Sylvia Pankhurst

Sylvia Pankhurst
Born	Estelle Sylvia Pankhurst (1882-05-05)5 May 1882 Old Trafford, Manchester, England
Died	27 September 1960(1960-09-27) (aged 78) Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
Burial place	Holy Trinity Cathedral, Addis Ababa
Alma mater	Manchester School of Art Royal College of Art
Occupation(s)	Political activist, writer, artist
Organization(s)	Women's Social and Political Union, East London Federation of Suffragettes, Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, World Committee Against War and Fascism
Political party	Independent Labour Party, Workers' Socialist Federation, Communist Workers' Party

Estelle Sylvia Pankhurst (5 May 1882 – 27 September 1960) was a campaigning English feminist and socialist. Committed to organising working-class women in London's East End, and unwilling in 1914 to enter into a wartime political truce with the government, she broke with the suffragette leadership of her mother and sister, Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst. She was inspired by the Russian Revolution and consulted with Lenin, but defied Moscow in endorsing a syndicalist programme of workers' control and by criticising the emerging Soviet dictatorship.

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 the Italian invasion in 1935, she was devoted to the cause of Ethiopia where, after the Second World War, she spent her remaining year as a guest of the restored emperor Haile Selassie. The circulation in the West Indies of her pan-Africanist weekly The New Times and Ethiopia News was regarded by the British authorities as a factor in the development of Ras Tafari.

Early life

Estelle Sylvia Pankhurst (she later dropped her first forename) was born at Drayton Terrace, Old Trafford, Manchester, to Emmeline Pankhurst (née Goulden) and Dr. Richard Pankhurst.

Dr Pankhurst had been a founding member in 1872 of the National Society for Women's Suffrage, and had played a role in drafting the Municipal Franchise Act 1869 that gave unmarried women householders a vote in local elections, and the Married Women's Property Act 1882 which gave married women control over their property and earnings. The family home, for a period in Russell Square in London, hosted radical intelligentsia from both Britain and abroad, among them 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. Pankhurst went on to train as an artist at the Manchester School of Art, and, in 1900, won a scholarship to the Royal College of Art in South Kensington, London. She registed that in the arts, as in other professions, women faced discrimination and inequity.

Suffragette

Sylvia Pankhurst carried by supporters, London, June 1914

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 Emmeline had persuaded a group of ILP women that women had to do the work 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. With Alice Hawkins and Mary Gawthorpe, she 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.

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 hunger striking. 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 the Prime Minister, H. H. Asquith, agreed to receive a deputation of East London women.

As Pankhurst, in August 1912, had led a march on Mountjoy Prison in Dublin in solidarity with two English WPSU militants who, on his visit to the Irish capital, had thrown a (blunted) hatchet at the prime minister, it was an audacious request. Asquith, did meet the deputation of six working mothers. Their spokesperson, Julia Scurr, began with a tribute to Pankhurst, speaking of "the work she has done in arousing the women of the East End to the importance of the vote in their daily lives". After listening to Scurr's account of the hardships of "working-class women" ("modern industrialism kills them off rapidly, both by accident and by overwork"), the Prime Minister re-iterated the government's position: votes could be extended to women only in the context of a general democratic reform of the franchise. That did to occur until 1918, and then only for women over thirty. Full voting equality took another ten years.

Women-led labour organising in America

Pankhurst wrote an account of her prison experience, "Forcibly Fed: The Story of My Four Weeks in Holloway Gaol", for the popular American periodical McClure's Magazine (August 1913). She had undertaken two speaking tours in the United States: in the first three months of 1911 and again at the beginning of 1912.

She described herself as having to persuade her largely middle-class American audiences that sweated female labour and mother-child poverty was 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.

At the outset of her first tour in January 1911 she visited Chicago. A strike wave, which began 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, she 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 Northwestern University Settlement House. Pankhurst had encountered settlement houses in England: as a child she had visited the first of these, Ancoat's 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.

