Born: 15 July 1858, United Kingdom
Died: 14 June 1929
Country most active: United Kingdom
Also known as: NA
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Emmeline Pankhurst was one of the most famous and influential British suffrage leaders. Her embrace of protest and direct action in the early 1900s marked a new phase in the battle for women’s votes.
Fourteen-year-old Emmeline Goulden attended a public meeting about women’s rights in Manchester, England in the early 1870s. By the time she left it, she had become “a conscious and confirmed suffragist.” This work continued throughout her life. She and her husband Richard Pankhurst, a strong supporter of women’s rights, were active in early British suffrage groups. They pushed not only for the vote but also for equality for women in divorce and inheritance law.
By the early 20th century, Pankhurst had become frustrated with British political parties’ inaction on suffrage. She founded the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) in 1903 to take militant action. The group targeted any political party that did not work towards votes for women.
The WSPU’s motto was “deeds, not words.” Pankhurst and her supporters attracted attention through their confrontational actions. They got themselves arrested and imprisoned for civil disobedience. In prison, several of them went on hunger strikes and endured brutal force-feedings. Others interrupted cabinet meetings and heckled politicians. Some activists even set fires in mailboxes and vacant houses.
Pankhurst and the WSPU had a significant influence on the American suffrage movement. While in graduate school in England, Alice Paul and Lucy Burns met Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters, Christabel and Sylvia. The pageantry of WSPU marches—the banners, trumpets, coordinated chants, and military-style march organization—inspired them. Paul and Burns began attending English suffrage demonstrations and were arrested several times in 1909.
Paul and Burns brought these ideas and tactics home to the United States, organizing the 1913 Woman Suffrage Procession and the “Silent Sentinels” pickets outside the White House. They also borrowed the English strategy of a single-issue focus on winning suffrage. The organization they founded, the Congressional Union (later the National Woman’s Party), pushed for a constitutional amendment.
Emmeline Pankhurst also influenced the American suffrage movement through speaking tours. In 1909, Harriot Stanton Blatch (a suffragist and the daughter of Elizabeth Cady Stanton) sponsored her tour through the Northeast, where she spoke in Boston, New York City, and Geneva, New York.[1] She returned in 1913. During a stop in Hartford, Connecticut, she delivered perhaps her most famous speech, “Freedom or Death.” Pankhurst defended the British suffragettes’ militancy. She argued that it was the only option for forcing the government to recognize women’s rights.
“You won your freedom in America when you had the revolution, by bloodshed, by sacrificing human life,” she reminded her audience. “You have left it to women in your land, the men of all civilized countries have left it to women, to work out their own salvation. That is the way in which we women of England are doing. Human life for us is sacred, but we say if any life is to be sacrificed it shall be ours; we won’t do it ourselves, but we will put the enemy in the position where they will have to choose between giving us freedom or giving us death.”
Suffragettes won a partial victory in 1918 when the United Kingdom granted propertied women over thirty the right to vote. Pankhurst continued to work for women’s empowerment, though her politics grew less radical. She committed herself to anti-communism, defended British imperialism, and became a member of the Conservative Party late in life. Despite ill health, Pankhurst lived to see suffrage extended to women on the same terms as men in England, Wales, and Scotland in 1928. She died that year at the age of 69.
From Famous Women: An Outline of Feminine Achievement Through the Ages With Life Stories of Five Hundred Noted Women. Written by Joseph Adelman, published 1926 by Ellis M Lonow Company:
Emmeline Pankhurst, leader of the militant wing of the English suffrage movement. She was born in Manchester of parents who were advocates of woman suffrage and champions of freedom for the slaves during the American Civil War.
In 1879 she married Dr. R. P. Pankhurst who associated with her social reforms until his death in 1898.
After being connected with various societies, Mrs. Pankhurst in 1903 founded the Woman’s Social and Political Union at a meeting held at her Manchester home and this organization to attain political equality of women with men soon had its headquarters in London whither Mrs. Pankhurst moved. When the Union became potent and formidable, receiving much financial and personal support, persuaded that more aggressive methods were necessary, the tactics of “peaceful militancy” were pursued for some years, but although pledges from a majority of members of parliament to support equal suffrage had been secured, the cabinet was hostile.
In 1913 it was decided by Mrs. Pankhurst and her followers to inaugurate a “women’s revolution,” and the incitements to violence had their effect. Country houses, club houses, railway stations, lumber yards, and churches were fired; race courses and golf links damaged and bombs exploded.
Thousands of women were put in jail, and Mrs. Pankhurst, held responsible for the acts of her associates, was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment. She restorted to the “hunger strike,” proclaiming that she would die if necessary, and after a few days was released, only to be imprisoned again and again. Soon after she sailed for an American lecture tour.
On her arrival in New York, she was detained for two days by the immigration authorities as an “undesirable alien,” but was released by orders from Washington and received a triumphant welcome.
After her return to England she was frequently imprisoned; in the summer of 1914 Mrs. Pankhurst and her associates announced a cessation of militant tactics until the European War should end, and in 1917 suffrage in England was granted to all women of thirty years and over. Mrs. Pankhurst’s daughters, Christabel (1880 – 1958 A.D.), and Sylvia (1882 – 1960 A.D.), are both women of exceptional capacity and energy, have taken part in their mother’s suffrage activity from childhood on, and have shared her prison and other experiences.