Early life thumb|right|Lydia Becker was an early influence on Pankhurst and may have been enamoured of Pankhurst's father Emmeline Goulden was born on Sloan Street in the Moss Side district of Manchester on 15 July 1858. Although her birth certificate says otherwise, she believed and later claimed her birthday was a day earlier, on Bastille Day (14 July). Most biographies, including those written by her daughters, repeat this claim. Feeling a kinship with the female revolutionaries who stormed the Bastille, she said in 1908: "I have always thought that the fact that I was born on that day had some kind of influence over my life."Quoted in Purvis 2002, p. 9; Bartley, pp. 15–16. Purvis suggests several possible reasons for the confusion. She notes that the name is spelled "Emiline" on the certificate. The family into which she was born had been steeped in political agitation for generations; her mother, Sophia, was a Manx woman from the Isle of Man who was descended from men who were charged with social unrest and slander.Bartley, p. 16; Liddington and Norris, p. 74.
Early life thumb|right|Lydia Becker was an early influence on Pankhurst and may have been enamoured of Pankhurst's father Emmeline Goulden was born on Sloan Street in the Moss Side district of Manchester on 15 July 1858. Although her birth certificate says otherwise, she believed and later claimed her birthday was a day earlier, on Bastille Day (14 July). Most biographies, including those written by her daughters, repeat this claim. Feeling a kinship with the female revolutionaries who stormed the Bastille, she said in 1908: "I have always thought that the fact that I was born on that day had some kind of influence over my life."Quoted in Purvis 2002, p. 9; Bartley, pp. 15–16. Purvis suggests several possible reasons for the confusion. She notes that the name is spelled "Emiline" on the certificate. The family into which she was born had been steeped in political agitation for generations; her mother, Sophia, was a Manx woman from the Isle of Man who was descended from men who were charged with social unrest and slander.Bartley, p. 16; Liddington and Norris, p. 74.