East London socialist

In a first show of independence, and with the support of Keir Hardie, Julia Scurr, Eveline Haverfield, Nellie Cressall, and George Lansbury, Pankhurst and Emerson renamed the East London Federation of the WPSU, the East London Federation of Suffragettes and, although it was to remain a women's—and women-led—emancipatory movement, it was open to trade unionists and to men.

Pankhurst noted that "the East End was the greatest homogeneous working-class area accessible to the House of Commons by popular demonstrations" and proposed that the "creation of a woman’s movement in that great abyss of poverty would be a call and a rallying cry to the rise of similar movements in all parts of the country". In this spririt, in November 1913, Pankhurst spoke at the Albert Hall, alongside James Connolly, in support of the men and women of the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union locked-out by Dublin employers.

In January 1914, accompanied by Nora Smyth, Pankhurst visited her sister Christabel in Paris (were she was taking refuge from the Cat and Mouse Act) to discuss the future of the ELFS. Christabel was insistent upon an independent, women-only WPSU, and was incredulous at sister's unwillingness to attack socialists unpledged to women's suffrage. Pankhurst was equally insistent on supporting popular and labour struggles, and critical of what she considered to the WPSU's social elitism. The sisters agreed that they and their organisations should go their separate ways.

From the East London Federation of Suffragettes, in 1914 Pankurst formed the Workers' Suffrage Federation. At the suggestion of Emerson, Pankhurst started a WSF paper. Provisionally titled Workers' Mate, the newspaper first appeared as The Woman's Dreadnought. Nora Smyth (who helped pay the bills) and Mary Phillips were the principal contributors, with Smyth illustrating the paper with her photographs of domestic East End poverty.

In the first edition of the paper (8 March 1914), Pankurst's editorial defended their insistence on building a working-class suffragette campaign:

Those Suffragists who say that it is the duty of the richer and more fortunate women to win the Vote, and that their poorer sisters need not feel themselves called upon to aid in the struggle appear, in using such arguments, to forget that it is the Vote for which we are fighting. The essential principle of the vote is that each one of us shall have a share of power to help himself or herself and us all. It is in direct opposition to the idea that some few, who are more favoured, shall help and teach and patronize the others.

This "struck a strong chord with many women socialists of an earlier generation who had serious reservations about the WSPU"; for example, Amy Hicks, a veteran of the Social Democratic Federation, who supported the ELFS from its start; and Dora Montefiore who, protesting its concentration of power in the hands of small group of privileged women, had left the WSPU in 1906, and had also spoken on behalf of the Dublin workers at the Albert Hall. The ELFS supported labour struggles and organised rent strikes.

War-time organiser and dissident

WSF toy factory, London East End, 1915

The United Kingdom declaration of war upon Germany on 4 August 1914 found Pankhurst in Dublin investigating the Bachelor's Walk massacre. After allowing the initial popular enthusiasm for the war to pass, with the WSF Pankhurst (who on 8 August decried the "heedless" rush to war of "men-made governments") campaigned against conscription and in solidarity with conscientious objectors, positions for which she was attacked in the WSPU newspaper, patriotically renamed Britannia.

Pankhurst retained the confidence of some WSPU veterans. She was invited by Elizabeth McCracken to Belfast, where had Christabel's wartime directive had put a halt to particularly militant campaign, to speak in support equal pay for women doing war work. It was a demand Pankhurst championed along with universal food rationing, debt relief and improved allowances for soldiers wives. By helping to shift some the costs of the war off the back of women and poor, she believed that these were measures that might hasten its end.

