Adela Pankhurst was the daughter of Richard Pankhurst, barrister, and Emmeline Pankhurst, nee Goulden, suffragette leader. After receiving her early education in London and then at the Manchester Girls High School, Adela became a pupil-teacher at seventeen in a working class suburb of Manchester. Physically fragile, and religious despite her father's opposition to organised religion, Adela was drawn to Christian Socialism and became involved in women's suffrage and the Independent Labour Party. In 1903 she became the youngest member of the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) formed by her mother. After years of campaigning and imprisonment on behalf of the suffragette movement her health broke down in 1912 and she withdrew from campaigning.
Conflict with her family over her sister Christabel's increasingly militant tactics as leader of the WSPU and sibling rivalry led to her departure for Switzerland and then Australia. She was never to see England or her family again. Vida Goldstein offered her a job as an organiser for the Women's Political Association which Pankhurst accepted. She was one of the prominent leaders of the feminist and socialist movements in Australia, active in the organisation of the Women's Political Association (WPA), renamed the Women's Peace Army, and the fight against conscription. Her leadership of demonstrations led to her imprisonment in Pentridge, Melbourne, Victoria, from late 1917 to January 1918. In 1917 she resigned from the WPA and joined the Victorian Socialist Party, wrote frequently for the Socialist and edited Dawn, a socialist newspaper for children. In the same year she married Irish born Tom Walsh, a militant trade-unionist, and bore five children between 1918 and 1926. She increasingly espoused a family centred feminism to the dismay of many feminists.
Pankhurst campaigned with her husband in the seamen's strike of 1919 and they both joined the Australian Communist Party in 1920. She resigned in 1922 and gradually became disillusioned with militant unionism after the seamen's strike of 1925 and the imprisonment of her husband. She finally rejected unionism, socialism and the Labor Party, reconciling with her mother just before Emmeline's death in 1928. Pankhurst also formed an Australian branch of the London-based Women's Guild of Empire, a middle-class welfare organisation whose newspaper, the Empire Gazette, she edited. Pankhurst preached anti-communism, family and the need for a strong Britsh Empire. She lost many of her conservative followers when, as a pacifist, she opposed World War II and advocated economic cooperation with Japan. In 1940 she stood unsuccessfully for the Australian Senate. In late 1941 she joined in the creation of the xenophobic, nationalist and anti-war Australia First Movement and was interned for seven months in 1942. Pankhurst withdrew from political life following the death of Tom Walsh in 1943, dying in poverty after having been received into the Catholic Church in 1960.
In addition to her anti-war play, Pankhurst published Put up the Sword (1915), and the following political pamphlets 'After the War, What? Being Papers on the Duties of Labor and the Unity and Morality of the Nations' (1917), 'Is Communism Possible in Australia? : Special to 'Advance! Australia' (1929?), 'Industrial Cooperation : policy speech of the Australian Women's Guild of Empire' [1931], 'Should We Defend Australia?' [1936], 'The Proposed Boycott of Japanese Goods' (1937), 'Conditions in Japan' (1940), 'What We Should Know About the Orient' (1940) and 'Australia and the Empire' [1945]. In 1940 she published a journal, The voice of the people : the people's welfare is the nation's strength. Her life and achievements are described by Verna Coleman in Adela Pankhurst : the wayward suffragette (1996).
(Source: Adapted from Verna Coleman, 'Walsh, Adela Constantia Mary Pankhurst (1885-1961)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography 57, Oxford University Press, (2004): 100-102; Joy Damousi, 'The Enthusiasms of Adela Pankhurst Walsh', Australian Historical Studies 25.100 (April 1993): 422-436; Susan Hogan, 'Pankhurst, Adela Constantia Mary (1885 - 1961)', Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 12, MUP, 1990, pp 372-374); 'Pankhurst, Adela' The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature, William H. Wilde, Joy Hooton, and Barry Andrews. (1994).
