Emmeline Pankhurst: A Biography

Emmeline Pankhurst is remembered today, at least in popular memory, as the
heroine of the votes for women campaign that was waged in Edwardian Britain,
the feminist leader of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU or
Union), the most notorious of the groupings campaigning for the parliamentary
vote for women on equal terms with men.^1 Emmeline founded the WSPU as a
women-only organisation and under her leadership the spectacular and heroic
deeds of her followers ‘hijacked the movement’s image as they hijacked the
action at the time’.^2 The popularisation of such a version of events was captured
in Midge Mackenzie’s BBC TV series, Shoulder to shoulder, watched by millions
in 1974 and by her book on the series, published the following year.^3 Some
twenty-five years later, Emmeline Pankhurst topped the polls amongst Observer
and Daily Mirrorreaders as the woman of the twentieth century, and even came
second in the Daily Mirror’s top ten women of the Millennium.^4 However,
despite the hold of Emmeline Pankhurst on the popular imagination, no
modern full-length biography has been written about her to complement the
earlier accounts of her life.^5
Emmeline Pankhurst had five children but her two sons died and it was her
three daughters – Christabel, Sylvia and Adela – who became associated with
their widowed mother in the suffrage campaign. After her death, her eldest
daughter, Christabel, began writing a memoir of her mother but although the
manuscript was completed by the mid 1930s, the book was published posthu-
mously, in 1959, one year after Christabel herself had passed away.^6 Upon its
publication, Unshackled: the story of how we won the voteproved to be less a biog-
raphy of the WSPU leader than a more general account of the WSPU’s
campaign. The first full-length biography of Emmeline Pankhurst, The life of
Emmeline Pankhurst, was published many years earlier, in 1935, and was written
by Sylvia Pankhurst, the only one of Emmeline’s three daughters from whom
she remained estranged at the time of her death.^7 Sylvia was a socialist feminist
whose world-view was often at odds with the women-centred perspective of her
mother and Christabel, generally acknowledged as Emmeline’s favourite child.^8
As Chief Organiser of the WSPU, Christabel worked closely with Emmeline
during the suffrage campaign, forming and directing policies with which Sylvia

INTRODUCTION