Richard Pankhurst, whom she married in 1879, when she was 20 and he was 40, was a brilliant lawyer, selflessly dedicated to reform, who drafted pioneering legislation granting women independent control of their finances. Emmeline bore five children but lost two sons, and when Richard died suddenly in 1898, she was left to bring up her children alone, with no private means.

The surviving Pankhurst women formed an intrepid, determined, powerfully gifted band. In 1903 they founded the Women's Social and Political Union. It was, Emmeline Pankhurst wrote later, "simply a suffrage army in the field." The charismatic, dictatorial eldest daughter Christabel emerged in her teens as the W.S.P.U.'s strategist and an indomitable activist, with nerves of tungsten. Mrs. Pankhurst's second daughter Sylvia, the artist, pioneered the corporate logo: as designer and scene painter of the W.S.P.U., she created banners, costumes and badges in the suffragist livery of white, purple and green. Though the family split later over policy, their combined talents powered from the beginning an astonishingly versatile tactical machine.

The W.S.P.U. adopted a French Revolutionary sense of crowd management, public spectacle and symbolic ceremony. They would greet one of their number on release from prison and draw her triumphantly in a flower-decked wagon through the streets, and they staged elaborate allegorical pageants and torchlight processions, with Mrs. Pankhurst proudly walking at their head (if she wasn't in jail). Her example was followed internationally: the U.S. suffragist Alice Paul, who had taken part in suffragist agitation when she was a student at the London School of Economics, imported Pankhurst militancy to the U.S., leading a march 5,000 strong in 1910.

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