How one of the legends of women’s suffrage found Christ and preached his coming
The very first Suffragette to spend a night in prison, Christabel Pankhurst combined campaigns for the right for women to vote with speaking at Christian events, after a conversion experience in 1918.
The daughter of Emmeline and Richard Pankhurst, Christabel was born in Manchester in 1880. Her father had been a member of a Congregational Baptist Union chapel, but became a religious sceptic, so Christabel did not receive any biblical education as a child. The reading of a popular premillennialist work of 1879 by Grattan Guinness1 led to her conversion and to a growing preoccupation with the notion that the second coming of Christ was imminent and that biblical prophecy provided a key for understanding and predicting the course of events.