At same time, in its East End docks community, the ELFS/WSF sought to offer women practical assistance. They organised "cost-price" canteens, employment in a toy-making cooperative (whose product was in high demand in West-End shops), and (in a what had been a pub converted from the Gunmakers’ Arms to the Mothers ’ Arms) childcare offered on Montessori principles, a home visiting center, and free medical care and advice. Not wishing to be diverted by actions that might be interpreted as charity (and for which wealthy patrons had to be solicited), Pankhurst had misgivings: "organised relief, even the kindliest and most understanding, might introduce some savour of patronage or condescension, and mar our affectionate comradeship, in which we were all equals". Mitigation was sought in a policy of paying women not less than the minimum wage paid to men in the area and by creating the separate League of Rights for Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Wives and Relatives, in which women who wished to challenge government benefit decisions were encouraged to act collectively. Pankhurst later wrote:

It was my great joy that we were stimulating working women to speak up for themselves and their sort, and to master, despite their busy lives, the intricacies of Royal warrants and Army regulations, so as to secure the promised allowances, such as they were, for themselves and their neighbours.

In 1915, Pankhurst supported to the International Women's Peace Congress, held at The Hague. Her sister Christabel, meanwhile, spoke out against conscientious objection, and after the Tsar was overthrown in the February 1917 Revolution travelled to Russia to rally support for the country's continued participation in the war.

The 28 July 1917 edition of her paper appeared under a new title Worker's Dreadnought—WSF members "realised that solidarity between men and women was essential if they were going to win their fight"— and a new strapline, "Socialism. Internationalism, Votes for All". It printed, three days in advance of The Times, Siegfried Sassoon’s "wilful defiance of military authority": his statement that having become "a War of aggression and conquest", the conflict was being "deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it". It led to police raid on the paper's offices.The issue of October 6, 1917 advocating a peace referendum among the troops, was destroyed and the type broken up.

In May 1918, the WSF, in line with the paper, was renamed the Workers' Socialist Federation. Reflecting her growing belief, in the wake of the October Revolution in Russia, that only Soviets could form the "guiding and co-ordinating machinery" for a socialist transformation, Pankhurst refused an invitation to stand for the Sheffield Hallam constituency in the December 1918 United Kingdom general election.The WSF did go on to support other socialist candidates, but claimed to do so merely to "make propaganda for the overthrow of Parliament" and for "the Soviet system [in which] those who make the laws are delegates chosen from amongst the workers themselves".

Revolutionary

Anti-parliamentary communist

By March 1919, Pankhurst was insisting that the choice was clear: socialists had to build "an industrial republic on Soviet lines," and abandon the Parliamentary system. Lenin, who in in his 1920 thesis Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder profiled the WSF, cautioned Pankhurst that, in Britain, her radicalism was premature—a tactical mistake.

In June 1920, the WSF co-hosted the inaugural meeting conference of the Communist Party (BSTI). In preparation for the meeting, Pankhurst published a manifesto in the Workers' Dreadnought. Rather than the developing Leninist model of the party-state and centrally planned economy, it embraced ideas closer to the councilism of the Dutch revolutionary Marxist Antonie Pannekoek and to the anarcho-syndicalism of her partner Silvio Corio. Her contribution was to highlight the potential for extending their models of collective decision-making from the workplace into the domestic sphere. What she called Household Soviets would ensure that "mothers and those who are organisers of the family life of the community" are "adequately represented, and may take their due part in the management of society"

In the event it was the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), formed by the British Socialist Party in August 1920 (with Montefiore on its provisional council), that gained Moscow's approval. In July, Pankhurst had smuggled herself into Soviet Russia to attend the Second Congress of the Comintern. There Lenin personally persuaded her that her objections were less important than unity, and that it would be possible for her to maintain a platform within the CPGB.

On her return, Pankhurst was sufficiently enthused to offer a paean to the new Soviet society:

From Russia... I brought away with me a prevailing memory of beautiful, well-grown children and healthy people. It appears that a happy contentment and buoyant, confident enthusiasm is radiating from the active makers of the revolution and builders of the proletarian state, to wider and wider sections of people...

Break with Moscow

In September, with Willie Gallacher Pankhurst called a conference, inviting representatives of the Shop Stewards Movement, the CPGB, the Scottish Worker's Committee and the Glasgow Communist Group. All the groups at the conference bar Guy Aldred's Glasgow Communist Group agreed to merge with the Communist Party of Great Britain in January 1921. But when the CPGB then told her to hand over the Workers Dreadnought she refused. She argued that there had to be “free expression and circulation of opinion within the Party" and “an independent Communist voice, free to express its mind unhampered by Party discipline".

