Adela Constantia Mary Pankhurst was a Suffragette campaigner, the daughter of the Suffragette leader Emmeline Pankhurst. As a teenager she joined her mother and sisters in militant campaigning. In 1906 she gave up her job as an elementary school teacher in Manchester to work full time for the Women's Social and Political Union as an 'organiser' in the Lancashire and Yokrshire area.
Adela served several prison sentences for interrupting Liberal meetings and for participating in demonstrations and deputations to Parliament. She was first arrested in 1909 for disrupting a talk by Liberal politician Winston Churchill and slapping a policeman who tried to evict her from the meeting. Like her sister Sylvia, Adela wanted the WSPU to join with the Independent Labour Party in supporting causes beyond women's suffrage.
Her left-wing sympathies were not shared by Emmeline or her sister Christabel. In 1911, suffering from ill-health she was encouraged to give up her work as an organiser and take up a gardening course. The following year Adela went to live in Australia, her ticket purchased by Emmeline Pankhurst, and there she remained for the rest of her life.
In Australia, Adela brought her experience of organising and militancy to first left- and then right-wing causes. In 1920, Pankhurst became a founding member of the Communist Party of Australia, from which she was later expelled. In September 1917, she had married Tom Walsh of the Federated Seamen's Union of Australasia, with whom she had a son and five daughters.
Adela became disillusioned with communism and founded the anti-communist Australian Women's Guild of Empire in 1927. In 1941 Pankhurst became one of the founding members of the and nationalistic Australia First Movement. She was interned in 1942 for her advocacy of peace with Japan.