Estelle Sylvia Pankhurst (; 5 May 1882 – 27 September 1960) was an English feminist and socialist activist and writer. Following encounters with women-led labour activism in the United States, she worked to organise working-class women in London's East End. This, together with her refusal in 1914 to enter into a wartime political truce with the government, caused her to break with the suffragette leadership of her mother and sister, Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst. Pankhurst welcomed the Russian Revolution and conferred in Moscow with Lenin. But as an advocate of workers' control, she rejected the Leninist party line and criticised the Bolshevik regime.

Pankhurst was vocal in her support for Irish independence; for anti-colonial struggle throughout the British Empire; and for anti-fascist solidarity in Europe. Following its invasion by Italy in 1935, she was devoted to the cause of Ethiopia where, after the Second World War, she spent her remaining years as a guest of the restored emperor Haile Selassie. The international circulation of her pan-Africanist weekly The New Times and Ethiopia News was regarded by British colonial authorities as a factor in the development of African nationalism, and of the Rastafari movement in Jamaica.

Early life

Estelle Sylvia Pankhurst (she later dropped her first forename) was born at Drayton Terrace, Old Trafford, Manchester, to Emmeline Pankhurst (née Goulden) and Dr. Richard Pankhurst.

Richard Pankhurst had been a founding member in 1872 of the National Society for Women's Suffrage, and played a role in drafting legislation that gave unmarried women householders a vote in local elections, and married women control over their property and earnings. According to his daughter, he was also distinguished by his support for Irish Home Rule, being "the first English Parliamentary candidate to pledge himself to Irish self-government when he stood at a by-election in Manchester in 1883".

The family home, for a period in Russell Square in London, hosted radical intelligentsia from both Britain and abroad. These included the Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin, the Communard Louise Michel, and the Fabian Annie Besant.

In 1893, Pankhurst's parents joined the Scottish miner Keir Hardie, a family friend, as founding members of the Independent Labour Party (ILP).

Pankhurst and her sisters, Christabel and Adela, attended Manchester High School for Girls. In 1903, Pankhurst went on to train as an artist at the Manchester School of Art.

In 1904, Pankhurst won a scholarship to the Royal College of Art (RCA) in London, but she was incensed to learn that of 16 scholarships awarded by the college each year, 13 were reserved for men, and that, in response to a parliamentary question, Keir Hardie should be told that the authorities "did not contemplate any change".

Suffragette

thumb|left|Sylvia Pankhurst on hunger strike carried by supporters, London, June 1914

The Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) was founded as an independent women's movement on 10 October 1903 in the family's Nelson Street home in Manchester. Pankhurst's sister Christabel had persuaded a group of ILP women that women had to do the work of emancipation themselves, and that they needed a movement free of party affiliation.

In 1907 she toured industrial towns in England and Scotland, painting portraits of working-class women in their working environments. She was later to write that she witnessed "so much distress", that she felt unable to return to her "beloved profession".

Pankhurst 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. It included her witness account of Black Friday 18 November 1910, in which 300 women marched to the Houses of Parliament as part of their campaign to press for voting rights under the Conciliation Bill, and were met with violence, some of it sexual, from the Metropolitan Police and male bystanders.

In 1912, Pankhurst led a march on Mountjoy Prison in Dublin in solidarity with two English WPSU militants who had violently sought to disrupt the Prime Minister H. H. Asquith's visit to the Irish capital. They had thrown a hatchet, to which a suffrage message was attached, into the carriage in which he was travelling with John Redmond and had attempted to set fire to the theatre in which the Prime Minister was to speak.

In June 1914, supporters carried her to the entrance to the Strangers' Gallery of the House of Commons where she announced that she would continue her hunger strike until Asquith agreed to receive a deputation of East London women. After listening to them pay tribute to the work Pankhurst had done "in arousing the women of the East End to the importance of the vote in their daily lives", and describe their hardships, the Prime Minister reiterated the government's position: votes for women would have to await a general democratic reform of the franchise. Writing letters home, mostly to Keir Hardie, she described herself as having to persuade her largely middle-class hosts that sweated female labour and mother-child poverty were as much a feature of the New World as the Old. She related her experience of going into factories, workshops, workhouses and prisons, of observing the application of Taylorist principles (rendering workers "part of the machinery"), and of witnessing in the South the virtual criminalisation of African Americans.

