Like Mother, Like Daughter: Emmeline Pankhurst daughter Sylvia Pankhrst

Born in Manchester in 1882, Sylvia was the second daughter of Emmeline Pankhurst, founder of the Women’s Social & Political Union; the movement known as the Suffragettes which campaigned to get women the vote. Sylvia’s father was the barrister and legal reformer Dr Richard Pankhurst, and regular visitors to her childhood home included the designer and socialist William Morris and the founder of the Labour Party, Keir Hardie.

Sylvia herself was an early force in the campaign for women’s right to vote. She was repeatedly imprisoned for her protests – more than any other Suffragette – but she had many other interests, both idealogical and cultural. Sylvia was a gifted painter and graphic designer who had trained at the Royal College of Art. Influenced by Walter Crane, William Morris and others, her early paintings and decorative art were of very high quality, and she created some memorable designs for the Suffragette movement.

At the Royal College of Art she discovered that most of the scholarships were only offered to men, but her protests were ignored even after Keir Hardie brought the matter up in Parliament. She was commissioned to decorate Pankhurst Hall in Salford, erected by the Independent Labour Party and named after her father, only to find later to her disgust that women were not to be admitted to the building. It was this discovery of Sylvia’s that spurred her mother Emmeline into founding the WSPU.

Sylvia abandoned her artistic career, however, in favour of altruistic work, initially after discovering the appalling conditions suffered by women in the East End just before the first world war. ‘Wherever there is a need,’ she said, ‘there is my country’.

She was imprisoned again in 1920, for the publication of political articles in the Workers’ Dreadnought – actually written for her by the American journalist Claude McKay. She published literature all her life; not only political however. She had a lifelong interest in the care of mothers and babies, and in 1930 she published 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.

Meanwhile, she had met an Italian revolutionary called Silvio Corio. Born in Turin in 1877, he had trained in Italy as a printer and typographer but was also a journalist with an interest in politics. They fell in love, and went to live together in Woodford from 1924 until Silvio died in 1954. Their son Richard was born in 1927.

For the rest of her life she remained constantly active, campaigning against political oppression and promoting worldwide human rights. When she finally moved to Ethiopia in 1956 at the request of Emperor Haile Selassie, she turned her attentions once again to improving conditions for mothers and babies, and campaigned to open a specialist women’s hospital. On her death, she was given an Ethiopian state funeral, and was buried in a place reserved for Ethiopian heroes.

POLITICS & WORLD AFFAIRS

Throughout her life, Sylvia Pankhurst was driven by her social conscience and never stopped trying to think of ways in which society could be improved. Her political ideals were never static, developing over time as her awareness of the world increased.

With her mother and sister she had fought for women’s suffrage but Sylvia believed strongly in universal suffrage, feeling that the more participation people had in deciding their own destiny, the sooner they would see a fairer society. However, winning the vote was not enough, and her own work would continue long after that.

After leaving the Women’s Social & Political Union in 1913, Sylvia went to work for the Labour Party, to drum up more support in the East End of London. She also became involved in the international women’s peace movement, bringing warring nations together at an international conference. The International Congress of Women met in the Hague in 1915 to protest against the World War; some 1500 women attended, coming from Europe and the United States. Afterwards, the Women’s Peace Party was formed.

When it came to political lobbying, Sylvia aimed high. George Bernard Shaw wrote of her later, ‘Like Joan of Arc she lectured, talked, won and over-ruled statesmen and prelates. She pooh-poohed the plans of generals leading their troops to victory. She had unbounded and quite unconcealed contempt for official opinion, judgement and authority.’

In 1918 Sylvia was invited to Moscow by Lenin, who had become leader of the Russian Communist Party after the 1917 Revolution. When World War I ended she had turned her hopes towards the new Russia; seeing Communism as the world’s future. Lenin and Sylvia did not see eye to eye about everything, however.

By this time Sylvia and a revolutionary Italian journalist, Silvio Corio, were working together for Communism, and Sylvia’s magazine the Workers’ Dreadnought (which she had formerly called the Woman’s Dreadnought) their voice in Britain.

Sylvia became a keen Anti-Fascist when, in northern Italy, she saw Fascist groups using violence against other political groups and members of the public. Following the murder in 1924 by Fascists of the Italian Socialist Deputy, Giacomo Matteotti, she founded an Anti-Fascist pressure group, the Women’s International Matteotti Committee.

Continuing her fight for world peace, back hom in Woodford she erected a monument against aerial warfare; she felt strongly that bombing innocent people from the sky was not a fair way to fight. In the 1930s she supported the Republicans in Spain, then helped Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany. Suspecting the lives of Ethiopians could be threatened by Italian occupation, Sylvia campaigned against it, but did not get the support of the British Government she hoped for. Sir Winston Churchill, MP for Woodford, had a long-running exchange with her about this in 1936 on the letters page of the Woodford Times.

Sylvia remained active in politics throughout her life, taking on specific causes that moved her including anti-racism. She was, incidentally, the first person in Britain to employ a black journalist. Britain remained suspicious of her, along with many other political figures who had at some time been allied to the Communist Party; in the MI5 Archives is a file dated 1948 discussing strategies for ‘Muzzling the tiresome Miss Sylvia Pankhurst’. Her efforts on behalf of Ethiopia, however, were never forgotten in that country, where she was eventually to spend the last years of her life.

Sylvia’s Mother:
EMMELINE PANKHURST (1858–1928)

Born Emmeline Goulden, Sylvia’s mother met her husband, 24 years her elder, when she was only 20. Emmeline had been brought up with a strong social awareness. Her father, Robert Goulden, had campaigned against slavery and the Corn Laws. Her mother, Sophia Crane, was an early feminist and had taken her to women’s suffrage meetings in the early 1870s.

With her husband, Emmeline founded the Women’s Franchise League in 1889 and became an active member of the Independent Labour Party formed by Keir Hardie in 1893 (which by 1895 had 35,000 members).

In 1903 she started the Women’s Social and Political Union, which began its militant campaigns in 1905, sometimes using violence in an effort to win women the vote. In 1907 she left Manchester for London. For the next seven years she was repeatedly imprisoned for her activities; her actions and frequent hunger strikes inspiring women all over the country to bring attention to the cause by committing acts of civil disobedience. On the outbreak of war in 1914, the Government released all suffragettes from prison in return for the WSPU agreeing to cease militant activities. From then on, Emmeline and her daughter Christabel turned their attentions to the war effort; also fighting for women’s right to contribute to it by doing work that had previously been the domain of men, freeing men to go and fight.

In the preceding years, Sylvia had become uncomfortable about the increasing violence used by the Suffragettes such as arson attacks and a rift developed, alienating her from Emmeline and Christabel. The WSPU abandoned its early commitment to Socialism, but Sylvia herself did not. Neither did Sylvia condone the war effort; she was later to object to enforced conscription which was introduced in 1916.

Source:  SylviaPankhurst.com