Rediscovering Emmeline

As we brace for a year of challenges, consider the resolve of those who came before us.

If you get off the tube at Earl’s Court in west London, if you exit the station and then immediately turn right, if you walk along the road for a minute or two, and if you then take another right down into Earl’s Court Square, you’ll eventually get to Warwick Road.

If, when you get to Warwick Road, you start walking along it—being very careful to dodge the traffic as you cross the A3218—you’ll eventually arrive at the entrance to Brompton Cemetery, one of Britain’s oldest graveyards.

About two weeks ago, this is exactly the route I took while out on a walk with my family. We were in London visiting family over the holidays and on the morning of Christmas Eve—to stretch our legs before another long, heavy lunch—we headed out for a stroll and found ourselves happening upon this beautiful burial ground which, since 1839, has served as the final resting place for more than 200,000 people. You can still be buried in Brompton Cemetery today.

It was a quiet, characteristically gray morning—the kind of morning someone who’s never been to London might imagine when challenged to picture a London morning. I was groggy, still trying to cast off the remnants of both stubborn jet lag and a nasty sinus infection. My six-year-old dragged her feet as we ambled through the gates. My husband, who had for more than twenty years lived nearby, wistfully mentioned how long it had been since he’d last visited: at least a decade. On the path ahead of us, a single crow hopped by before lurching into flight.

We idly started to take in the various headstones and mausolea (a plural I had to double check). Instinctively, I started counting the Jameses and Henries, the Charleses and Johns—a challenge my late grandfather used to set me when I was as old as my daughter is now, and he would take my sister and me for walks around the cemetery in the northern English town where he lived.

Before I could get carried away with nostalgia, though, my husband snapped me back to the here and now: “Hey look,” he was pointing at a tall elegant headstone topped with a cross, so old and mossy the inscribed name was hard to decipher from where I was standing a few feet away.

I moved closer and bent over: Emmeline Pankhurst. For a second it felt like my breath caught in my chest. Over the last few years, I’ve so frequently thought about her. Now here she was. Exactly where she had been for the last 95 years.

Deeds, Not Words

Emmeline Pankhurst was born on July 14 1858 in the Moss Side district of Manchester as the eldest of five daughters. She was raised in a distinctly political household—a huge family of ten children in which slavery and women’s rights were openly discussed. Opinions were encouraged; debate was a past time; steely principles were expected.

Both Emmeline’s parents considered themselves social activists. When abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher visited Manchester from the U.S, he reportedly met with Emmeline’s father. Emmeline’s mother, meanwhile, was extremely fond of the novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, written by Beecher's sister, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and regularly read from it at her children’s bedtime. Her mother also devoured the Women's Suffrage Journal and attended public meetings about women’s rights and the prospect of universal suffrage. Emmeline had barely entered her teenage years when she, too, started thinking of herself as a suffragist.

In 1879, Emmeline married Richard Pankhurst, a radical lawyer who was two decades older than her. Emmeline had five children in the space of ten years but—untypical for the time—both her and her husband were adamant that a mother’s job did not have to be confined to the home. The couple hired a butler enabling Emmeline to dedicate herself to her budding activism and specifically the cause of suffrage.

At first she aligned herself with a group known as the Parliament Street Society, or PSS, but she distanced herself when other members’ proved reluctant to advocate on behalf of married as well as unmarried women. Some assumed that married women didn’t need the vote: their husbands would just vote for them.

In 1889, therefore, Emmeline and Richard—who by this point had moved south to London—started something new. On July 25 of that year, they held the inaugural meeting of the the Women's Franchise League, or WFL, an organization that didn’t only advocate for a women’s vote, but also for trade unionism and workers’ rights more broadly. Ultimately, the organization was short-lived, falling apart after just a year, but Emmeline had placed her stake in the ground and chosen her fight. She wasn’t backing down.

After moving back to Manchester, she became active in the Women's Liberal Federation and in 1891 helped create the Independent Labour Party, the ILP. Not long after that, she was arrested for defying a ban on speaking in public parks at Boggart Hole Clough in Manchester. It would be her first of many serious run-ins with the law.

In 1898, Richard Pankhurst died of complications relating to a stomach ulcer. A bereft Emmeline managed to find paid work as a registrar of births and deaths to support herself and her family. But her days as an activist and suffragist were far from over. In 1903, she co-founded the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU), an group that was only open to women members and that focused explicitly on direct action to win the vote.

"Deeds," Emmeline later famously wrote, "not words, was to be our permanent motto."

Like Mother, Like Daughter

There were other pro-suffrage societies and organizations at that time, but by 1905 it was clear that the WSPU was unlike those others, and that was in no small part because of Christabel, Emmeline’s daughter, born in September 1880.

In October 1905, Christabel and another WSPU member named Annie Kenney attended a Liberal Party election meeting in Manchester at which they made their agenda very clear by insistently asking whether a Liberal government would give women the vote. They also unfurled a banner demanding ‘Votes for Women’, after which the pair was ordered to leave the premises and later arrested on charges of obstruction and assault. Annie and Christabel refused to pay a fine, and were summarily sent to Strangeways prison.