In the interim, in October 1920, she had been arrested in the offices of the Dreadnought and sentenced to six months for calling on docker not to load arms for shipment to the anti-Bolshevik forces in Russia. Pankhurst said she considered a hunger strike but was afraid the weapon was no longer available as the goverrnment had just allowed Terence MacSwiney, Sinn Féin mayor of Cork, to die in Brixton Prison. While in Holloway, Pankhurst wrote poems published in 1922 as Writ on Cold Slate. They are, "above all", about the stories of her cellmates – "the young and the old, the homeless and the hungry, mothers, pregnant women and babies born in captivity – ‘dregs from the ancient system’s wheel of waste’".

Influenced by the Shop Stewards' and miners' rank-and-file movements, and by example in Germany of the General Workers' Union (AAUD) (which drew in turn on the Industrial Workers of the World), the re-organised Dreadnought group called for an "All-Workers Revolutionary Union" (AWRU). This was to organise on industrial unionist lines, with recallable delegates elected, in rising succession, from workshops, factories, districts, and regions to national councils. With this One Big Union programme, in February 1922 they formed themselves as the Communist Workers' Party (CWP).

Meanwhile, in an "Open Letter to Lenin" (4 November 1922), Pankhurst warned that the Bolsheviks had begun to "desert communism" and, by default, were opening Europe to path taken in Italy by the Fascisti. This followed the Dreadnought’s publication of Alexandra Kollontai’s "The Workers’ Opposition", a critique of the developing Soviet bureaucracy, and of appeals from anarchists in Bolshevik prisons. By July 1923 Pankhurst concluded that "the term 'dictatorship of the proletariat' has been used to justify the dictatorship of a party clique of officials over their own party members and over the people at large". Socialism, as interpreted by the Bolsheviks, had been stripped of its emancipatory promise. In one of her last contributions to Dreadnought on the subject of Soviet regime she wrote:

The Bolsheivks pose now as the prophets of centralised efficiency, trustification, State control and the discipline of the proletariat in the name of increased production... Russian workers remain wage slaves, and very poor ones, working, not from free will, but under compulsion of economic need, and kept in their subordinate position by ... State coercion.

When the CWP announced its campaign to build the AWRU in July 1923, it was with the admission that they had no funds and very few people. It had managed to established just three branches outside London, in Sheffield, Plymouth and Portsmouth. Despite optimism concerning a rise in revolutionary sentiment, by the end of 1923 the AWRU had dissolved. On 14 June 1924, Workers' Dreadnought itself ceased publication. This was not before raising the alarm at the triumph fascism in Italy; condemning the then-communist condoned white labourism in South Africa's Rand Rebellion, and employing its first black correspondent, the Jamaican writer Claude McKay. With McKay Pankhurst shared outrage at the Daily Herald's campaign against the French employment of black colonial troops in Germany.

Writer

With her partner, the Italian libertarian socialist, Silvio Erasmus Corio, Pankhurst retired to a cottage in then rural Woodford Green, Essex (now in the London Borough of Redbridge).

While Corio ran a tearoom, Pankhurst researched and wrote an eclectic series of books: an anti-colonial historical-cultural treatise. India and the Earthly Paradise (1926); a promotion of the international auxiliary language Interligua, Delphos, or the future of International Language (1928); Save the Mothers: A plea for measures to prevent the annual loss of about 3000 child-bearing mothers and 20,000 infant lives in England and Wales and a similar grievous wastage in other countries (1930); her largely autobiographical accounts,The Suffragette Movement (1931) and The Home Front (1932); and a biography of her mother, The Life of Emmeline Pankhurst (1935), who, since the birth of Pankhurst's son Richard in 1927, had broken off all contact.

