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Legacy

News of Emmeline Pankhurst's death was announced around the country, and extensively in North America. Her funeral service on 18 June 1928 was filled with her former WSPU colleagues and those who had worked beside her in various capacities. The Daily Mail described the procession as "like a dead general in the midst of a mourning army". Women wore WSPU sashes and ribbons, and the organisation's flag was carried alongside the Union Flag. Christabel and Sylvia appeared together at the service, the latter with her child. Adela did not attend. Press coverage around the world recognised her tireless work on behalf of women's right to vote – even if they did not agree on the value of her contributions. The New York Herald Tribune called her "the most remarkable political and social agitator of the early part of the twentieth century and the supreme protagonist of the campaign for the electoral enfranchisement of women."

Shortly after the funeral, one of Pankhurst's bodyguards from her WSPU days, Catherine Marshall, began raising funds for a memorial statue. In spring 1930 her efforts bore fruit, and on 6 March her statue in Victoria Tower Gardens, next to and gesturing towards the Houses of Parliament, was unveiled. A crowd of radicals, former suffragettes, and national dignitaries gathered as former Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin presented the memorial to the public. In his address, Baldwin declared: "I say with no fear of contradiction, that whatever view posterity may take, Mrs. Pankhurst has won for herself a niche in the Temple of Fame which will last for all time." Sylvia was the only Pankhurst daughter in attendance; Christabel, touring North America, sent a telegram which was read aloud. While planning the agenda for the day, Marshall had intentionally excluded Sylvia, who in her opinion had hastened Pankhurst's death. Historic England listed the statue as Grade II on 5 February 1970.

A proposal to move the statue of Pankhurst away from the Houses of Parliament to the private Regent's University London in Regent's Park was submitted to Westminster City Council planning department in July 2018 by former Conservative MP Sir Neil Thorne. This proposal was withdrawn in September 2018 after widespread anger and a public campaign against it. The planning application received 896 comments, 887 of them objections. A 38 Degrees petition against the removal of the statue attracted 180,839 signatures. The Curator's Office at the Palace of Westminster commissioned a report into the plan to remove the statue. Published on 22 August 2018, it concluded 'The Memorial to Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst is of high significance, which is not fully recognised through its listing at Grade II. An application has been made to Historic England to upgrade the memorial to Grade II*. This is based on it having 'more than special interest', in terms of its unique history, its artistic quality and the importance of its setting next to the Houses of Parliament. This proposal to move the memorial from Victoria Tower Gardens to Regent's Park would cause substantial harm to the significance of the memorial, as well has harm to the Westminster Abbey and Parliament Square Conservation Area...The proposal to move the memorial, therefore, should not be granted planning permission or listed building consent.

During the twentieth century Emmeline Pankhurst's value to the movement for women's suffrage was debated passionately, and no consensus was achieved. Her daughters Sylvia and Christabel weighed in with books, scornful and laudatory respectively, about their time in the struggle. Sylvia's 1931 book The Suffrage Movement describes her mother's political shift at the start of the First World War as the beginning of a betrayal of her family (especially her father) and the movement. It set the tone for much of the socialist and activist history written about the WSPU and particularly solidified Emmeline Pankhurst's reputation as an unreasonable autocrat. Christabel's "Unshackled: The Story of How We Won the Vote," released in 1959, paints her mother as generous and selfless to a fault, offering herself completely to the most noble causes. It provided a sympathetic counterpart to Sylvia's attacks and continued the polarised discussion; detached and objective assessment has rarely been a part of Pankhurst scholarship.

Recent biographies show that historians differ about whether Emmeline Pankhurst's militancy helped or hurt the movement; however, there is general agreement that the WSPU raised public awareness of the movement in ways that proved essential. Baldwin compared her to Martin Luther and Jean-Jacques Rousseau: individuals who were not the sum total of the movements in which they took part, but who nevertheless played crucial roles in struggles of social and political reform. In the case of Pankhurst, this reform took place in both intentional and unintentional ways. By defying the roles of wife and mother as the docile companion, Pankhurst helped to pave the way for many future feminists, though some would later decry her support for empire and endorsement of the idea of "race betterment."

In 1987 one of her homes in Manchester was opened as the Pankhurst Centre, an all-women gathering space and museum. In 2002, Pankhurst was placed at number 27 in the BBC's poll of the 100 Greatest Britons. In 2006, a blue plaque for Pankhurst and her daughter, Christabel was placed by English Heritage at 50 Clarendon Road, Notting Hill, London W11 3AD, Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, where they had lived.

In January 2016, following a public vote, it was announced that Rise up, Women, a statue of Emmeline Pankhurst by Hazel Reeves, would be unveiled in Manchester in 2019, making her the first woman to be honoured with a statue in the city since Queen Victoria more than 100 years ago. The statue was unveiled on 14 December 2018, one hundred years after British women were first able to vote in the 1918 United Kingdom general election. Her name and image and those of 58 other women's suffrage supporters including her daughters are etched on the plinth of the statue of Millicent Fawcett in Parliament Square, London that was unveiled in 2018. One of the ' houses ' at Wellacre Academy in Manchester is named after her.

Helen Pankhurst, the great-granddaughter of Emmeline Pankhurst and the granddaughter of Sylvia Pankhurst, works for women's rights. Along with her daughter, she founded Olympic Suffragettes, which campaigns on a number of women's rights issues.

Pankhurst has appeared in several works of popular culture. In the 1974 BBC television miniseries Shoulder to Shoulder, Pankhurst is played by Siân Phillips. In the 2015 film Suffragette, Pankhurst is played by Meryl Streep.