ABSTRACT
Emmeline Pankhurst, leader of the British suffragette movement, was born in Moss Side, Manchester, the eldest daughter of Robert Goulden and his wife Sophia Jane Craine. Pankhurst recounts a childhood completely suffused by political awareness and activism, not only in the direction of women's rights, but also anti-slavery and the Irish Fenian uprisings. In 1903 she founded the Women's Social and Political Union and, working closely with her eldest daughter Christabel, campaigned for the women's vote until the outbreak of war in 1914. The childhood section of Pankhurst's autobiography, My Own Story, is brief, and reproduced in full below. She focuses almost entirely on her growing political awareness, first at home and then in the wider world, but also on the later stages of her education, especially the time she spent in France in the early 1870s when Paris was recovering from the traumas of the Franco-Prussian War.
