Emmeline Pankhurst was a British political activist who organised the British suffragette movement and helped women win the right to vote. In 1999, Time named her as one of the 100 Most Important People of the 20th Century, stating that "she shaped an idea of objects for our time" and "shook society into a new pattern from which there could be no going back". She was widely criticised for her militant tactics, and historians disagree about their effectiveness, but her work is recognised as a crucial element in achieving women's suffrage in the United Kingdom.
Estelle Sylvia Pankhurst was an English feminist and socialist activist and writer. Following encounters with women-led labour activism in the United States, she worked to organise working-class women in London's East End. This, together with her refusal in 1914 to enter into a wartime political truce with the government, caused her to break with the suffragette leadership of her mother and sister, Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst. Pankhurst welcomed the Russian Revolution and consulted in Moscow with Lenin. But as advocate of workers' control, she rejected the Leninist party line and criticised the Bolshevik dictatorship.
Dame Christabel Harriette Pankhurst was a British suffragette born in Manchester, England. A co-founder of the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU), she directed its militant actions from exile in France from 1912 to 1913. In 1914, she supported the war against Germany. After the war, she moved to the United States, where she worked as an evangelist for the Second Adventist movement.
Richard Marsden Pankhurst was an English barrister and socialist who was a strong supporter of women's rights. He was married to suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst.
The Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) was a women-only political movement and leading militant organisation campaigning for women's suffrage in the United Kingdom founded in 1903. Known from 1906 as the suffragettes, its membership and policies were tightly controlled by Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters Christabel and Sylvia. Sylvia was eventually expelled.
The Pankhurst Centre, 60–62 Nelson Street, Manchester, England, is a pair of Victorian villas, of which No. 62 was the home of Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters Sylvia, Christabel and Adela and the birthplace of the suffragette movement in 1903.
Adela Constantia Mary Walsh was a British born suffragette who worked as a political organiser for the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) in Scotland. In 1914 she moved to Australia where she continued her activism and was co-founder of both the Communist Party of Australia and the Australia First Movement.
Black Friday was a suffragette demonstration in London on 18 November 1910, in which 300 women marched to the Houses of Parliament as part of their campaign to secure voting rights for women. The day earned its name from the violence meted out to protesters, some of it sexual, by the Metropolitan Police and male bystanders.
A movement to fight for women's right to vote in the United Kingdom finally succeeded through acts of Parliament in 1918 and 1928. It became a national movement in the Victorian era. Women were not explicitly banned from voting in Great Britain until the Reform Act 1832 and the Municipal Corporations Act 1835. In 1872 the fight for women's suffrage became a national movement with the formation of the National Society for Women's Suffrage and later the more influential National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies (NUWSS). As well as in England, women's suffrage movements in Wales, Scotland and other parts of the United Kingdom gained momentum. The movements shifted sentiments in favour of woman suffrage by 1906. It was at this point that the militant campaign began with the formation of the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU).
A suffragette was a member of an activist women's organisation in the early 20th century who, under the banner "Votes for Women", fought for the right to vote in public elections in the United Kingdom. The term refers in particular to members of the British Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU), a women-only movement founded in 1903 by Emmeline Pankhurst, which engaged in direct action and civil disobedience. In 1906, a reporter writing in the Daily Mail coined the term suffragette for the WSPU, derived from suffragist, in order to belittle the women advocating women's suffrage. The militants embraced the new name, even adopting it for use as the title of the newspaper published by the WSPU.
Richard Keir Pethick Pankhurst OBE was a British scholar, founding member of the Institute of Ethiopian Studies, and former professor at the University of Addis Ababa in Ethiopia. His books have been reviewed in scholarly journals, with Edward Ullendorff calling his The Ethiopians as another testimony to his "remarkable diligence and industry in the service of Ethiopian studies". He is known for his research on economic history and socio-cultural studies on Ethiopia.
Shoulder to Shoulder is a 1974 BBC television serial and book relating the history of the women's suffrage movement, both edited by Midge Mackenzie. The drama series grew out of discussions between Mackenzie and the actress and singer Georgia Brown, who was dissatisfied at the lack of decent roles for women in TV drama. Brown enlisted the producer Verity Lambert in the project she and Mackenzie were devising to dramatise the struggle for women's suffrage, and the three women presented the idea to the BBC, which gave approval for the series. Originally they had hoped to use only female script writers but this proved impracticable. Male writers were used and the three female originators of the project later said they needed to remove from their scripts a number of 'innuendoes, misconceptions and untruths' indicative of what Georgia Brown termed "the male point of view".
Ernestine Evans Mills was an English metalworker and enameller who became known as an artist, writer and suffragette. She was the author of The Domestic Problem, Past, Present, and Future (1925). Three pieces of jewellery that Mills created for the suffragettes are in the Museum of London.
The Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst Memorial is a memorial in London to Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughter Christabel, two of the foremost British suffragettes. It stands at the entrance to Victoria Tower Gardens, south of Victoria Tower at the southwest corner of the Palace of Westminster. Its main feature is a bronze statue of Emmeline Pankhurst by Arthur George Walker, unveiled in 1930. In 1958 the statue was relocated to its current site and the bronze reliefs commemorating Christabel Pankhurst were added.
Helen Pankhurst is a British women's rights activist, scholar and writer. She is currently CARE International's senior advisor working in the UK and Ethiopia. She is the great-granddaughter of Emmeline Pankhurst and granddaughter of Sylvia Pankhurst, who were both leaders in the suffragette movement. In 2018 Pankhurst convened the Centenary Action Group, a cross-party coalition of over 100 activists, politicians and women's rights organisations campaigning to end barriers to women's political participation.
Suffrage jewellery refers to jewellery worn by suffragists, including suffragettes, in the years immediately preceding the First World War, ranging from the homemade to the mass-produced to fine, one-off Arts and Crafts pieces. Its primary purpose was to demonstrate its wearer's allegiance to the cause of women's suffrage in the UK. Jewellery was a key mechanism used by British suffragists to identify themselves.
Mary Elizabeth Phillips was an English suffragette, feminist and socialist. She was the longest prison serving suffragette. She worked for Christabel Pankhurst but was sacked; she then worked for Sylvia Pankhurst as Mary Pederson or Mary Paterson. In later life she supported women's and children's organisations.
Maud Joachim was a member of the Women's Social and Political Union, one of the groups of suffragettes that fought for women to get the right to vote in the United Kingdom. She was jailed several times for her protests. Joachim was one of the first suffragettes to go on hunger strike when imprisoned, a protest at not being recognised as political prisoners.
Sylvia is a British musical with book by Kate Prince and Priya Parmer, with music by Josh Cohen and DJ Walde and lyrics by Prince based on the life of Sylvia Pankhurst.
Edith Hudson was a British nurse and suffragette. She was an active member of the Edinburgh branch of the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) and was arrested several times for her part in their protests in Scotland and London. She engaged in hunger strikes while in prison and was forcibly fed. She was released after the last of these strikes under the so-called Cat and Mouse Act. Hudson was awarded a Hunger Strike Medal 'for Valour' by the WSPU.
