SYLVIA PANKHURST - A Formidable Campaigner

By Margaret Brecknell

Above: Sylvia Pankhurst c.1930 Photo Credit: LSE Library

Sylvia Pankhurst was born 140 years ago this month in the Manchester suburb of Old Trafford. Together with her mother, Emmeline, and elder sister, Christabel, she is rightly celebrated today for the pivotal part she played in helping women win the right to vote.

Yet, this only tells part of the story. Sylvia believed passionately in the suffragettes’ cause, but she also campaigned vigorously on a range of other issues. This brought her into conflict with her mother and sister and for much of her adult life she became estranged from her own family.

Estelle Sylvia Pankhurst was born on 5th May 1882. Long before he married Emmeline in late 1879 (she was his junior by 24 years), her father Richard had campaigned actively on improving women’s legal rights. Emmeline had been interested in the topic of women’s suffrage ever since as a child she had started to read her mother’s copies of the Women’s Suffrage Journal. Along with her siblings, therefore, Sylvia grew up in a household where involvement in politics and the suffrage movement was viewed very much as the norm.

early age that “If you do not work for other people, you will not have been worth the upbringing”. She showed much youthful promise as an artist and won a scholarship to study at the Manchester School of Art, before, in 1904, moving to the capital to attend the prestigious Royal College of Art. By her mid-twenties, however, she had abandoned any hope of pursuing a career as a full-time artist to work for the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), alongside her mother and sister. Sylvia’s creative talents were soon put to another use, as she designed the banners, murals, hats and brooches, all in the green, white and purple colours of the suffragettes, which became such iconic symbols of the women’s movement.

The WSPU’s origins lay in a meeting organised in October 1903 by Emmeline Pankhurst at the then family home in Nelson Street, Manchester. Richard and Emmeline had both been involved in the Labour Party movement ever since its beginnings in the early 1890s. However, Christabel later recalled that her mother had become so frustrated regarding the Labour Party’s lack of support for the women’s suffrage movement that she invited a group of female party members to her home, declaring that “Women, we must do the work ourselves. We must have an independent women’s movement. Come to my house tomorrow and we will arrange it”.

If the WSPU’s early members expected the formation of this new organisation to generate more media coverage for the cause, they were sadly disappointed. It soon became apparent that a more direct approach was needed to attract the attention they desired. Thus began the campaign of civil disobedience and militant action, for which the movement became famous.

Along with many other WSPU members, Sylvia Pankhurst often found herself on the wrong side of the law. After leading a protest meeting in the lobby of the House of Commons in October 1906, she was arrested for the first time and served a twoweek sentence in Holloway Prison. This was just the first of multiple occasions on which she was arrested and imprisoned.

From 1909 onwards, imprisoned suffragettes began to refuse food as a further form of protest. Sylvia staged many such hunger strikes during her time in prison and, as a consequence, was subjected to the horrific experience of force-feeding. She wrote several accounts of her experiences, often in the form of letters written on toilet paper which were then smuggled out of prison.

One such account appeared in the Manchester Guardian in 1913. “I was determined to fight against it with all my strength”, she begins. “I thought that when the doctors came I would throw things at them if they dared to enter my cell to torture me. But when the door opened, it was six of the women officers…I struggled as hard as I could, but before long they had got me on the bed, holding me by the ankles, knees and shoulders”. She then proceeds to describe in graphic detail the inhumane process of tubefeeding, which made for deeply uncomfortable reading then and still does today. Accounts like this did generate more public support at the time for the suffragettes. For modern readers they provide an invaluable insight into the lengths to which these remarkable women were prepared to go for their cause.

Despite all this personal sacrifice, Sylvia increasingly found herself at odds with her mother and elder sister. Emmeline and Christabel were at pains to run the WSPU as an independent organisation with no affiliation to a

particular political party. However, Sylvia did not sever connections with the labour movement, but remained a committed socialist. After leaving art college, she remained in London and became increasingly involved in the work to improve social conditions for working-class women in the East End.

It is often forgotten that when the militant suffragette movement first became active in the early 1900s, it was not just women who were disenfranchised. Before the Representation of the People Act in 1918, an estimated two in five men were excluded from voting because they did not meet the propertyowning qualifications then in place. Whereas Emmeline and Christabel focused their attention on achieving for women equal voting rights with men, Sylvia wanted the WSPU to campaign for universal suffrage and to champion the rights of all women, irrespective of their social and financial status.

