📍Pankhurst Centre, 62 Nelson Street, Manchester M13 9WP, UK
1898 – 1907“I was raised in Manchester in a family who believed in reform. My father was a businessman who supported the abolition of slavery, and my mother took me, at fourteen, to my first meeting on votes for women. I married Richard Pankhurst, a radical lawyer more than twenty years my senior, who drafted early bills for women's suffrage. When he died suddenly in 1898, I was left with four children and little money, and we moved to 62 Nelson Street, a modest Victorian villa in Chorlton-on-Medlock. To support my family, I became registrar of births and deaths and ran the office from the house, listening every day to the stories of poor women who came to register their children. Many were unmarried, many were struggling, and almost all of them were powerless under the law. My daughters Christabel, Sylvia and Adela grew up debating politics around our table, and our home filled with socialist friends and women activists. We grew impatient with the slow, polite methods of the established suffrage societies. On 10 October 1903, I invited a small group of women to my parlour at Nelson Street, and there we founded the Women's Social and Political Union, with a simple motto: deeds, not words. From that room came the suffragette movement, with its marches, its courage, its imprisonments and hunger strikes. In 1907 I left Manchester to lead the campaign from London. Today the house is the Pankhurst Centre, a museum and a centre for women's organisations, and my parlour has been restored as it was when the suffragette movement began.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today