Emmeline Pankhurst was born in 1858 to a middle-class family in Manchester. Her parents and her husband had campaigned for women’s suffrage and she came naturally to take up the cause. She was a striking woman of great presence who inspired women to follow her.

As a young woman she had "raven black hair, an olive skin with a slight flush of red in the cheeks, delicately pencilled black eyebrows, beautiful expressive eyes of an unusually deep violet blue, [and] above all a magnificent carriage and a voice of remarkable melody."

She was a natural speaker, giving hundreds of speeches about women’s suffrage. Rebecca West described her speaking: "Trembling like a reed, she lifted up her hoarse, sweet voice on the platform, but the reed was of steel and it was tremendous."

Her words were sensible and stirring, such as this from March/April 1908:

"I for one, friends, looking round on the muddles that men had made, looking round on the sweated and decrepit members of my sex, I say men have had the control of these things long enough, and no woman with any spark of womanliness in her will consent to let this state of things go on any longer. We are tired of it. We want to be of use; we want to have this power [to vote] in order that we may try to make the world a much better place for men and women than it is today.…Perhaps it is difficult to rouse women; they are long-suffering and patient, but now that we are roused, we will never be quiet again."

Emmeline Pankhurst went to prison many times (12 times in 1912 alone) and participated in hunger strikes to protest treatment of suffragettes.

She died in June 1928. On 2 July 1928, just 3 weeks after her death, a law was passed allowing all women over the age of 21 to vote.

Photo courtesy of the Museum of London