The British have never forgotten Christabel Pankhurst (1880–1958). Alongside her mother, Emmeline, she led the Women's Social and Political Union as it pursued its militant campaign to obtain votes for women. Christabel Pankhurst had personally inaugurated the civil disobedience phase of the campaign and was therefore, together with Annie Kenney, the first – but by no means the last – of the Suffragettes to go to prison. Pankhurst's tactical mind was a major force behind the waves of militant feminist action which marked that dramatic period in British history. Her name was on everyone's lips for the most important years of the campaign, not least those of the prime minister, members of the cabinet, and MPs. The outbreak of the Great War followed by the granting of votes for (some) women in 1918 permanently ended Pankhurst's role as a militant leader in the women's struggle. Around twenty years later, however, her nation remembered her formally. In the 1936 New Year's honours list it was announced that she had been created a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire. When Dame Christabel Pankhurst died on 13 February 1958 at her home in Santa Monica, California, the British nation responded to this loss by adding a permanent memorial to her next to the one of her mother that stood near the House of Lords. Less than twenty years after that act of remembering, women's rights came to the fore once again, and Pankhurst's name has become familiar to generations of British schoolchildren ever since. Historians have also become aware in recent decades that history writing in the past had largely excluded women and have endeavoured to introduce the lives of women and the experiences of women into their narratives. Today it would be hard to imagine any general account of British history in the twentieth century that would leave out the name of Christabel Pankhurst.

On the other hand, although Pankhurst is often named, she is rarely studied. In fact, in an age when very impressive scholarly biographies are continually appearing of women that most well-educated people have never heard of before, and many well-known women seem to find a new biographer on a triennial basis, no academic has ever written a biography of Christabel Pankhurst.