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Suffragettes with police escort, c1910
© Manchester Archives & Local Studies
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Our father who art a liberal |
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United we stand
Manchester was by now established as the focal city outside London for women’s suffrage, and the father of twenty-year-old Emily Goulden invited Pankhurst to dinner on hearing him speak at a local rally. A mutual attraction quickly surfaced between his daughter and Richard, the latter then forty-four, borne of shared ideals and political ambition.
Here was a man who was not afraid of public scorn in encouraging and permitting any spouse to pursue an independent agenda; such were his own activities that neither would he be content to wed a woman of quiet, domestic piety. Until Emily proved them otherwise, friends had thought him a confirmed bachelor for life.
Plaque on Pankhurst's former home
© Pankhurst Centre, Manchester |
They were married one year after meeting, and after starting a family, Emily encouraged her husband to stand for local election as an Independent candidate. She felt it was now time for him to claim his rightful due, through which she herself would be able to participate in an arena otherwise denied her by virtue of gender.
At this stage she had no aspiration to ascend the speaker’s platform herself, with early reports describing her as nervous, even reticent when introducing her husband on stage to an assembled crowd.
He lost by a landslide, again due in no small part to Richard’s sweeping and extreme views with little concession to the localized concerns of voters.
His defeat was to prove a defining moment.
Words: Bren O'Callaghan
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