Anti-imperialist, anti-Fascist

Pankhurst protesting in Trafalgar Square, London, against British policies in India, 1932

While the Dreadnought did not have consistent line on the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin, an editorial written by Pankhurst began: "Justice can make but one reply to the Irish rebellion and that is the demand that Ireland should be allowed to govern itself". She put the Rising in the context of the resistance of Unionists to Irish Home Rule, and noting that it was they "who first armed". She lauded the rebels' "high ideals", not least their promise in an Irish Republic of universal suffrage.

Coinciding with highpoint of her revolutionary zeal, the Irish War of Independence occasioned the suggestion in the Dreadnought that "with their industries being destroyed by English capitalists, and with their lives always in danger from the military . . . Irish men and women are compelled to become Communists in word and deed". The paper was open to assertions of James Connolly's daughter Nora that "the awakening of a revolutionary spirit (caused by the insurrection of 1916) has come an intensive growth of revolutionary thought". In the event, Pankhurst was disappointed by the outcome: the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 described in the Dreadnought as "a sad, humiliating compromise of the stand for a completely independent Irish Republic".

In India and the Earthly Paradise, published in Bombay in 1926, Pankhurst proposed that the social and family life in ancient India had the essential features of communism: equality, fraternity and mutuality. These were corrupted and overridden by priests, rulers and foreign invaders, up to, and including, the British, who introduced, or reinforced, racial and caste distinctions. The work has been described as a "romantic Communist’ contribution to Indian nationalism" which may have been the "result of [Pankhurst's] contacts with fringe elements of that movement".

There was no publisher for the book in Britain, but it was background to Pankhurst's outspoken interventions on British policy in India. She addressed protests against the failure to grant India meaningful self-government and against the use of British air power against insurgent villages in Burma and the North-West Frontier (a stand she memorialised by working the sculptor Eric Benfield to create, in 1936, the "Stone Bomb" anti-war monument in Woodford Green).

In 1934, the French feminist Gabrielle Duchêne organized the World Assembly of Women, and chaired its World Committee of Women against War and Fascism (CMF: Comité mondial des femmes contre la guerre et le fascisme). Pankurst was among the non-Communist British sponsors of the Committee along with Charlotte Despard, Ellen Wilkinson, Vera Brittain and Storm Jameson, the Six Point Group and the National Union of Women Teachers. In 1935 the Committee of pooled resources with the League against Imperialism and the West-African Union des Travailleurs Nègres to promote freedom of speech and to protest repression throughout the European colonial empires. The Women's World Committee was active in support of the International Committee for the Defense of the Ethiopian People, which held its first meeting on 2 September 1935 before the Italian invasion of Ethiopia was launched in October 1935.

Having already in her Open Letter to Lenin (1922) identified Fascism as a gathering threat in Europe, Pankhurst acted in support of Italian exiles (her partner Silvio Corio among them). She was a founding member of the anti-fascist Friends of Italian Freedom, the Italian Information Bureau and the Women's International Matteotti Committee. Later, in the 1930s, she became a vice-president of the League for the Boycott of Aggressor Nations and the Anti-Nazi Council which sought trade embargoes against Mussolini's Italy and Hitler's Germany.

Correspondence with George Bernard Shaw (who professed to be unmoved by the murder Giacomo Matteotti) suggest that her alarm at the advance fascism moderated a once doctrinaire dismissal of capitalist democracy. To Shaw she wrote (9 July 1935):

You have said that "liberty, as understood by the upholders of capitalism, is a putreyfying corpse". To a large extent you are right, for if people are slaves of economic stress, as so many are everywhere today, they often find themselves unable to exercise the liberty of standing up for their convictions as they would desire, but at least in the non-Fascist countries, most of us are able to do propaganda for our convictions, as you and I do.

Pankhurst wrote to Winston Churchill, her constituency MP, concurring with him on the need for a more resolute foreign policy, but was unable to persuade him of the need for immediate action against the Italian invasion of Ethiopia.

