ABSTRACT
Emmeline Pankhurst is remembered today, at least in popular memory, as the heroine of the votes for women campaign that was waged in Edwardian Britain, the feminist leader of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU or Union), the most notorious of the groupings campaigning for the parliamentary vote for women on equal terms with men.1 Emmeline founded the WSPU as a women-only organisation and under her leadership the spectacular and heroic deeds of her followers ‘hijacked the movement’s image as they hijacked the action at the time’.2 The popularisation of such a version of events was captured in Midge Mackenzie’s BBC TV series, Shoulder to shoulder, watched by millions in 1974 and by her book on the series, published the following year.3 Some twenty-five years later, Emmeline Pankhurst topped the polls amongst Observer and Daily Mirror readers as the woman of the twentieth century, and even came second in the Daily Mirror’s top ten women of the Millennium.4 However, despite the hold of Emmeline Pankhurst on the popular imagination, no modern full-length biography has been written about her to complement the earlier accounts of her life.5