That same month, in New York City where she addressed a rally in Carnegie Hall, Pankhurst met the pioneer socialist feminist Margaret Sanger, together with a twenty-year-old Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. A year later, Flynn was to be the "Bread and Roses" strategist for the Industrial Workers of the World in the Lawrence textile strike. Back in New York City at the beginning of 1912, Pankhurst observed in laundry workers the same ability to overcome through collective action the racial, ethnic and sexual divisions systematically exploited by employers. Returning to London with Emerson, it was an example she sought to replicate in London's East End.

East London socialist

In a first show of independence, and with the support of Keir Hardie, Julia Scurr, Eveline Haverfield, Nellie Cressall, and George Lansbury, Pankhurst renamed the East London Federation of the WPSU, the East London Federation of Suffragettes. Although it was to remain a women's—and women-led—emancipatory movement, it was opened to trade unionists and to men. In this spirit, in November 1913, Pankhurst spoke at the Albert Hall, alongside James Connolly, in support of the men and women of the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union locked-out by Dublin employers.

In January 1914, accompanied by Nora Smyth, Pankhurst visited her sister Christabel in Paris, where she was taking refuge from the Cat and Mouse Act, to discuss the future of the ELFS. Christabel was insistent upon an independent, women-only WPSU, and was incredulous at her sister's unwillingness to attack socialists unpledged to women's suffrage. Pankhurst was equally insistent on supporting popular and labour struggles, and critical of what she considered to the WPSU's social elitism. The sisters agreed that they and their organisations should go their separate ways. Provisionally titled Workers' Mate, the newspaper first appeared as The Woman's Dreadnought. Nora Smyth (who helped pay the bills) and Mary Phillips were the principal contributors, with Smyth illustrating the paper with her photographs of domestic East End poverty.

In the first edition of the paper (8 March 1914), Pankhurst's editorial defended their insistence on building a working-class suffragette campaign: as did Dora Montefiore who had left the WSPU in 1906, and had also spoken on behalf of the Dublin workers at the Albert Hall. The ELFS supported labour struggles and organised rent strikes.

Pankhurst retained the confidence of some WSPU veterans. She was invited by Elizabeth McCracken to Belfast, where Christabel's wartime directive had put a halt to a particularly militant campaign, to speak in support of equal pay for women doing war work. It was a demand Pankhurst championed along with universal food rationing, debt relief and improved allowances for soldiers wives. By helping to shift some the costs of the war off the back of women and poor, she believed that these were measures that might hasten its end.

At the same time, in the East End docks community, the ELFS/WSF sought to offer women practical assistance. They organised "cost-price" canteens, employment in a toy-making cooperative (whose product was in high demand in West-End shops), and (in what had been a pub renamed from the Gunmakers' Arms to the Mothers' Arms) childcare offered on Montessori principles, a home visiting centre, and free medical care and advice.

In 1915, Pankhurst supported the International Women's Peace Congress, held at The Hague. Her sister Christabel, meanwhile, seconded British diplomatic efforts, travelling to Russia after the February 1917 Revolution to rally support for the country's continued participation in the war.

The 28 July 1917 edition of her paper appeared under a new title Worker's Dreadnought—WSF members "realised that solidarity between men and women was essential if they were going to win their fight"— and with a new strap-line, "Socialism. Internationalism, Votes for All". It printed, three days in advance of The Times, Siegfried Sassoon's "wilful defiance of military authority": his statement that having become "a War of aggression and conquest", the conflict was being "deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it". It led to a police raid on the paper's offices. The issue of 6 October 1917 advocating a peace referendum among the troops, was destroyed and the type broken up. Reflecting her growing belief, in the wake of the October Revolution in Russia, that only Soviets could form the "guiding and co-ordinating machinery" for a socialist transformation, Pankhurst refused an invitation to stand for the Sheffield Hallam constituency in the December 1918 "Coupon election". The WSF did go on to support other socialist candidates,

