My own story

About the book

Emmeline Pankhurst recounts the experiences and convictions behind her leadership of the British women's suffrage campaign. Beginning with childhood encounters with political injustice, she follows the formation of the Women's Social and Political Union and the escalating conflict between campaigners and government. Public meetings, arrests, imprisonment, hunger strikes, and forcible feeding become stages in her argument that conventional appeals had failed. Written from within that struggle, the book presents a participant's forceful defense of disputed methods rather than a detached history of the movement. Its 1914 perspective also matters: Pankhurst writes before the later extension of voting rights, with both the campaign's costs and its unfinished demands pressing upon her account.

• Women's suffrage
• Political resistance
• Prison and protest

Why read it

Read a central campaigner's own explanation of the choices and confrontations behind militant suffrage.

English text of the 1914 autobiography