Emmeline Pankhurst

Emmeline Pankhurst was a British political activist who set up the Women's Social and Political Union in 1903 and led its militant campaign for women's right to vote. Her suffragettes broke windows, went on hunger strike in prison and later turned to arson, tactics that brought her fame, repeated imprisonment and lasting controversy. Historians still disagree about whether militancy helped or hindered the cause, but there is wide agreement that her movement put women's suffrage at the centre of British politics.

Emmeline Goulden was born on 15 July 1858 in the Moss Side district of Manchester, the eldest daughter in a large family; she later preferred to give her birthday as 14 July, Bastille Day. Her father, a self-made manufacturer, and her Manx mother were both politically active, backing abolitionism and votes for women. At 14 she went with her mother to hear the suffragist Lydia Becker speak and, by her own account, came away a confirmed supporter. She finished her schooling in Paris.

In 1879 she married Richard Pankhurst, a radical barrister more than twenty years her senior who had long campaigned for women's suffrage. They had five children, among them Christabel, Sylvia and Adela, who all became activists. In 1889, at the family home in London, the couple helped found the Women's Franchise League, which demanded the vote for married as well as unmarried women.

Back in Manchester in the 1890s, Pankhurst joined the Independent Labour Party and in 1894 was elected a Poor Law Guardian, where the conditions she found in the workhouse shocked her. After Richard's sudden death in 1898 left the family in debt, she worked as a registrar of births and deaths. The stories of poor women she heard there hardened her conviction that women needed the vote.

Frustrated by failed suffrage bills, she launched the Women's Social and Political Union on 10 October 1903, open only to women and committed to direct action. Its motto, in her words, was "Deeds, not words". Early protests were noisy but peaceful; when a newspaper dismissed the militants as "suffragettes", they adopted the word as a badge of honour.

Pankhurst was first arrested in February 1908 and jailed for six weeks; she was arrested seven times before women won the vote. From 1909 imprisoned members went on hunger strike and were often force-fed. After the Conciliation Bill failed in 1910, police dealt violently with a march on Parliament on Black Friday. In 1912 the union turned to mass window-smashing and then arson. The government responded with the Cat and Mouse Act, which let hunger strikers be released and rearrested. Her autocratic leadership caused splits, and her daughters Sylvia and Adela left.

When World War I began in 1914, Pankhurst and Christabel suspended militancy and threw their energy into supporting the war effort, urging women into industry and men into the army. In 1917, after the Russian Revolution, she travelled to Petrograd to urge Russia to keep fighting. The Representation of the People Act of 1918 gave the vote to women over 30. Christabel stood for Parliament that year for Pankhurst's Women's Party and narrowly lost.

After the war she toured North America warning against Bolshevism and defending the British Empire, and in 1922 she settled for a time in Toronto, Canada, where she campaigned on public health and also promoted eugenic ideas. Returning to England, she joined the Conservative Party and was chosen as a candidate in east London. Her health failed, and she died in a Hampstead nursing home on 14 June 1928, weeks before an act of Parliament gave women the vote on the same terms as men.

A statue of her was unveiled beside the Houses of Parliament in 1930. Her daughters wrote opposing accounts of her, Sylvia as an autocrat and Christabel as selfless, and her later support for empire and eugenics has drawn criticism.

Our 1914 and 1920 maps show the United Kingdom and its empire before and after the war in which British women first gained the vote.