Towards the end of the new film Suffragette, the main characters briefly note that the tactics of their leader, Emmeline Pankhurst (regally portrayed by Meryl Streep) have spurred dissent, not only inside the suffrage movement but also within the Pankhurst family itself.

That’s the movie’s only gesture towards Emmeline’s rebel daughter Adela, who, when she relocated to Australia, launched a career every bit as colourful as the action portrayed in the film.

The Pankhurst daughters – Christabel, Sylvia and Adela – grew in a family dominated by ideas and causes. Their father, the campaigning lawyer and socialist Dr Richard Pankhurst, Emmeline’s husband, once declared “Life is nothing without enthusiasms”, and visitors to the household included most of the era’s great rebels and iconoclasts: William Morris, Keir Hardie, Tom Mann, Eleanor Marx, the anarchists Peter Kropotkin and Errico Malatesta, the abolitionists William Lloyd Garrison and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and others.

Not surprisingly, the children followed their parents into agitation around the Independent Labour party and then, after Richard’s death, the Women’s Social Political union.

But the unwavering dedication to public life created intense personal stress.

Adela always thought that, as a late-arriving child, she was resented by her mother. Certainly, Emmeline made no secret of her preference for Christabel, who would become her closest political ally. But Adela was also deeply jealous of Sylvia. “We lived too much together within ourselves,” she wrote later, “to be healthy minded, and brooded over troubles that children in more healthy surroundings would have forgotten in five minutes”.

At a young age, Adela threw herself into the suffragette cause. In 1906, she heckled Churchill and Lloyd George; when she slapped the policeman trying to eject her, she was sent to Strangeways prison in Manchester for assault. She did more jail time after a violently suppressed suffragette protest at parliament, and then worked as an organiser for the WSPU until she collapsed from exhaustion.

By late 1913, personal and political tensions had come to the boil. Tactically, Emmeline and Christabel had embraced aggressive tactics such as window breaking, hunger strikes and even bombings. Politically, they were moving to the right – and they were aghast at Sylvia’s relationship with the working class organisations of East London.

Adela, too, made no secret of her socialist views, and so, when Sylvia was ejected from the movement, Emmeline and Christabel decided the youngest Pankhurst daughter should also go.

“I would not care if you were multiplied by a hundred,” said Christabel to Sylvia, “but one of Adela is too many.”

Adela was given £20, some warm clothes, a letter of introduction to Melbourne feminist Vida Goldstein, and a boat ticket to Australia. She never saw her mother or sisters again.

Arriving in Melbourne in April 1914, she received a hero’s welcome: the famous daughter of a famous mother.

“You have heard a great deal about broken windows,” she told a crowd at the Melbourne Auditorium. “I can tell you about the broken lives that caused the broken windows.”

“She’s not the least like one’s idea of the ‘shrieking sisterhood’,” said one conservative paper with approval.

But the appreciation for Adela from respectable Melbourne did not last long. Free from her mother’s restrictions, she joined the Victorian Socialist party and the Women’s Peace Army, and threw herself into agitation against the first world war. She wrote antiwar plays and pamphlets; during the two anti-conscription referendums, she campaigned almost every day, often alongside future prime minister John Curtin.

“I have seldom heard a speaker who held such sway over her audience,” said one of the undercover police recording her.

In August 1917, police arrested Adela during a Melbourne march against wartime price increases. “Roused to fury by this development,” reported the Age, “several women acted in a most disgraceful manner and umbrellas and fists were used against police.”

A few weeks later, she and “half a dozen shrill-voiced girls” led a group of red flag-carrying men and women into the city “singing songs of revolt” (as the Argus said) “and smashing windows out of pure wantonness”.

In September, Adela married Tom Walsh, a union leader who signed his articles as “Sinbad the Sailor”; in October, the magistrate Notley Moore sentenced her to prison. The socialist poet RH Long asked:

Adela Pankhurst, what have you done?

Meddled with poison, handled a gun?

Nine months gaol from Notley Moore,

For openly pleading the cause of the poor.

In 1920, Adela Pankhurst Walsh and her husband Tom were two of the most prominent figures at the foundation of the Communist party of Australia, a meeting she attended with a crying baby on her knee.

Adela’s political convictions spurred Emmeline – a passionate supporter of the war – to telegram the prime minister, Billy Hughes, denouncing her daughter. But these convictions also drew her closer to Sylvia, a central figure in early British communism. Lenin’s pamphlet Left Wing Communism is partly addressed to Sylvia.

“This is the life, isn’t it,” wrote Adela to her sister, “and I am very happy.”

Christabel, meanwhile, had moved to America to become an evangelical Seventh Day Adventist.

Suffragettes Adela Pankhurst and Annie Kenney in 1910. They are standing beside a tree planted by Emmeline Pankhurst. Photograph: Col Linley Blathwayt/Bath In Time – Bath Central Library

Adela’s passion for communism faded remarkably quickly. In articles such as “Communism and Social Purity” she expressed a tacit enthusiasm for conventional domesticity quite foreign to the new doctrines coming out of Moscow and, by 1923, both she and Walsh had left the party.

The next year, Walsh was sent to jail – and nearly deported – for his role in the seamen’s strike, an experience that, alongside his quarrels with his former comrades, seems to have shattered the couple’s faith in union militancy.

In 1927, Adela launched the Australian Women’s Guild of Empire, an organisation dedicated to fighting communism, upholding Christian ideals and safeguarding the family. She wrote to her mother, now a member of the Conservative party, explaining that she and Tom had changed their minds about socialism. Just before her death, Emmeline replied to say she was “full of regret for the long rift”.

Over the next decade, Adela devoted her considerable skills to an employer-backed campaign against strikes. She would arrive at a discontented workplace, set up her stump outside and then harangue the employees about the advantages of industrial peace. In her writing, she denounced contraception, abortion and even nursery schools as detrimental to the maternal values she identified as the key legacy of suffragism.

Though Sylvia had also broken with the Communist party, she remained determinedly on the left, supporting sexual freedom and raising support for Ethiopia’s struggle against fascist Italy (she eventually moved to Addis Ababa). Perhaps for that reason, Adela was enraged by her sister’s 1931 account of the suffragette movement, and the two were once again estranged.

Throughout the 1930s Adela drifted further rightward, occasionally embracing anti-Semitism and writing favourably about Nazi Germany. In 1940, in the midst of the second world war, she became an organiser for Australia First, the peculiar pro-Japanese fascist outfit established by the writer PR “Inky” Stephensen. Interned (without trial) as a traitor in 1942, the old suffragette embarked on a hunger strike until she obtained her release.

Thereafter, she remained out of public life. There was, however, one last ideological reinvention: just before her death in 1961 she converted to Catholicism.

In 1978, feminist historian Anne Summers asked why, after such a remarkable career, Adela Pankhurst remained so obscure. Despite Vera Coleman’s 1996 biography of “the wayward suffragette”, the question remains moot.

Where Summers partly attributed the neglect of Pankhurst to her break from traditional feminist preoccupations, other historians (such as Joy Damousi and Jacqueline Dickenson) have focused on the continuities behind her apparent zigzags (such as a longstanding preoccupation with the domestic sphere and an understanding of femininity as a eugenic safeguard for British “racial” purity).

Indeed, it might be argued that Adela provides the most extreme illustration of the problem that Martin Pugh identifies in his collective biography of her family: the difficulty of explaining “exactly where the Pankhursts stand in relation to the modern women’s movement”. If, in some respects, Adela seems a very contemporary figure, in other ways, she reminds us of the foreignness of the past.