Suffragettes: Deeds Not Words

Leading women's rights campaigner Helen Pankhurst, great-granddaughter of suffragette leader Emmeline Pankhurst, Jill Liddington and Robert Wainwright discuss the struggle for the vote and ask how far women have come since the suffragettes, how far they still have to go and how they will get there. Chaired by Julia Wheeler.

Helen Pankhurst is a women’s rights activist and senior advisor to CARE International, based in the UK and in Ethiopia.  Her work in Ethiopia includes support to program development across different sectors, focused on the interests and needs of women and girls.  In the UK she is a public speaker and writer on feminist issues. She also leads CARE International’s #March4Women event in London on International Women’s Day. Helen is the great-granddaughter of Emmeline Pankhurst and granddaughter of Sylvia Pankhurst, leaders of the British suffragette movement. Helen Pankhurst’s latest book Deeds Not Words: the Story of Women’s Rights, Then and Now will be published in February 2018.

Jill Liddington is a writer and historian. Her latest book, Vanishing for the Vote, was published by Manchester University Press in 2014. Her first suffrage history (One Hand Tied Behind Us, Virago) told the story of the radical suffragists of the Lancashire cotton towns and has remained in print ever since it was first published in 1978. She is an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Leeds, a member of the Society of Authors and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.  

Robert Wainwright has worked as a journalist for 30 years and is the author of eleven books, including The Maverick Mountaineer, which won The Times Biography of the Year Prize at the Cross British Sports Book Awards 2017, Sheila and Miss Muriel Matters. 

Julia Wheeler is a journalist and interviewer who worked for the BBC for more than 15 years, including as the BBC’s Gulf Correspondent, based in the UAE between 2000 and 2010. She continues to work for broadcast and print in London. Julia has moderated large-scale conferences and chaired inter-governmental forums, and she is a chair and interviewer at several festivals including Cheltenham (Literature and Science), Stanfords Travel Writers Festival at Olympia and the Emirates Literature Festival. 

Image: 'The woman voter- see how she grows!' taken from Votes for women. Originally published/produced on June 13, 1913 (Colindale, volume VI no.275)