Today would have been the birthday of Emmeline Pankhurst, leader of the suffragette movement in Britain, lathough the woman herself did not believe this day to actually be her birthday. She always maintained that she had in fact been born a day earlier, on the 14th July – Bastille Day. Various books about her, including some written by her children, repeat this claim. Bastille Day would indeed have made an appropriate birthday, and Emmeline is said to have felt an affinity with the female revolutionaries who stormed the Bastille. In June Purvis’ 2002 biography, she is quoted as saying: “I have always thought that the fact that I was born on that day had some kind of influence over my life.”

Whether or not today is actually her 156th birthday, it is still an excuse, if one were needed, to celebrate the life of a remarkable woman to whom all…