Friend of Ethiopia

From 1936, MI5 monitored Pankhurst's correspondence. In 1940 she wrote to Viscount Swinton, then chairing a committee investigating Fifth Columnists, and enclosed lists of active Fascists still at large and of anti-Fascists who had been interned. A copy of this letter on MI5's file carries a note in Swinton's hand reading: "I should think a most doubtful source of information." Meanwhile, the authorities took an increasingly grim view of her anti-colonial agitation, heightened from 1935 by her support for the Ethiopian cause.

In July 1935, representing the Women's Committee against War and Fascism, with George Brown (League of Coloured Peoples), Reginald Reynolds (No More War movement) and Reginald Bridgeman (League against Imperialism) she organised a public protest in support of Ethiopia at Essex Hall in London. After the Italian invasion commenced in October, she began publication of The New Times and Ethiopia News. As well as reporting Italian atrocities in Ethiopia, It provided an outlet for anti-colonialist writers elsewhere in Africa.

Pankhurst visited Ethiopia in 1944 and observed that, although "liberated" by the British, it was still under effective colonial occupation. Returning from a second visit to Ethiopia in 1950-51 through Eritrea she learned that the British administration had been dismantling many port installations – a policy she denounced in a pamphlet "Why are we destroying the Eritrean ports?" She further unsettled the British authorities by commending a post-colonial union between Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Italian Somaliland. Already in 1947, a Foreign Office official had been moved to comment: "we agree with you in your evident wish that this horrible old harridan should be choked to death with her own pamphlets".

The New Times and Ethiopia News remained in circulation for 20 years and at its height sold 40,000 copies weekly. This included an extensive circulation throughout West Africa and the West Indies. In 1956, the Governor of Jamaica, Sir Hugh Foot, was cautioned that Pankhurst's paper was radicalising a "sect" who called themselves the "Rastafari". It was with the acknowledgement that, on the basis of "our dealings with her in the past over British Somaliland problems", she could be relied upon to "react violently to any suggestion that her paper should not be made available to all and sundry".

Pankhurst did have political contact with T. Ras Makonnen, the West Indian pan-Africanist (a Guyanese of Ethiopian descent), but there is no indication that she was engaged with the new spiritual movement in Jamaica. But such was her hagiography of Haile Selassie that she has since been proposed as the "first white Rastafarian".

Her biographer Patricia Romero suggests that Pankhurst was overwhelmed by Haile Sellassie so that "her republicanism departed from Waterloo station in June 1936, when the emperor’s train rolled in" and she encountered him for the first time. Others explain the devotional relationship, at least in part, by reference to her strong anti-imperialist, anti-fascist and anti-racist sympathies: "Pankhurst loved to defend the underdog and she saw in Selassie much more a defeated victim of fascism than a reactionary monarch".

In 1956, encouraged by Haile Selassie to aid with women’s development, Pankurst and her son Richard moved into an imperial guest house in the Ethiopian capital to Addis Ababa. She raised funds for Ethiopia's first teaching hospital, and wrote extensively on Ethiopian art and culture. She dedicated Ethiopia: A Cultural History (1955) to Haile Selassie: "Guardian of Education, Pioneer of Progress, Leader and Defender of his People in Peace and War".

Death and commemoration

Pankhurst's grave

Pankhurst died in Addis Ababa in 1960, aged 78, and received a full state funeral at which Haile Selassie named her "an honorary Ethiopian". She is the only foreigner buried in front of Holy Trinity Cathedral in Addis Ababa, in a section reserved for patriots of the Italian war.

Her name and picture (and those of 58 other women's suffrage supporters) are on the plinth of the statue of Millicent Fawcett in Parliament Square. There is a two-dimensional silhouette constructed of Corten steel representing Pankhurst as a campaigning suffragette in Mile End Park, Bethnal Green, London, England. She is also the subject of a mural, completed 2018 by Jerome Davenport, on the gable-end of the Lord Morpeth pub on Old Ford Road in Bow, London. It is next door to the house in which she lived between 1914 and 1924 while working with the ELFS and WSF.

