Dame Christabel Harriette Pankhurst, DBE (22 September 1880 – 13 February 1958), was a suffragette born in Manchester, England. A co-founder of the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU), she directed its militant actions from exile in France from 1912 to 1913. In 1914 she became a fervent supporter of the war against Germany. After the war she moved to the United States, where she worked as an evangelist for the Second Adventist movement.
Christabel Pankhurst was the daughter of the lawyer Dr. Richard Pankhurst and women's suffrage movement leader Emmeline Pankhurst and sister to Sylvia Pankhurst and Adela Pankhurst. Nancy Ellen Rupprecht wrote, “She was almost a textbook illustration of the first child born to a middle-class family. In childhood as well as adulthood, she was beautiful, intelligent, graceful, confident, charming, and charismatic.” Christabel and her mother, Emmeline, had a special bond that none of her other siblings had. She and her father were very close as well. In the Dictionary of National Biography, Roger Fulford says that he named her Christabel after the lines of a poem by Coleridge “The lovely lady Christabel/ Whom her father loves so well.” When her mother died in 1928, Christabel grieved deeply for two years. Her family was not wealthy growing up. Her father was a lawyer and her mother owned a small shop. She assisted her mother while Emmeline was working as the Registrar of Births and Deaths in Manchester. Her family always encouraged themselves in their financial struggles by firmly believing that they were more devoted to causes than comforts.