Emmeline Pankhurst

Emmeline Goulden[11] was born on Sloan Street in the Moss Side district of Manchester on 15 July 1858. Although her birth certificate says otherwise, she believed and later claimed her birthday was a day earlier, on Bastille Day (14 July). Most biographies, including those written by her daughters, repeat this claim. Feeling a kinship with the female revolutionaries who stormed the Bastille, she said in 1908: “I have always thought that the fact that I was born on that day had some kind of influence over my life.” The family into which she was born had been steeped in political agitation for generations; her mother, Sophia (née Craine), was a Manx woman from the Isle of Man who was descended from men who were charged with social unrest and slander. In 1881 the Isle of Man was the first country to grant women the right to vote in national elections. Her father, Robert Goulden, came from a modest Manchester merchant family with its own background of political activity. Robert’s mother worked with the Anti-Corn Law League, and his father was present at the Peterloo massacre, when cavalry charged and broke up a crowd demanding parliamentary reform.

The Gouldens’ first son died at the age of two, but they had 10 other children; Emmeline was the eldest of five daughters. Soon after her birth, the family moved to Seedley, where her father had co-founded a small business. He was also active in local politics, serving for several years on the Salford town council. He was an enthusiastic supporter of dramatic organisations including the Manchester Athenaeum and the Dramatic Reading Society. He owned a theatre in Salford for several years, where he played the leads in several Shakespeare plays. Goulden absorbed an appreciation of drama and theatrics from her father, which she used later in social activism. The Gouldens included their children in social activism. As part of the movement to end U.S. slavery, Robert welcomed American abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher when he visited Manchester. Sophia used the novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, written by Beecher’s sister Harriet Beecher Stowe, as a regular source of bedtime stories for her sons and daughters. In her 1914 autobiography My Own Story, Goulden recalls visiting a bazaar at a young age to collect money for newly freed slaves in the U.S.

Emmeline began to read books when she was very young, with one source claiming that she was reading as early as the age of three. She read the Odyssey at the age of nine and enjoyed the works of John Bunyan, especially his 1678 story The Pilgrim’s Progress. Another of her favourite books was Thomas Carlyle’s three-volume treatise The French Revolution: A History, and she later said the work “remained all [her] life a source of inspiration”. Despite her avid consumption of books, however, she was not given the educational advantages enjoyed by her brothers. Their parents believed that the girls needed most to learn the art of “making home attractive” and other skills desired by potential husbands. The Gouldens deliberated carefully about future plans for their sons’ education, but they expected their daughters to marry young and avoid paid work. Although they supported women’s suffrage and the general advancement of women in society, the Gouldens believed their daughters incapable of the goals of their male peers. Feigning sleep one evening as her father came into her bedroom, Goulden heard him pause and say to himself, “What a pity she wasn’t born a lad.”

It was through her parents’ interest in women’s suffrage that Goulden was first introduced to the subject. Her mother received and read the Women’s Suffrage Journal, and Goulden grew fond of its editor Lydia Becker. At the age of 14, she returned home from school one day to find her mother on her way to a public meeting about women’s voting rights. After learning that Becker would be speaking, she insisted on attending. Goulden was enthralled by Becker’s address and later wrote, “I left the meeting a conscious and confirmed suffragist.” A year later, she arrived in Paris to attend the École Normale de Neuilly. The school provided its female pupils with classes in chemistry and bookkeeping, in addition to traditionally feminine arts such as embroidery. Her roommate was Noémie, the daughter of Victor Henri Rochefort, who had been imprisoned in New Caledonia for his support of the Paris Commune. The girls shared tales of their parents’ political exploits and remained good friends for years. Goulden was so fond of Noémie and the school that she returned with her sister Mary Jane as a parlour boarder after graduating. Noémie had married a Swiss painter and quickly found a suitable French husband for her English friend. When Robert refused to provide a dowry for his daughter, the man withdrew his offer of marriage and Goulden returned, miserable, to Manchester.