Dr Helen Pankhurst is a women’s rights activist and senior advisor to CARE International, based in the UK and in Ethiopia. She has extensive media experience including national and international radio and print interviews, and was involved in the 2015 film Suffragette.

Her work in Ethiopia includes support to program development across different sectors, focused on the interests and needs of women and girls. In the UK she is a public speaker and writer on feminist issues. She also leads CARE International’s #March4Women event in London on the 4th March. Helen is the great-granddaughter of Emmeline Pankhurst and granddaughter of Sylvia Pankhurst, leaders of the British suffragette movement.

Talk: Deeds Not Words

In 2018, on the centenary of one of the most significant steps forward for women – the Fourth Reform Act (6 February), which saw propertied women over 30 gain the vote for the first time – Helen Pankhurst charts how women’s lives have changed over the last century, and offers a new way forward in her new book. Each of the five chapters within the book explores a different theme; politics, money, family & identity, violence and culture. The voices of both pioneers and ordinary women are woven into the analysis which ends with suggestions about how to better understand and strengthen feminist campaigning and with aims for the future.

Combining historical insight with inspiring argument, Deeds Not Words reveals how far women have come since the suffragettes, how far we still have to go, and how we might get there.