Pankhurst, Emmeline (redirected from Emmeline Goulden)

Pankhurst, Emmeline

 orig. Emmeline Goulden

Emmeline Pankhurst in prison clothes, 1908

(credit: BBC Hulton Picture Library)

(born July 14, 1858, Manchester, Eng.—died June 14, 1928, London) British feminist. In 1879 she married Richard Pankhurst (1834–98), author of Britain's first women's-suffrage bill and the Married Women's Property Acts (1870, 1882). In 1889 she founded the Women's Franchise League, which in 1894 secured for married women the right to vote in local elections. In 1903, after holding municipal offices in Manchester, she founded the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU). From 1912 she advocated extreme militancy, mainly in the form of arson, and was arrested 12 times in one year. Weeks before her death in 1928, Britain passed a bill to give voting rights to all women. Her daughter Christabel H. Pankhurst (1880–1958)—later Dame Christabel—organized the militant tactics of the WSPU and directed actions that included hunger strikes and huge outdoor rallies. She later became a religious evangelist and moved to the U.S.