Emmeline Pankhurst insisted she was born on Bastille Day. She wasn't
Her birth certificate says 15 July 1858, but Emmeline Pankhurst claimed the day before, Bastille Day, feeling kinship with revolutionary women. She went on to found the Women's Social and Political Union under the motto deeds, not words, and helped win British women the vote in 1918.
She was born Emmeline Goulden in Moss Side, Manchester. Her father, Robert, had risen from errand boy to manufacturer, sat on Salford town council and loved theatre. The household was politically engaged: Robert hosted the American abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher, and her mother, Sophia, read Uncle Tom's Cabin to the children at bedtime. Emmeline was reading very young, tackling the Odyssey at nine and loving Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress and Carlyle's history of the French Revolution. Yet her parents expected daughters to learn homemaking while they planned their sons' schooling with care.
Her mother subscribed to the Women's Suffrage Journal, and Emmeline admired its editor, Lydia Becker. At fourteen she came home to find her mother heading to a meeting on votes for women and went along. She later helped form the Women's Franchise League, which sought the vote for married and unmarried women alike. Nearby, the Isle of Man had already let women vote in its own elections in 1881.
In 1903 she founded the WSPU, a women-only group that kept its distance from political parties and became notorious for direct action, with members breaking windows and clashing with police. When the First World War began, she and her daughter Christabel suspended the campaign to back the government and staged the Women's Right to Serve procession to show women's contribution.
The Representation of the People Act of 1918 gave the vote to men over 21 and women over 30, an age gap designed to stop men becoming a minority of voters after the war's enormous death toll. Pankhurst then turned the WSPU into the Women's Party. Alarmed by Bolshevism, she later joined the Conservatives and in 1927 was picked to stand for them in Whitechapel and St Georges. Her death came on 14 June 1928, and Time later named her among the hundred most important people of the century.
Source: Emmeline Pankhurst
