Emmeline Pankhurst founded the Women’s Social and Political Union, whose members—known as suffragettes—fought to enfranchise women in the United Kingdom.Who Was Emmeline Pankhurst?

Emmeline Pankhurst was born in England in 1858. In 1903, she founded the Women's Social and Political Union, which used militant tactics to agitate for women's suffrage. Pankhurst was imprisoned many times, but supported the war effort after World War I broke out. Parliament granted British women limited suffrage in 1918. Pankhurst died in 1928, shortly before women were given full voting rights.

Marriage and Political Activism

After studying in Paris, Goulden returned to Manchester, where she met Dr. Richard Pankhurst in 1878. Richard was a lawyer who supported a number of radical causes, including women’s suffrage. Though he was 24 years older than Goulden, the two married in December 1879, and Goulden became Emmeline Pankhurst.In 1889, Pankhurst became an early supporter of the Women's Franchise League, which wanted to enfranchise all women, married and unmarried alike (at the time, some groups only sought the vote for single women and widows). Her husband encouraged Pankhurst in these endeavors until his death in 1898.Rise of the Suffragettes

Over the next few years, Pankhurst would encourage WSPU members to rein in their demonstrations when it seemed possible that a bill on women’s suffrage might move forward. But when the group was disappointed—as in 1910 and 1911, when Conciliation Bills that included women’s suffrage failed to advance—protests would escalate. By 1913, militant actions by WSPU members included window-breaking, vandalizing public art and arson.Throughout these protests, suffragettes were arrested, but in 1909 the women had begun to engage in hunger strikes while in prison. Though this resulted in violent force-feedings, the hunger strikes also led to early release for many suffragettes. When Pankhurst was given a nine-month sentence in 1912 for throwing a rock at the prime minister’s residence, she too embarked on a hunger strike. Spared from being forcibly fed, she was soon freed.Seeking to circumvent the hunger strikes, in 1913 the Prisoners’ Temporary Discharge for Ill Health Act was enacted. The law said that prisoners who were released for health reasons could be rearrested and taken back to prison once they’d recovered. It became known as the "Cat and Mouse Act," with suffragette “mice” being pursued by the authorities.In 1913, after an incendiary device went off in an unoccupied house being built for the chancellor of the exchequer, David Lloyd George, Pankhurst received a sentence of three years of penal servitude for inciting the crime. She was released after a hunger strike, but the Cat and Mouse Act led to a series of rearrests and releases—during one furlough, Pankhurst proceeded to the United States for a fundraising and lecture tour—that continued into 1914. But everything changed with the arrival of World War I.

World War I and the Vote

Feeling that suffragettes needed to make sure they had a country to vote in, Pankhurst decided to call for a halt to militancy and demonstrations. The government released all WSPU prisoners, and Pankhurst encouraged women to join the war effort and fill factory jobs so that men could fight on the front.The contributions of women during wartime helped convince the British government to grant them limited voting rights—for those who met a property requirement and were 30 years of age (the voting age for men was 21)—with the Representation of the People Act of 1918. Later that year, another bill gave women the right to be elected to Parliament.Emmeline Pankhurst's great-granddaughter Helen also surfaced in the news for the release of her book, Deeds Not Words. An activist in the mold of her famed ancestor, Helen Pankhurst expressed concern that U.S. President Donald Trump was using his position to reverse the tide of hard-fought progress for women: "I think it's really sad that in 2018 we have as the president of apparently the most powerful place in the world someone who has done the things that he has done and speaks the way that he does," she said.