Family

Pankhurst objected in principle to entering into a marriage contract and to taking a husband's name. Near the end of the First World War she began living with Italian anarchist Silvio Corio and moved to Woodford Green, where she lived for over 30 years — a blue plaque and Pankhurst Green opposite Woodford tube station commemorate her ties to the area. In 1927, at the age of 45, she gave birth to a son, Richard. As she refused to marry the child's father, her mother broke ties with her and did not speak to her again. Richard became a leading student of Ethiopian history and the first director of the Institute of Ethiopian Studies at Addis Ababa University.

Art

From an early age Pankhurst had an ambition to become a "painter and draughtsman in the service of the great movements for social betterment". She trained at Manchester School of Art (1900–02) and then the Royal College of Art in London (1904–06). As part of her work campaigning for the WSPU, for which she created designs for a range of banners, jewellery and graphic logos. Her motif of the 'angel of freedom', a trumpeting emblem had wider appeal across the campaign for women's suffrage, appearing on banners, political pamphlets, cups and saucers.

An exhibition of her artistic works took place at Tate Modern in 2013–14. Information about the exhibition, together with photographs of the artwork itself, is part of the Sheffield Hallam University Research Archive.

Pankhurst found it difficult to reconcile her artistic vocation with her political activities, eventually deciding that they were incompatible. She said: "Mothers came to me with their wasted little ones. I saw starvation look at me from patient eyes. I knew that I should never return to my art". By 1912, she had all but abandoned her artistic career in order to concentrate on her political activism.

Writings (selection)

• 1911: The Suffragette: The History of the Women's Militant Suffrage Movement, London: Gay & Hancock
• 1913: "Forcibly Fed: The Story of My Four Weeks in Holloway Gaol", McClure's Magazine, August, pp. 87–92.
• 1918: Education of the Masses. London: Worker's Dreadnought Publications.
• 1920: "A constitution for British soviets. Points for a communist programme". Workers' Dreadnought, 19 June.
• 1921: "Soviet Russia as I saw it", Workers' Dreadnought, 16 April.
• 1921: Soviet Russia as I Saw It. London: Worker's Dreadnought Publications.
• 1922: Writ on Cold Slate. Prison Poems by Sylvia Pankhurst. London: Worker's Dreadnought Publications. Reissued 2021 by Smokestack Books.
• 1921: "Free discussion", Workers' Dreadnought, 17 September.
• 1921-1923: "Communism and its Tactics", Workers' Dreadnought (serialisation).
• 1922: "Open Letter to Lenin". Workers Dreadnaught. 4 November.
• 1926: India and the Earthly Paradise. Bombay: Sunshine Publishing House.
• 1927: Delphos or the Future of International Language, London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co
• 1930: Save the Mothers: A plea for measures to prevent the annual loss of about 3000 child-bearing mothers and 20,000 infant lives in England and Wales. London: A.A. Knopf
• 1931: The Suffragette Movement: An Intimate Account of Persons and Ideals. Reissued 1984 by Chatto & Windus.
• 1932 The Home Front: A Mirror to Life in England During the First World War. Reissued 1987 by The Cresset Library.
• 1935: The Life of Emmeline Pankhurst, Boston: Houghton Miflin
• 1951: Ex-Italian Somaliland. Digitized 2006 by the Philosophical Library.
• 1953: with Richard Pankhust, Ethiopia and Eritrea. the last phase of the reunion struggle 1941-52. Woodford Green: Lalibela House.
• 1955: Ethiopia: A Cultural History. Woodford Green: Lalibela House.
• 1987: E. Sylvia Pankhurst - Portrait of a Radical, London: Yale University Press.
• 1993: A Sylvia Pankhurst Reader, ed. by Kathryn Dodd, Manchester University Press.
• 2019: A Suffragette in America, Reflections on Prisoners, Pickets and Political Change, Ed. Katherine Connelly. London: Pluto Press.

