Sylvia Pankhurst: a crusading life by Shirley Harrison
It was an extraordinary life. Sylvia Pankhurst was born in Manchester, died in Ethiopia, but came to fame in her adopted East End.
A figure of fierce determination who transformed a Bow pub into a woman’s clinic and crèche, she had devoted followers and was attacked by the Government of her day. She won support from major figures in society, yet fell out with her mother and sister over the direction of the Women’s Suffrage movement. George Bernard Shaw was moved to declare ‘there are only two opinions about her. One was that she was miraculous. The other was that she was unbearable.’ A new book Sylvia Pankhurst: a crusading life examines this remarkable figure.
Sylvia Pankhurst was born into radical politics, in Manchester in 1882. It was a bohemian household that played host to activists and artists such as Keir Hardie, George Bernard Shaw, William Morris, Thomas Mann and Annie Besant. Sylvia’s father Richard was a militant feminist who jeopardised his legal career to found the Manchester National Women’s Suffrage Movement in 1865. In 1898, when she was just 16, he died in Sylvia’s arms of a perforated ulcer.
As the new century dawned, Sylvia put aside her ambitions as an artist to spend more and more time working for the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) founded by her mother in 1903.
She was also active in the Labour Party and became a close friend of Keir Hardie, the leader of the party in the Commons. And in 1906 Sylvia gave up her studies at the Royal College of Art and worked full-time for the WSPU. Later that year she went to prison for the first time.
Mother Emmeline and sister Christabel were still heading the WSPU, but the younger sister was increasingly growing away from them. Sylvia was already angry that the WSPU had abandoned its earlier commitment to socialism and disagreed with Emmeline and Christabel’s attempts to gain middle class support by watering down their fight for women’s suffrage – demanding a limited vote for women rather than a universal franchise.
But one of the major splits came over the WPSU’s endorsement of violent direction action. ‘The argument of the broken pane of glass is the most valuable argument in modern politics,’ declared Emmeline Pankhurst in 1912.
Sylvia Pankhurst disagreed. ‘I believe then and always that the movement required not more serious militancy by the few, but a stronger appeal to the great masses to join the struggle.’ Sylvia now put her ideas into practice by attempting to build a mass base for women’s suffrage in London’s East End.
Sylvia Pankhurst’s final break with the WSPU came in 1912 when the movement adopted a policy of widespread arson. Sylvia was ejected from the movement, and now concentrated her efforts on the Bow-based East London Federation of the Suffragettes and its paper the Woman’s Dreadnought.
The outbreak of the First World War caused further conflict between Sylvia and the WSPU. Sylvia was a pacifist and disagreed with the WSPU’s strong support for the war.
During the war Sylvia joined with Dr Barbara Tchaykovsky to open four mother-and-baby clinics in London. Tchaykovsky pointed out that during the first year of the war 75,000 British soldiers (2.2 per cent of the combatants) had been killed. However, during the same period more than 100,000 babies in Britain (12.2 per cent of those born) had died.
In 1915 nearly 1,000 mothers and their babies were seen at Sylvia’s clinics. Now came the unlikely transformation of Bow’s Eleanor Arms pub into the Mother’s Arms clinic and crèche. Local politician George Lansbury helped to raise funds for an organisation whose milk bill alone was over £1,000 a year. More initiatives followed in her attempt to build a solid base for her movement. The Cost Price Restaurant in Old Ford Road aimed to do just what it said – provide cost-price meals for poverty stricken East Enders who could not otherwise afford nourishing meals. Bow’s Toy Factory aimed to pay women the same as men were earning. And there was her Bow Road shop fronted ‘in letters of gold’ proclaiming ‘votes for women’.
Sylvia was in and out of prison, weakened by hunger strikes. By the 1920s her dozen years in the East End were coming to an end. She began living with Italian socialist Silvo Corio and gave birth to a son, Richard Pankhurst, in 1927. She upset her mother by refusing to marry Corio or take his name.
Though the vote for universal suffrage was won, Sylvia remained active in politics throughout her life. In the 1930s she supported the republicans in Spain, helped Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany and led the campaign against the Italian occupation of Ethiopia.
And it was to Ethiopia that she finally moved, following Corio’s death. Emperor Haile Selassie had never forgotten her support in the thirties and invited her to make her home in Addis Ababa. Here she died, in 1960, and was accorded a state funeral.
Sylvia Pankhurst: a crusading life by Shirley Harrison, published by Aurum, ISBN 1854109057, £20