Matters came to a head in late 1913 when Sylvia was accused of tarnishing the reputation of the WSPU by speaking at a rally held at London’s Albert Hall in support of Irish workers who were involved in a major industrial dispute in Dublin. She was expelled from the WPSU and founded her own militant feminist organisation, the East London Federation of the Suffragettes.

With the outbreak of World War I the following year, the differences of opinion between family members became even more apparent. Emmeline and Christabel suspended their campaign to focus on the war effort and became strongly patriotic. As a pacificist, Sylvia was more intent on continuing with the suffragette cause and became an outspoken critic of the Military Service Act, which introduced compulsory conscription.

By the time the Representation of the People Act was passed in 1918, which gave certain women over the age of 30 the right to vote for the first time, Sylvia’s aims had expanded significantly. She now declared her determination “to secure human suffrage, namely a vote for every woman and man of full age, and to win social and economic freedom for the people”. Reflecting her more openly left-wing stance, the East London Federation of the Suffragettes first changed its name to the Workers’ Suffrage Federation and then eventually the Workers’ Socialist Federation.

Sylvia had faced much criticism in 1917 for lending her support to the Bolsheviks during the Russian Revolution. Three years later, around the same time that she helped form the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), this controversy resurfaced when details of her correspondence with the new Russian leader, Lenin, were leaked to the press. One letter from Sylvia begins, “Dear Comrade Lenin, I have been wanting a long time to have a talk with you. The labour movement in England is being ruined under my eyes by parliamentary and municipal politics…It is impossible to create a revolutionary temper amongst the masses whilst they are occupied entirely by the thought of electoral victories”. She ends by declaring “I cannot help thinking that if you were here, you would say: Devote all your energies to direct revolutionary action and leave tinkering with the political machine alone”.

Perhaps, inevitably, the proCommunist views which Sylvia expressed here and elsewhere during this period led her once more into conflict with the British authorities. In October 1920, she appeared in court, accused of the serious charge of

“sedition”, and was sent to prison for six months. The magistrate’s remarks when sentencing her that “in his opinion the Government had taken a most lenient course in proceeding against her under the particular section of the charge which limited the sentence” were widely reported at the time.

Just as Sylvia had fallen out with her mother and sister regarding the way in which the WSPU should be run, she eventually cut ties with the CPGB. By 1927 the newspapers were reporting that “Sylvia Pankhurst, who was inclined to be ‘Red’, has now recanted and is devoting herself to the invention of an international language which she claims to be better than Esperanto”.

By the end of the same year, however, Sylvia was attracting criticism again when, at the age of 45, she gave birth to an illegitimate son, Richard. She and the baby’s father, an Italian anarchist called Silvio Corio, were in a long-term relationship, but the fact that the couple refused to marry caused a great deal of moral outrage, not least on the part of Sylvia’s own mother. Emmeline severed all remaining contact with her daughter and the pair were never reconciled, as Emmeline died only six months later.

Sylvia remained active in politics throughout her life. During the 1930s, she and her partner, Silvio Corio, became involved in the antifascist movement. When Corio’s native Italy invaded Ethiopia in 1935, Sylvia began a new publication, the Ethiopian News, through which she aimed to drum up support for the Ethiopian cause and the country’s exiled leader, Haile Selassie. Sylvia’s World War II years were spent in helping Jewish refugees flee Germany and continuing to campaign against fascism.

In 1953, an interview with Sylvia appeared in the Liverpool Echo. She had reached the age of 70 by this time, but is described as still working up to 14-hour days, responding to the colossal amount of correspondence she continued to receive from women seeking help. She expressed disappointment that the women of the 1950s were not “fighting for peace as we fought for the vote” and believed that even then too much violence was shown on TV. With great foresight, she also predicted that “we ought to be able to tune in to the House of Commons whenever we feel like it”.

Her long-time partner, Silvio Corio, died not long after this interview was published. Sylvia and her son, Richard, were invited by Emperor Haile Selassie to live in Ethiopia and she continued to work tirelessly on schemes to improve health and education facilities in the African country, as well as championing Ethiopian independence. In her later years she resumed contact with her sister Christabel, before the latter’s death in February 1958.

Following her death in the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa in September 1960, Sylvia was given a state funeral. Possibly because of Sylvia’s more radical politics, her contribution to the women’s suffrage movement in this country has, perhaps, not been so widely recognised as that of her mother and elder sister. Yet, this courageous and formidable campaigner deserves to be remembered for the challenges she overcame and the sacrifices she made in her quest to make the world a fairer place.