Emmeline Pankhurst: Suffragette icon

Along with her daughter Christabel, Emmeline founded and then led the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), whose followers became known as Suffragettes.

Emmeline’s powerful speeches converted many to the cause, and her and Christabel’s radical tactics transformed women’s struggle for the vote, also known as women’s suffrage.

Today, she’s rightly celebrated as a heroic women’s rights campaigner whose brave sacrifices – including her time in prison – helped change society.

Emmeline was born in Manchester in 1858. Her parents were middle class and politically active. With their influence, Emmeline became involved in the women’s suffrage movement aged 14.

Aged 21, she married Richard Pankhurst, a liberal-minded lawyer. With his support, Emmeline founded the Women’s Franchise League, a non-militant suffragist group, in 1889.

Richard died in 1898. Emmeline, now a widow, was forced to find work. She became a registrar, recording births and deaths – a job where she met many women in desperate situations. It only made her more sure that women must have the vote.

Emmeline founded the WSPU in 1903 as an all-women group independent of any political party. It moved its headquarters to London in 1906.

The WSPU’s motto was “Deeds, not words”. Under Emmeline’s leadership the campaigners used increasingly confrontational tactics to demand the vote.

They progressed from peaceful petitions, to disrupting political events and organising huge marches. And then to smashing windows and starting fires. Emmeline declared “the argument of the broken pane of glass is the most valuable argument in modern politics”.

Our collection shows how dangerous the demonstrations could be – there’s one of Emmeline’s shoes, lost during a scuffle, and the iconic photo of her being arrested and lifted off her feet by a police officer.

Emmeline and her daughter Christabel were charismatic leaders. But some notable WSPU members felt they held too much power.

Some opposed their extreme tactics, or their singular focus on winning the vote rather than representing women on a variety of issues. By 1913, many Suffragettes, including Emmeline’s daughters Adela and Sylvia, openly opposed the WSPU’s tactics.

Emmeline responded harshly. Adela was forced to leave for Australia, while Sylvia left the WSPU and founded her own organisation, more aligned to socialist policies. The family rift never healed.

Emmeline was imprisoned multiple times between 1908 and 1914, including for encouraging the bombing of the house of Chancellor David Lloyd George.

In prison, Emmeline followed the Suffragette tactic of going on hunger strike.

Unlike other Suffragettes, she never faced the brutal process of force-feeding. The authorities considered it too controversial and dangerous to harm the Suffragette leader, who was in her 50s at this time.

During her time in London’s Holloway Prison in 1913, Emmeline’s hunger strikes led to her being repeatedly released, nursed back to health, then rearrested under the "Cat and Mouse" Act.

When the First World War began in 1914, Emmeline ordered the Suffragettes to stop campaigning and support the war effort.

The government, once her enemy, turned to Emmeline to organise meetings and processions which encouraged women to find work supporting the war.

In 1918 the Representation of the People Act finally gave up to 8.4 million women over the age of 30 the right to vote and become Members of Parliament.

Ahead of the 1918 election, Emmeline campaigned for Christabel to be elected as the first female MP. After that plan failed, Emmeline began an unsettled period of her life, lecturing in Canada, running a tea shop in the French Riviera, and finally returning to London in 1925.

Emmeline died of septicaemia in 1928, aged 69. She is buried in Brompton Cemetery, London.

That same year, an Act of Parliament gave women over 21 the right to vote. For the first time, men and women now had equal voting rights.

Pankhurst’s long fight for equality is recognised by a statue in Victoria Tower Gardens, near the Houses of Parliament.

Emmeline’s speeches are still quoted by modern-day feminists. One of her finest quotes comes from a speech in 1913:

“I come to ask you to help win this fight. If we win it, this hardest of all fights, then, to be sure, in the future it is going to be easier for women all over the world to win their fight when their time comes.”