Secondary literature

• Richard Pankhurst, Sylvia Pankhurst: Artist and Crusader, An Intimate Portrait (Virago Ltd, 1979), ISBN 0-448-22840-8
• Richard Pankhurst, Sylvia Pankhurst: Counsel for Ethiopia (Hollywood, CA: Tsehai, 2003) London: Global Publishing ISBN 0972317228
• Ian Bullock and Richard Pankhurst (eds) Sylvia Pankhurst. From Artist to Anti-Fascist (Macmillan, 1992) ISBN 0-333-54618-0
• Shirley Harrison, Sylvia Pankhurst, A Crusading Life 1882–1960 (Aurum Press, 2003) ISBN 1854109057
• Sylvia Pankhurst, The Rebellious Suffragette (Golden Guides Press Ltd, 2012) ISBN 1780950187
• Shirley Harrison, Sylvia Pankhurst, Citizen of the World (Hornbeam Publishing Ltd, 2009), ISBN 978-0-9553963-2-8
• Barbara Castle, Sylvia and Christabel Pankhurst (Penguin Books, 1987), ISBN 0-14-008761-3
• Martin Pugh, The Pankhursts: The History of One Radical Family (Penguin Books, 2002) ISBN 0099520435
• Patricia W. Romero, E. Sylvia Pankhurst. Portrait of a Radical (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1987) ISBN 0300036914
• Barbara Winslow, Sylvia Pankhurst: Sexual Politics and Political Activism (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1996); ISBN 0-312-16268-5
• Katherine Connolly, Sylvia Pankhurst. Suffragette, Socialist and Scourge of Empire (Pluto Press, 2013); ISBN 9780745333229
• Katy Norris, Sylvia Pankhurst (Eiderdown Books, 2019); ISBN 978-1-9160416-0-8
• Rachel Holmes, Sylvia Pankhurst. Natural Born Rebel (Francis Boutle Publishers, 2020); ISBN 978-1-4088804-1-8

See also

• Anti-Air War Memorial
• History of feminism
• List of suffragists and suffragettes
• Pankhurst Centre in Manchester
• Sylvia Pankhurst (artwork)
• Women's suffrage in the United Kingdom
• Patricia Lynch

External links

• Sylviapankhurst.com, a comprehensive information resource about Sylvia Pankhurst from Hornbeam Publishing Limited, sponsored by the UK Heritage Lottery Fund
• Sylvia Pankhurst biography, spartacus-educational.com; accessed 4 April 2014
• Sylvia Pankhurst Archive, libcom.org; accessed 4 April 2014
• "Archival material relating to Sylvia Pankhurst". UK National Archives.
• Estelle Sylvia Pankhurst papers archived at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam
• Application for naturalisation of Mrs Margarethe Morgenstern and her husband Erwin, including written plea from Pankhurst
• "Communism or Reforms" at the Wayback Machine (archived 27 October 2009), two articles by Pankhurst and Anton Pannekoek, first published in the Workers Dreadnought in 1922; first published as a pamphlet in 1974 by Workers Voice, a Liverpudlian Communist group.
• Three pamphlets detailing the work of Sylvia Pankhurst as an anti-Bolshevik Communist, "Anti-Parliamentarism and Communism in Britain, 1917–1921" by R.F. Jones, Anti-Parliamentary Communism: The Movement for Workers Councils in Britain, Class War on the Home Front
• Sylvia Pankhurst: Everything is Possible – A documentary that chronicles the life and political campaigns of Sylvia Pankhurst and includes an exclusive interview with her son Richard Pankhurst and his wife Rita. The accompanying website includes images of a large number of security files held on Pankhurst, from the collection at the National Archives.
• Profile, nrs.harvard.edu; accessed 4 April 2014
• Profile, radcliffe.harvard.edu (Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University)
• "I Was Forcibly Fed" by Sylvia Pankhurst, McClure's (August 1913)
• Works by Sylvia Pankhurst at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)