Episode 39. The Two Lives of Christabel Pankhurst

SYNOPSIS

Christabel Pankhurst (1880-1958) was only approaching her mid-thirties when, with her mother, Emmeline, she abandoned militant action in support of  female suffrage for patriotic engagement in the British war effort in 1914.  When Christabel died in 1958 at the age of seventy-seven in Los Angeles, California (long reconciled with the British establishment, as a Dame Commander of the British Empire) she had spent more of her life as a celebrated Evangelical preacher, than as a campaigner. Yet she never renounced her feminism, sometimes being introduced to her American congregations as ‘The Apostle of the Suffragettes’.    

Faced with the cataclysm of the First World War, Christabel’s strategic mind had turned to apocalyptic explanations. Coming across in 1918 a new edition of an obscure book, The Approaching End of the Age Viewed in the Light of History, Prophecy and Science, she became convinced of Christ’s imminent return as the answer to the world’s problems.   

The interview covers both ‘lives’ of Christabel. It starts with her childhood in the Pankhurst home, which was committed to many of the tenets of 19c non-conformist liberalism, including women’s property rights and universal suffrage.  It charts her position as Emmeline’s favourite daughter, her acquisition of legal training in the footsteps of  her father Richard, and her assumption of the key tactical role in disruptive suffragette activism from a safe base in Paris.  It then examines how Christabel’s international fame opened pulpits for her in America despite her status as an English Anglican, and how her two lives may have complemented each other.  In an irony of circumstance, America’s religious fundamentalist culture proved far more open to entrepreneurial female preachers than the hidebound Church of England. 

GUEST

Timothy Larsen is McManis Professor of Christian Thought and Professor of History at Wheaton College, Illinois, the American University which holds the papers of several eminent British writers, including G K Chesterton, C S Lewis, J R R Tolkien, Dorothy L Sayers and George MacDonald in its Marion E. Wade Center.  His Christabel Pankhurst: Fundamentalism and Feminism in Coalition was the first full academic account of its subject’s life when it was published in 2002.   

Professor Larsen is the author or editor of twenty books, including Crisis of Doubt: Honest Faith in Nineteenth Century England, A People of One Book: The Bible and the Victorians, and The Slain God: Anthropologists and the Christian Faith. He is General Editor of Oxford University Press’s Spiritual Lives series to which he has personally contributed John Stuart Mill: A Secular Life. 

Timothy’s interview with Simon Machin was recorded online on 31 October 2023.