Optical connections: Mrs Pankhurst’s son

Emmeline Pankhurst is best known as a leading light of the suffragette movement, fighting tirelessly for most of her life for the right of women to vote in elections. But she was also a single mother of limited means struggling to bring up four children (a fifth child died, aged four, from diphtheria). And there has long been a suggestion that she cruelly denied her son the spectacles he needed to correct his poor vision.

How to reconcile the idealistic proponent of women’s rights and devoted mother (who was so grief-stricken at her young son’s untimely death that she could not bear to look at his likeness afterwards, locking away two portraits of him in a cupboard) with the woman who favoured her eldest daughter to the detriment of her other children and apparently lacked any sympathy for her surviving son, Harry, who was blighted by poor eyesight and other health problems?