Emily Wilding Davison was born at Roxburgh House, Greenwich, England.
Emily Wilding Davison was born on 11 October 1872 at Roxburgh House in Greenwich, then part of Kent and now within Greater London. She was the daughter of Charles Edward Davison, a merchant, and his second wife Margaret Caisley.
Davison grew up in a middle-class family that valued education, and she went on to study at Royal Holloway College and later at St Hugh's College, Oxford, achieving first-class honours in her final examinations at a time when Oxford did not yet formally award degrees to women. Her intellectual gifts and independence of mind would later find expression in her fierce commitment to the cause of women's suffrage.
Though her birth itself was an ordinary event, it marked the beginning of a life that would end in one of the most iconic and controversial acts of the British women's suffrage movement. Her early education and formation in a household that prized learning helped shape the determined, articulate campaigner who would later become one of the movement's most militant and, ultimately, most mythologised figures.
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