Who was Mrs Pankhurst?

Emmeline Goulden was born in 1858 in Manchester, England, and later married Richard Pankhurst. With his help, and that of her two daughters, Sylvia and Christabel, she formed the Women’s Franchise League in 1889, an organization which campaigned for the right of women to vote. In 1903 she formed the National Women’s Social and Political Union, with slogan “Votes for Women”. Mrs. Pankhurst and her daughters, and their followers, were called the Suffragettes because they were fighting for women’s suffrage, the right to vote at elections. They were often roughly treated by the police, who arrested them when they used more violent methods of drawing attention to their struggle. Many of them were imprisoned, and treated very badly. Finally, however, women over the age of thirty were given the vote in 1918, and ten years later, the year of Mrs Pankhurst’s death, all women over twenty-one years old had the right to vote, putting them on an equal footing with men. It seems odd to think that women were only given the vote so recently, doesn’t it?