Emmeline Pankhurst

English suffragist

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Lived 1858–1928, aged 70United Kingdom

United Kingdom PoliticiansPolitician

Wikipedia
71 languages
Cross-language footprint
Era
1858–1928
Aged 70
Known for
Paris 1900
1948

Summary

Updated 2026-06-09

She turned the fight for women's suffrage into a war: smashed windows, hunger strikes, arson, forced feedings. The tactics were condemned as too extreme, but in 1918 British women voted.

Biography

About

Born in Manchester in 1858 to politically active parents, Pankhurst entered the suffrage movement at sixteen and spent years in moderate advocacy, founding the Women's Franchise League and working as a Poor Law Guardian where workhouse conditions shook her. In 1903 she founded the Women's Social and Political Union, an all-women group committed to "deeds, not words" — physical confrontations, window-smashing, assaults on police. She and her daughters endured prison, hunger strikes, force-feedings. The WSPU escalated to bombings and arson, splintering the movement; in 1913 Pankhurst exiled her…

Voice

In their own words

Sourced, dated quotes from Emmeline Pankhurst

Emmeline Pankhurst

said1914

Those men and women are fortunate who are born at a time when a great struggle for human freedom is in progress.

— My Own Story (1914)

Emmeline Pankhurst

said1914

Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin, was so great a favourite with my mother that she used it continually as a source of bedtime stories for our fascinated ears.

— My Own Story (1914)

Emmeline Pankhurst

said1914