Britannia's children

Emmeline Pankhurst may have started life as an idealistic Mo Mowlam type of gal, says Lauren Booth, but then she turned into Anne Widdicombe

Emmeline Pankhurst was the mother of modern feminism. I wonder how she’d feel looking at 21st century British women, with our jobs, bank accounts and mortgage-related ulcers. Chances are, she’d feel both proud and disappointed with our progress over the last 75 years. It was in 1917 that Emmeline and her daughter, Christabel, founded the Women’s Party and pledged support for ‘equal pay for equal work, equal marriage rights and equal rights over children for both parents’. Yet, almost a century later and 30 years after the introduction of the equal pay act, the gap between men and women’s average hourly earnings has not only stalled - it has widened. In 1998, the New Earnings Survey showed that full-time female employees received just 80 per cent of men’s gross hourly earnings (down 0.1% on the previous year). For part-time workers, the gap is even wider with women in this area earning 58 per cent of the hourly earnings received by full-time male employees.

Pankhurst began her political life as a committed socialist. In her role as a Poor Law Guardian, she regularly visited the local workhouse where the misery and suffering she witnessed reinforced her belief that female suffrage was the only way to end women’s misery. Sadly, winning the right to vote was only the beginning. In 1997 many believed that the election of over 100 women MPs would have a significant impact on the way women were treated and paid at work, this has not been the case.