Christabel Pankhurst

Christabel Pankhurst DBE
Christabel Pankhurst, c. 1910
Born	Christabel Harriette Pankhurst (1880-09-22)22 September 1880 Old Trafford, Manchester, England
Died	13 February 1958(1958-02-13) (aged 77) Santa Monica, California, U.S.
Resting place	Woodlawn Memorial Cemetery
Occupation	Political activist
Parent(s)	Richard Pankhurst Emmeline Pankhurst (née Goulden)

Dame Christabel Harriette Pankhurst, DBE (/ˈpæŋkhərst/; 22 September 1880 – 13 February 1958), was a British suffragette born in Manchester, England. A co-founder of the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU), she directed its militant actions from exile in France from 1912 to 1913. In 1914 she supported the war against Germany. After the war she moved to the United States, where she worked as an evangelist for the Second Adventist movement.

Christabel Pankhurst was the daughter of women's suffrage movement leader Emmeline Pankhurst and radical socialist Richard Pankhurst and sister to Sylvia and Adela Pankhurst. Her father was a lawyer and her mother owned a small shop. Christabel assisted her mother, who worked as the Registrar of Births and Deaths in Manchester. Despite financial struggles, her family had always been encouraged by their firm belief in their devotion to causes rather than comforts.

Nancy Ellen Rupprecht wrote, "She was almost a textbook illustration of the first child born to a middle-class family. In childhood as well as adulthood, she was beautiful, intelligent, graceful, confident, charming, and charismatic." Christabel enjoyed a special relationship with both her mother and father, who had named her after "Christabel", the poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge ("The lovely lady Christabel / Whom her father loves so well"). Her mother's death in 1928 had a devastating impact on Christabel.

Pankhurst learned to read at her home on her own before she went to school. She and her two sisters attended Manchester High School for Girls. She obtained a law degree from the University of Manchester, and received honours on her LL.B. exam but, as a woman, was not allowed to practice law. Later Pankhurst moved to Geneva to live with a family friend, but returned home to help her mother raise the rest of the children, when her father died in 1898.