Emmeline Pankhurst

Emmeline Goulden was born in Manchester into a family of radical mill owners and was taken to her first suffrage meeting at 14. She married Richard Pankhurst, a barrister twice her age who had drafted the first women's suffrage bill, and when he died suddenly in 1898 she was left with five children, debts and a job as a registrar of births and deaths. The work took her into the poorest homes in the city, where she registered the babies of girls barely into their teens, and it hardened her view that women without a vote would never be heard.

In 1903 she founded the Women's Social and Political Union with her daughters, adopting the motto "Deeds, not words". After years of petitions and lobbying achieved nothing, the WSPU turned to heckling, window-smashing and arson. Pankhurst was arrested repeatedly, went on hunger strike and was released and rearrested under the so-called Cat and Mouse Act. By 1913 she was so weak from the cycle of imprisonment that she was sometimes carried into meetings on a stretcher.

Her methods split the movement and her own family. Her daughters Sylvia and Adela were pushed out of the WSPU for disagreeing with her, and she and Christabel expelled loyal members without warning. When war came in 1914 she suspended the campaign and threw herself into recruiting for the army.

Women over 30 won the vote in 1918. Pankhurst died in June 1928, a few weeks before the law was changed to give women the vote on the same terms as men.