It was a benchmark moment for the WSPU—and inflection point after which the party unashamedly became a militant organization; it’s members proudly identifying as “suffragettes”. It moved it’s headquarters from Manchester to London and grew rapidly.

Over the next decade, according to several accounts, more than 1,000 women went to prison in pursuit of the vote. Their supposed offenses ranged from civil disobedience and obstruction to criminal charges, including damage to property and arson. In prison, the fight frequently continued through protests and controversial hunger strikes.

Throughout that period, Emmeline was a mostly undisputed leader of the WSPU. She led from the front and by example, setting the tone and pace for those who looked to her for guidance and inspiration. In February 1908, she was arrested and spent two months in London’s Holloway Prison. The following year she was locked up again. Before, after, and in between her imprisonments, she travelled the country and as far afield as America to raise funds and rally support. In the U.S., she found admirers and allies who were fighting their own battle. To many—including Alice Paul who drafted an early version of the embattled Equal Rights Amendment—Emmeline was not only a role model, but a teacher and confidante.

Emmeline Pankhurst in 1913 (Library of Congress)

Under Emmeline’s guidance, the WSPU in 1910 called a temporary truce to militant activity inspired by an all-party Conciliation Committee drafting a bill for women’s suffrage. But when the government didn’t give the bill a parliamentary hearing, Emmeline led a fresh, fierce protest at Parliament. The police violently shut it down, gravely injuring several women and triggering brutal retaliation: mass window-smashing and arson—the types of acts that reduced brilliant suffrage leaders to a vicious stereotype; that of the hysterical, lawless damsel.

In 1912, Emmeline and Christabel were charged with conspiracy. Christabel fled to Paris; Emmeline was sentenced to nine months in prison. Mother and daughter were now firmly co-leaders of the WSPU, adamant to finish this struggle they’d started. The militancy continued to escalate, until August 1914, when World War I broke out, prompting the Pankhursts to reconsider.

They began encouraging suffragettes to support the war, campaigning—as they did—for women’s war work. As the end of the war approached the WSPU renamed itself: The Women’s Party. And then, in 1918 a major victory when parliament finally introduced The Representation of the People Act, affording the right to vote to women over the age of 30, and removing property restrictions on men’s suffrage.

Not long after, The Parliament (Qualification of Women) Act gave women over the age of 21 the right to stand for election as a Member of Parliament. Christabel Pankhurst, stood on behalf of the Women’s Party. When she lost, her mother didn’t hide her disappointment, but any distress paled in comparison to the joy of having achieved something monumental.

Over the next seven years, Emmeline Pankhurst tried on various hats. She worked as a lecturer on social hygiene for the Canadian government. She briefly ran a tea shop in the South of France. But the pull of politics never completely relented. In 1925, she accepted an invitation from the Conservative Party to stand as a candidate in the London borough of Whitechapel in the 1929 election. In anticipation of doing so, she moved to the constituency, but on 14 June, 1928, Emmeline drew her last breath. A bout of the flu had led to septicaemia. She was 69 years old.

Less than a month after she passed, the Representation of the People (Equal Franchise) Act of 1928 received Royal Assent. In effect, that meant that all women over the age of 21 now had the right to vote. Christabel died in 1958.

Complicated Legacy

As is always the case with women through history who displayed great courage and great strength, Emmeline’s legacy has been the topic of debate and argument.

The New York Herald Tribune described her as "the most remarkable political and social agitator of the early part of the twentieth century and the supreme protagonist of the campaign for the electoral enfranchisement of women." But others through history have not been so sure. Did her militancy really help the cause? Or did it actually hurt it? Slow it down, perhaps? It’s a question that will likely never find an adequate answer.

For me, Emmeline will always be remarkable. And as I—along with millions of other women—brace for a year of challenges (the second U.S. presidential term of a world renowned misogynist, to cite just one example) I will continue to draw strength from her story. Her resolve was unflinching. Her determination in the face of setback remarkable.

The old adage that history repeats itself can feel stale and lazy, but in recent months, as I’ve written about the lives of such women as Alice Paul, and Febb Burn, and Shirley Chisholm I’ve found myself using it like a crutch. I also found myself dwelling on it as I stood in Brompton Cemetery two weeks ago, gazing through the late December mist at an almost century-old headstone and some hastily laid flowers long past the point of wilting. Those who came before us were able to endure; they were able to persist. Surely, so will we.

That’s all from me this week. I hope you’ve had a good start to 2025. If you’ve enjoyed reading this newsletter for free, I’d urge you to consider upgrading to a paid subscription. Paid subscriptions help support my work, enabling me to publish better, more deeply-reported content and sharper analysis, more frequently.

I’ll be back in your inboxes on January 20.

Thank you, as always.

Josie

Ps: If you’ve read WOMEN MONEY POWER, the book, or listened to the audiobook, I would hugely appreciate it if you could take thirty seconds to post a review or rate it on Amazon using this link. If Goodreads is your jam, that’s just as great, and you can leave a review or rating here. A million thanks for your support!