying to enter on equal terms. In Manchester, her old home at 62 Nelson Street is part of the Pankhurst Centre, a museum and women's centre. In 2018 the city also unveiled Hazel Reeves's statue "Rise Up, Women" in St Peter's Square, the first statue of a woman in the city centre in over a century apart from Queen Victoria. Time magazine later named her among the hundred most important people of the twentieth century.
Notable people
- Emmeline Pankhurst
- Christabel Pankhurst
- Sylvia Pankhurst
- Adela Pankhurst
- Richard Pankhurst
- Lydia Becker
- Emily Wilding Davison
- David Lloyd George
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