Revolutionary

Left communist

By March 1919, Pankhurst was insisting that the choice was clear: socialists had to build "an industrial republic on Soviet lines", and abandon the Parliamentary system. Lenin, who in his 1920 thesis Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder profiled the WSF, advised Pankhurst that, tactically, the blanket rejection of parliamentarianism is a "mistake". What she called Household Soviets would ensure that "mothers and those who are organisers of the family life of the community" are "adequately represented, and may take their due part in the management of society" that gained Moscow's approval. In July, after a six-month tour through revolutionary Europe , stopping in Bologna, Italy expressly to observe a soviet in action, Pankhurst had smuggled herself into Soviet Russia to attend the Second Congress of the Comintern. There Lenin personally persuaded her that her objections were less important than unity, and that it would be possible for her to maintain a platform within the CPGB.

In September, with Willie Gallacher Pankhurst called a conference, inviting representatives of the Shop Stewards Movement, the CPGB, the Scottish Worker's Committee and the Glasgow Communist Group. All the groups at the conference bar Guy Aldred's Glasgow Communist Group agreed to merge with the Communist Party of Great Britain in January 1921.

While in Holloway, Pankhurst wrote poems published in 1922 as Writ on Cold Slate. "Above all" they are the stories of her cellmates – "the young and the old, the homeless and the hungry, mothers, pregnant women and babies born in captivity – 'dregs from the ancient system's wheel of waste. Pankhurst refused to hand over control of the Workers Dreadnought to the CPGB, and was expelled. She had serialised Rosa Luxemburg's 1918 critique of Bolshevik policy, and had herself repeated Luxemburg's charge that in sanctioning the division of the land into small peasant holdings, the Bolsheviks had betrayed the revolution. She had also opened the Dreadnought to Alexandra Kollontai's "The Workers' Opposition", a critique of the developing Soviet bureaucracy, and to appeals from anarchists in Bolshevik prisons.

By July 1923, Pankhurst concluded that "the term 'dictatorship of the proletariat' has been used to justify the dictatorship of a party clique of officials over their own party members and over the people at large". Socialism, as interpreted by the Bolsheviks, had been stripped of its emancipatory promise. In one of her last contributions to Dreadnought on the subject of Soviet regime she wrote: that Communism can be achieved only by workers "acting where they stand in the process of production", the Dreadnought group called for an "All-Workers Revolutionary Union" (AWRU). This was to organise on industrial unionist lines, with recallable delegates elected, in rising succession, from workshops, factories, districts, and regions to national councils. With this One Big Union programme, in February 1922 they formed themselves as the Communist Workers' Party (CWP). and employing its first black correspondent, the Jamaican writer Claude McKay. With McKay, Pankhurst shared outrage at the Daily Herald's campaign against the French employment of black colonial troops in Germany.

In Australia, and after a militant career with the WSPU, Pankhurst's younger sister, Adela Walsh, appeared to have moved in similar direction. Having organised during the war for the Women's Peace Army, in 1920 she became a founding member of the Communist Party of Australia. But following her own disillusionment with Leninist party politics, she was to move to the far right, becoming a leading figure in the Australia First Movement.

Writer

With her partner, the Italian libertarian socialist Silvio Erasmus Corio, Pankhurst retired to a cottage in then rural Woodford Green, Essex (now in the London Borough of Redbridge).

While Corio ran a tearoom, Pankhurst researched and wrote an eclectic series of books: an anti-colonial historical-cultural treatise. India and the Earthly Paradise (1926); 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 (1930); her largely autobiographical accounts, The Suffragette Movement (1931) and The Home Front (1932); and a biography of her mother, The Life of Emmeline Pankhurst (1935), who, since the birth of Pankhurst's son Richard in 1927, had broken off all contact.

Anti-imperialism and anti-fascism

thumb|left|Pankhurst protesting in [[Trafalgar Square against British policies in India, 1932]]

While the Dreadnought did not take a consistent line on the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin, an editorial written by Pankhurst on the event stated in part that: "Justice can make but one reply to the Irish rebellion and that is the demand that Ireland should be allowed to govern itself".

