Helen Pankhurst

Helen Sylvia Pankhurst CBE (born 1964)^{[citation needed]} is a British women's rights activist, scholar and writer. She is currently CARE International's senior advisor working in the United Kingdom and Ethiopia. She is the great-granddaughter of Emmeline Pankhurst and granddaughter of Sylvia Pankhurst, who were both leaders in the suffragette movement. In 2018, Pankhurst convened Centenary Action, a cross-party coalition of over 100 activists, politicians and women's rights organisations campaigning to end barriers to women's political participation.

Helen Sylvia Pankhurst was brought up in Ethiopia until the age of 12, the daughter of historian Richard and Romanian-born librarian Rita Pankhurst. Richard and his mother Sylvia Pankhurst, the former suffragette, had settled in that country in the 1950s. Her paternal grandfather was Silvio Corio, an Italian chef and anarchist. Helen's mother was Rita Eldon Pankhurst, academic and activist. Helen has one sibling, Alula Pankhurst, like both their parents a scholar of Ethiopia.

She began her studies, in French, at the Lycée Guebre-Mariam in Addis Ababa. The family moved to London following the coup d'etat of 1974 which overthrew Emperor Haile Selassie and began the Ethiopian Civil War. She continued her schooling at the Lycée Charles de Gaulle before going on to the Atlantic College in Wales, the first of the United World Colleges. She then studied at Sussex University in England, Vassar College in New York, and finally Edinburgh University, Scotland, where she gained a PhD degree in social science. Her thesis was published by Zed Press in 1992 as Gender Development and Identity: An Ethiopian Study.

Helen Pankhurst has worked for a range of international development organisations including ACORD, Womankind Worldwide and CARE International, primarily in Ethiopia. Her focus has been on programme and policy in urban and rural development, water hygiene and sanitation, and women's rights.

Pankhurst has been a trustee of Water Aid, Farm Africa and Action Aid and has been a visiting senior fellow at the London School of Economics (LSE) and a visiting professor at Manchester Metropolitan University.

At the 2012 Summer Olympics opening ceremony, Pankhurst appeared alongside her daughter, Laura. The pair have since formed a group called Olympic Suffragettes, which campaigns on a number of women's rights issues. She also leads and speaks at the London march each year on 8 March for International Women's Day. She was interviewed by the Huffington Post in 2017 as part of three generations of Pankhursts, with her mother Rita and daughter Laura. Her mother said that feminism for her was “more of a curve or a climb - a growing awareness”. Helen said it was about seeing women in Ethiopia who were expected to carry water every day, whereas Laura said it wasn't so apparent until she was older because of the family where she had grown up.

In 2018 Pankhurst established Centenary Action, a cross-party coalition of over 100 activists, politicians and women's rights organisations campaigning to end barriers to women's political participation; as of October 2024^[update] she is its convener. Centenary Action has campaigned on issues ranging from increased transparency in political party candidate selections to an end to the violence and abuse of women.

Pankhurst leads and sits on the steering committee of GM4women2028, a charity created in 2018 to deliver change for the women of Manchester. Other committee members include Prof Francesca Gains, Eva Herman, Omolade Femi-Ajao, Profs Jackie Carter and Jill Rubery. In February 2021 Pankhurst led "a virtual score card reveal" witnessed by Andy Burnham, the mayor of Manchester. The GM4Women2028 score cards are keeping track of gender equality as Manchester approaches 2028 - the centenary of the Representation of the People (Equal Franchise) Act 1928, which gave all British women the right to vote on equal terms to men.