Emmeline Goulden was born on Sloan Street in the Moss Side district of Manchester on 15 July 1858, at school her teachers called her Emily, a name she preferred to be called. 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." 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. In 1881 the Isle of Man was the first country to grant women the right to vote in national elections. Her father, Robert Goulden, was a self-made man- working his way from errand boy to manufacturer- from a humble Manchester family with its own background of political activity. Robert's mother, a fustian cutter, worked with the Anti-Corn Law League, and his father was press-ganged into the Royal Navy and present at the Peterloo massacre, when cavalry charged and broke up a crowd demanding parliamentary reform.