Sylvia Pankhurst, the East London Suffragettes, and the Chicago Strikers Chicago in January 1911 gave Sylvia Pankhurst an extraordinary insight into the condition of workers in America and informed new ways of organizing. Katherine Connelly
n March 1916, the Australian writer Miles Franklin, most famous for her novel My Brilliant Career, sent a letter from war-weary London to her friend Alice Henry. In her letter, she recalled “traipsing around Chicago with you”: the two women were deeply involved in the Chicago labor and feminist movements and had together edited the Chicago-based Women’s Trade Union League publication, Life and Labour.1 Franklin, now on an extended stay in Britain, told Henry that she had recently sought out and written an article about the work of antiwar, socialist suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst in East London.2 Franklin’s letter testifies to “half forgotten” socialist feminist transatlantic friendships that helped inspire Pankhurst to radically change the nature of the British militant suffragette movement, with far-reaching political and personal consequences. Franklin’s article on Sylvia Pankhurst detailed her visit to what she described as “the dark pit of London’s East End”; the poverty in that part of the city had only been exacerbated by the war.3 Pankhurst showed Franklin around the various projects initiated by the East London Federation of Suffragettes, now rechristened the Workers’ Suffrage Federation. Franklin described Pankhurst’s home, and headquarters of the organization, on East London’s Old Ford Road, as a “tumbledown house” with an “impoverished meeting hall” at the back where a costprice restaurant, selling food on a not-for-profit or “at cost” basis, allowed people to access cheap meals (which were surreptitiously made free to the very poorest). She saw what had been the Gunmakers’ Arms pub, opposite a gun making factory, which Pankhurst transformed into the “Mothers’ Arms,” providing a nursery run according to Montessori principles, a home visiting center, free medical care and advice, and free milk and baby food.
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“Socialist feminism hangs, suspended and fragile, in half forgotten memories.” —Sheila Rowbotham, Hidden from History (1973)
4 | CHICAGO HISTORY | Fall 2020