In commentary on the Irish War of Independence (1919-1921), the Dreadnought suggested that "with their industries being destroyed by English capitalists, and with their lives always in danger from the military . . . Irish men and women are compelled to become Communists in word and deed". The paper was open to assertions of James Connolly's daughter Nora that with "the awakening of a revolutionary spirit (caused by the insurrection of 1916) has come an intensive growth of revolutionary thought". In the event, Pankhurst was disappointed by the outcome: the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 described in the Dreadnought as "a sad, humiliating compromise of the stand for a completely independent Irish Republic". The work has been described as a romantic Communist' contribution to Indian nationalism" which may have been the "result of [Pankhurst's] contacts with fringe elements of that movement". Though she was unable to find a publisher for the work in Britain, Pankhurst continued to involve herself on Indian affairs. She participated in protests against the slow progress of the Indian Home Rule movement and criticised the Royal Air Force's use of aerial bombing during the Saya San Rebellion in Burma and Pink's War in the North-West Frontier. In 1935, Pankhurst commissioned the Anti–Air War Memorial in Woodford Green, London as "a protest against war in the air".

In 1934, the French feminist Gabrielle Duchêne organized the World Assembly of Women, and chaired its World Committee of Women against War and Fascism (CMF; ). Pankhurst was among the non-Communist British sponsors of the Committee along with Charlotte Despard, Ellen Wilkinson, Vera Brittain and Storm Jameson, the Six Point Group and the National Union of Women Teachers. In 1935 the Committee pooled resources with the League against Imperialism and the West-African (Union of Black Workers) to promote freedom of speech and to protest repression throughout the European colonial empires. The Women's World Committee was active in support of the International Committee for the Defence of the Ethiopian People, which held its first meeting on 2 September 1935 before the Italian invasion of Ethiopia was launched in October 1935. To George Bernard Shaw (who professed to be "unmoved" by the murder of Giacomo Matteotti) she wrote (9 July 1935):

Pankhurst wrote to Winston Churchill, her constituency MP, concurring with him on the need for a more resolute foreign policy, but was unable to persuade him of the need for immediate action against the Italian invasion of Ethiopia.

In 2004, the release of previously classified government files revealed that throughout the 1930s and 1940s MI5 had monitored Ms Pankhurst's movements and intercepted her letters and telephone calls.

Involvement in Ethiopia

From 1936, MI5 monitored Pankhurst's correspondence. In 1940 she wrote to Viscount Swinton, then chairing a committee investigating Fifth Columnists, and enclosed lists of active Fascists still at large and of anti-Fascists who had been interned. A copy of this letter on MI5's file carries a note in Swinton's hand reading: "I should think a most doubtful source of information." Meanwhile, the authorities took an increasingly grim view of her anti-colonial agitation, heightened from 1935 as she became "the main protagonist of the 'print activism in the cause of Ethiopia.

In July 1935, representing the Women's Committee against War and Fascism, Pankhurst together with George Brown (League of Coloured Peoples), Reginald Reynolds (No More War movement) and Reginald Bridgeman (League against Imperialism) organised a public protest in support of Ethiopia at Essex Hall in London. After the Italian invasion commenced in October, she began publication of The New Times and Ethiopia News. As well as reporting Italian atrocities in Ethiopia (and from July 1936, Francoist atrocities in Spain), it provided an outlet for anti-colonialist writers elsewhere in Africa.

Pankhurst visited Ethiopia in 1944 after it had been liberated by Allied forces from Italian occupation, and criticised what she perceived as British ambitions to take over the region. In another visit which lasted from 1950 to 1951, she visited Eritrea, which was then under a British military administration. Pankhurst observed the administration's dismantlement of Italian-built port installations in Eritrea, which were sent to India and Kenya as war reparations, criticising the policy in a pamphlet titled Why are we destroying the Eritrean ports? In opposition to the British authorities, she supported Eritrea, Djibouti and Somaliland becoming part of Ethiopia. In 1947, a Foreign Office official commented that "we agree with you ... that this horrible old harridan should be choked to death with her own pamphlets".

