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Pankhurst Pankhurst Edits are in bold

Sources:

Bell, Geoffrey. Sylvia Pankhurst and the Irish Revolution. Revolutionary Politics. January 2016. Retrieved 2020-04-22.

Ian Bullock and Richard Pankhurst. Sylvia Pankhurst: From Artist to Anti-Fascist. 1992. Retrieved 2020-04-22.

Early life

Estelle Sylvia Pankhurst (she later dropped her first forename) was born at Drayton Terrace, Old Trafford, Manchester, a daughter of Richard Pankhurst and Emmeline Pankhurst, who both later became founding members of the Independent Labour Party and were much concerned with women's rights. Pankhurst and her sisters, Christabel and Adela, attended Manchester High School for Girls, and all three became suffragists. Growing up in Manchester, Pankhurst and her siblings were exposed to various types of fine art. At a very young age, Pankhurst was interested in the arts, which led her to attend the Royal College of Art to pursue a career in this profession. Between 1904 and 1906 while attending the school she witnessed the lack of gender equality in the art profession.

In 1912, Pankhurst along with her, friends, organized the East London Confederation of Suffragettes, which later became a branch of WSPU.

Sylvia Pankhurst trained 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.

Suffragism

Pankhurst protesting in Trafalgar Square, London, against British policy in India, 1932.

In 1906, Sylvia Pankhurst started to work full-time for the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) with her sister Christabel and their mother. She applied her artistic talents on behalf of the WSPU, devising its 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 spent time in Leicester where she was welcomed by Alice Hawkins who she knew through the Independent Labour Party. They were soon joined by Mary Gawthorpe and they established a WSPU presence in Leicester.

In contrast to Emmeline and Christabel, Pankhurst retained an affiliation with the labour movement and concentrated her activity on local campaigning. She and Amy Bull founded the East London Federation of the WSPU. Pankhurst also 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.

On November 1, 1913 Pankhurst spoke at Albert Hall in support of the Dublin workers who had recently gone on strike in order to promote a more humane society. After this incident, Pankhurst's relationship with her family became very strained because of Pankhurst's involvement with the Labour Party. Pankhurst's' family believed that her aligning with the Labour party went against WSPU identification of being independent. For this reason her sister Christabel removed Pankhurst from their union because of a belief that she was tarnishing their name.

Like many suffragists she spent time in prison, being arrested 15 times while campaigning for the rights of women. Pankhurst was aged 24 when she went to prison for the first time. During the period between February 1913 and July 1914 Sylvia Pankhurst, was arrested eight times, each time being repeatedly force-fed. She gave several accounts of her experience of force feeding and time in prison. One such account was written for McClure's Magazine, a popular American periodical, in 1913.

Pankhurst had been given a Hunger Strike Medal 'for Valour' by WSPU.

By 1914, Pankhurst had many disagreements with the route the WSPU was taking, that is, campaigning by direct action without threat to life. It had become independent of any political party, but she wanted it to become an explicitly socialist organisation tackling wider issues than women's suffrage, and aligned with the Independent Labour Party. She had a close personal relationship with the Labour politician Keir Hardie. On 1 November 1913, Pankhurst showed her support in the Dublin Lockout and spoke at a meeting in London. The members of the WSPU, particularly her sister Christabel, did not agree with her actions, and consequently expelled her from the union. Her expulsion led to her founding of the East London Federation of Suffragettes in 1914 which over the years evolved politically and changed its name accordingly, first to the Women's Suffrage Federation and then to the Workers' Socialist Federation. She founded the newspaper of the WSF, Women's Dreadnought, and employed Mary Phillips to write for it, this subsequently became the Workers' Dreadnought. The federation campaigned against the First World War and some of its members hid conscientious objectors from the police.