Pankhurst, Emmeline

orig. Emmeline Goulden

born July 14, 1858, Manchester, Eng.

died June 14, 1928, London

British feminist.

In 1879 she married Richard Pankhurst (1834–98), author of Britain's first women's-suffrage bill and the Married Women's Property Acts (1870, 1882). In 1889 she founded the Women's Franchise League, which in 1894 secured for married women the right to vote in local elections. In 1903, after holding municipal offices in Manchester, she founded the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU). From 1912 she advocated extreme militancy, mainly in the form of arson, and was arrested 12 times in one year. Weeks before her death in 1928, Britain passed a bill to give voting rights to all women. Her daughter Christabel H. Pankhurst (1880–1958)

later Dame Christabel

organized the militant tactics of the WSPU and directed actions that included hunger strikes and huge outdoor rallies. She later became a religious evangelist and moved to the U.S.

Emmeline Pankhurst in prison clothes, 1908

BBC Hulton Picture Library

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▪ British suffragist

née  Goulden  

born July 14, 1858, Manchester

died June 14, 1928, London

 militant champion of woman suffrage whose 40-year campaign achieved complete success in the year of her death, when British women obtained full equality in the voting franchise. Her daughter Christabel Harriette (afterward Dame Christabel) Pankhurst (Pankhurst, Dame Christabel Harriette) (1880–1958) also was prominent in the woman suffrage movement.

      In 1879 Emmeline Goulden married Richard Marsden Pankhurst, lawyer, friend of John Stuart Mill, and author of the first woman suffrage bill in Great Britain (late 1860s) and of the Married Women's Property acts (1870, 1882). Ten years later she founded the Women's Franchise League, which secured (1894) for married women the right to vote in elections to local offices (not to the House of Commons). From 1895 she held a succession of municipal offices in Manchester, but her energies were increasingly in demand by the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU), which she founded in 1903 in Manchester. The union first attracted wide attention on Oct. 13, 1905, when two of its members, Christabel Pankhurst and Annie Kenney, thrown out of a Liberal Party meeting for demanding a statement about votes for women, were arrested in the street for a technical assault on the police and, after having refused to pay fines, were sent to prison.

      From 1906 Emmeline Pankhurst directed WSPU activities from London. Regarding the Liberal government as the main obstacle to woman suffrage, she campaigned against the party's candidates at elections, and her followers interrupted meetings of Cabinet ministers. In 1908–09 Pankhurst was jailed three times, once for issuing a leaflet calling on the people to “rush the House of Commons.” A truce that she declared in 1910 was broken when the government blocked a “conciliation” bill on woman suffrage. From July 1912 the WSPU turned to extreme militancy, mainly in the form of arson directed by Christabel from Paris, where she had gone to avoid arrest for conspiracy. Pankhurst herself was imprisoned, and, under the Prisoners (Temporary Discharge for Ill-Health) Act of 1913 (the “Cat and Mouse Act”), by which hunger-striking prisoners could be freed for a time and then reincarcerated upon regaining their health to some extent, she was released and rearrested 12 times within a year, serving a total of about 30 days. With the outbreak of World War I in 1914, she and Christabel called off the suffrage campaign, and the government released all suffragist prisoners.

      During the war Pankhurst, who previously had made three tours of the United States to lecture on woman suffrage, visited the United States, Canada, and Russia to encourage the industrial mobilization of women. She lived in the United States, Canada, and Bermuda for several years after the war. In 1926, upon returning to England, she was chosen Conservative candidate for an east London constituency, but her health failed before she could be elected. The Representation of the People Act of 1928, establishing voting equality for men and women, was passed a few weeks before her death. Pankhurst's autobiography, My Own Story, appeared in 1914.

Additional Reading

E. Sylvia Pankhurst, The Life of Emmeline Pankhurst: The Suffragette Struggle for Women's Citizenship (1935, reissued 1969), is a biography by Pankhurst's second daughter. June Purvis, Emmeline Pankhurst (2002), gives a modern perspective on Pankhurst's life and activities.

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