Country: Great Britain.
Cause: Equal voting rights for women.
Background: The Reform Acts of 1832, 1867 and 1884 extend the right to vote to all British men. But women are excluded. Women and their supporters unite to fight for full and equal voting rights.
Mini biography: Born Emmeline Goulden on 14 July 1858 in Manchester, England.
1879 - She marries Richard Marsden Pankhurst, a lawyer who drafted an amendment to the Municipal Franchise Act of 1869 which allowed unmarried women householders to vote in local elections, and who wrote the Married Women's Property Acts in 1870 and 1882.
1880 - Her daughter Christabel Harriette Pankhurst is born. The first of Pankhurst's five children, Christabel is destined to also become prominent in the women's suffrage movement, as is Pankhurst's second daughter, Sylvia, born in 1882.
1889 - She helps found the Women's Franchise League.
1894 - The league wins the right for married women to vote in elections for local offices, but not the right for them to vote for the House of Commons.
1895 - She holds a succession of municipal offices in Manchester.
1898 - Her husband, Richard, dies of a perforated ulcer.
1903 - She founds the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) in Manchester.
1905 - The suffrage movement attracts wide attention in October when two of its members, Christabel Pankhurst and Annie Kenney, are jailed. After being thrown out of a Liberal Party election rally for demanding a statement about votes for women, the two were arrested in the street for a technical assault on the police but refused to pay their fines.
1906 - Pankhurst directs WSPU activities from London. She organises marches and rallies and campaigns against the Liberal government's candidates at elections. Her followers interrupt meetings of Cabinet ministers. The women are disparaged as "suffragettes" by the 'Daily Mail' newspaper but the movement proudly adopts the description.
1908-09 - She is jailed three...