Sylvia Pankhurst

Estelle Sylvia Pankhurst (5 May 1882 – 27 September 1960) was an English feminist, socialist, activist, artist and writer. The youngest daughter of two founding members of the Independent Labour Party (ILP), she with her mother and sister Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst formed the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) at their home. Following encounters with women-led labour activism in the United States, Sylvia worked to organise working-class women in London's East End. This, together with her refusal in 1914 to enter into a wartime political truce with the government, caused her to break with the suffragette leadership of her mother and sister. Pankhurst welcomed the Russian Revolution and conferred in Moscow with Lenin. But as an advocate of workers' control, she rejected the Leninist party line and criticised the Bolshevik regime.

Pankhurst was vocal in her support for Irish independence; for anti-colonial struggle throughout the British Empire; and for anti-fascist solidarity in Europe. Following its invasion by Italy in 1935, she was devoted to the cause of Ethiopia where, after the Second World War, she spent her remaining years as a guest of the restored emperor Haile Selassie. The international circulation of her pan-Africanist weekly The New Times and Ethiopia News was regarded by British colonial authorities as a factor in the development of African nationalism, and of the Rastafari movement in Jamaica.

Early life

Estelle Sylvia Pankhurst (she later dropped her first forename) was born on 5 May 1882 at Drayton Terrace, Old Trafford, Manchester, to Emmeline Pankhurst (née Goulden) and Dr. Richard Pankhurst. Richard Pankhurst had been a founding member in 1872 of the National Society for Women's Suffrage, and played a role in drafting legislation that gave unmarried women householders a vote in local elections, and married women control over their property and earnings. According to his daughter, he was also distinguished by his support for Irish Home Rule, being "the first English Parliamentary candidate to pledge himself to Irish self-government when he stood at a by-election in Manchester in 1883".

The family home, for a period in Russell Square in London, hosted radical intelligentsia from both Britain and abroad. These included the Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin, the Communard Louise Michel, and the Fabian Annie Besant. In 1893, Pankhurst's parents joined the Scottish miner Keir Hardie, a family friend, as founding members of the Independent Labour Party (ILP).

Pankhurst and her sisters, Christabel and Adela, attended Manchester High School for Girls. In 1903, Pankhurst went on to train as an artist at the Manchester School of Art. While completing an ILP commission to paint murals in a social hall the party had built in Salford, Pankhurst discovered that the hall, named after her father, would not admit women. It was an episode that helped convince her elder sister, Christabel, of the need for women to organise independently.

In 1904, Pankhurst won a scholarship to the Royal College of Art (RCA) in London, but she was incensed to learn that of 16 scholarships awarded by the college each year, 13 were reserved for men, and that, in response to a parliamentary question, Keir Hardie should be told that the authorities "did not contemplate any change".

Suffragette

The Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) was founded as an independent women's movement on 10 October 1903 in the family's Nelson Street home in Manchester. Pankhurst's sister Christabel had persuaded a group of ILP women that women had to do the work of emancipation themselves, and that they needed a movement free of party affiliation.

In 1906, Sylvia Pankhurst started to work full-time for WSPU, with Christabel and their mother. She devised the WSPU logo and various leaflets, banners, and posters as well as the decoration of its meeting halls.

In 1907 she toured industrial towns in England and Scotland, painting portraits of working-class women in their working environments. She was later to write that she witnessed "so much distress", that she felt unable to return to her "beloved profession". With Alice Hawkins and Mary Gawthorpe she became a full-time organiser, and helped establish the WSPU in Leicester.

Pankhurst contributed articles to the WSPU's newspaper, Votes for Women and, in 1911, she published a propagandist history of the WSPU's campaign, The Suffragette: The History of the Women's Militant Suffrage Movement. It included her witness account of Black Friday 18 November 1910, in which 300 women marched to the Houses of Parliament as part of their campaign to press for voting rights under the Conciliation Bill, and were met with violence, some of it sexual, from the Metropolitan Police and male bystanders.

In 1912, Pankhurst led a march on Mountjoy Prison in Dublin in solidarity with two English WPSU militants who had violently sought to disrupt the Prime Minister H. H. Asquith's visit to the Irish capital. They had thrown a hatchet, to which a suffrage message was attached, into the carriage in which he was travelling with MP John Redmond and had attempted to set fire to the theatre in which the Prime Minister was to speak.

Between February 1913 and August 1914, Sylvia was arrested eight times for protest actions in London. After the passing of the so-called Cat and Mouse Act, she would be released for short periods to recuperate from her hunger strikes. Supporters would carry her back to her home and offices in Old Ford Street, Bow, where, when the police came to re-arrest her, street battles would ensue.In June 1914, supporters carried her to the entrance to the Strangers' Gallery of the House of Commons where she announced that she would continue her hunger strike until Asquith agreed to receive a deputation of East London women. Asquith met the deputation of six working mothers. After listening to them pay tribute to the work Pankhurst had done "in arousing the women of the East End to the importance of the vote in their daily lives", and describe their hardships, the Prime Minister reiterated the government's position: Votes for women would have to await a general democratic reform of the franchise. That did not occur until 1918, with votes extended to married, property owning women over thirty. Full voting equality took another ten years.

Encounters women-led labour activism in the United States

Pankhurst undertook two speaking tours in the United States: in the first three months of 1911 and again at the beginning of 1912. Writing letters home, mostly to Keir Hardie, she described herself as having to persuade her largely middle-class hosts that sweated female labour and mother-child poverty were as much a feature of the New World as the Old. She related her experience of going into factories, workshops, workhouses and prisons, of observing the application of Taylorist principles (rendering workers "part of the machinery"), and of witnessing in the South the virtual criminalisation of African Americans.

In January 1911, she was in Chicago. A strike wave, which had begun in 1909 with "the uprising of the 20,000" mostly immigrant, Jewish women workers in the sweatshops of New York, had spread to the city's clothing workers. Union pickets had been beaten and arrested. Two had been shot dead. Pankhurst visited strikers in their police cells, and observed that their conditions were as bad anything suffragettes had been subject to in Britain.

That same month, in New York City where she addressed a rally in Carnegie Hall, Pankhurst met the pioneer socialist feminist Margaret Sanger, together with a twenty-year-old Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. A year later, Flynn was to be the "Bread and Roses" strategist for the Industrial Workers of the World in the Lawrence textile strike. Back in New York City at the beginning of 1912, Pankhurst observed in laundry workers the same ability to overcome through collective action the racial, ethnic and sexual divisions systematically exploited by employers.

In Chicago, Pankhurst had been in the company of Zelie Passavant Emerson. Emerson had come to the Women's Trade Union League from the settlement house movement. Pankhurst had encountered settlement houses in England: As a child she had visited the first of these, Ancoats Brotherhood in Manchester. But in their outreach to women as both domestic and wage workers, in America she saw a potentially potent form of women-led activism. Returning to London with Emerson, it was an example she sought to replicate in London's East End.

Before being followed back to England by Emerson, in April 1912 Pankhurst joined the funeral procession in New York City for the 146 garment workers killed in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. Speaking beside labour organiser Rose Schneiderman, she said that their deaths were the result of working-class people being denied the right to represent themselves.