The New Times and Ethiopia News remained in circulation for 20 years and at its height sold 40,000 copies weekly. This included an extensive circulation throughout West Africa and the West Indies. In 1956, the Governor of Jamaica, Sir Hugh Foot, was informed that Pankhurst's paper was radicalising a "sect" who called themselves the "Rastafari". At the same time, he was cautioned that she could be relied upon to "react violently to any suggestion that her paper should not be made available to all and sundry". In some Crown colonies, such as Sierra Leone from where the nationalist I. T. A. Wallace Johnson contributed pieces, the paper had, indeed, been banned. but there is no indication that she was engaged with the new spiritual movement in Jamaica. Such, nonetheless, was her seeming hagiography of Haile Selassie that she has since been proposed as the "first white Rastafarian". Others explain the devotional relationship, at least in part, by reference to her strong anti-imperialist, anti-fascist and anti-racist sympathies: "Pankhurst loved to defend the underdog and she saw in Selassie much more a defeated victim of fascism than a reactionary monarch". According to her son, Richard, her mother did not hesitate to tell Haile Selassie that, as a life-long republican, she supported him only because of the cause he represented, and that while she was cautious about involving herself in Ethiopia's domestic politics, she did voice support for trade unions and for universal suffrage.

In 1956, encouraged by Haile Selassie to aid with women's development, Pankhurst and her son Richard moved into an imperial guest house in the Ethiopian capital to Addis Ababa (Corio had died in 1954). Richard's future wife, Rita, arrived some months later. Sylvia raised funds for Ethiopia's first teaching hospital, and wrote extensively on Ethiopian art and culture. She dedicated Ethiopia: A Cultural History (1955) to Haile Selassie: "Guardian of Education, Pioneer of Progress, Leader and Defender of his People in Peace and War".

Death and commemoration

thumb|right|Pankhurst's grave

Pankhurst died in Addis Ababa in 1960, aged 78, and received a full state funeral at which Haile Selassie named her "an honorary Ethiopian". She is the only foreigner buried in front of Holy Trinity Cathedral in Addis Ababa, in a section reserved for patriots of the Italian war.

Pankhurst's name and picture (and those of 58 other women's suffrage supporters) are on the plinth of the statue of Millicent Fawcett in Parliament Square, Westminster, London. There is a two-dimensional silhouette constructed of Corten steel representing Pankhurst as a campaigning suffragette in Mile End Park, Bethnal Green, London. She is also the subject of a mural, completed 2018 by Jerome Davenport, on the gable end of the Lord Morpeth pub on Old Ford Road in Bow, London. It is next door to the house in which she lived between 1914 and 1924 while working with the ELFS and WSF.

In October 2022, London's Old Vic Theatre announced for 25 January 2023 the world premiere of Sylvia, a hip-hop musical about Pankhurst. Directed and choreographed by Kate Prince, it seek to tell her story to "younger and more diverse audiences".

Family

Pankhurst objected in principle to entering into a marriage and to taking a husband's name. Near the end of the First World War, she began living with Italian anarchist Silvio Corio and moved to Woodford Green, where she lived for over 30 years — a blue plaque and Pankhurst Green opposite London Underground's Woodford tube station commemorate her ties to the area. At Woodford Green in 1927, at the age of 45, she gave birth to a son, Richard. As she refused to marry the child's father, her mother broke ties with her and did not speak to her again. Richard became a leading student of Ethiopian history and the first director of the Institute of Ethiopian Studies at Addis Ababa University. His son, Pankhurst's grandson, Alula Pankhurst is an Ethiopian scholar and social development consultant in Addis Ababa, and has been a contributor to the Ethiopia Observer which continues to publish.

Art

thumb|Sylvia Pankhurst in her studio

From an early age Pankhurst had an ambition to become a "painter and draughtsman in the service of the great movements for social betterment". She trained at Manchester School of Art (1900–1902) and then the Royal College of Art in London (1904–1906). As part of her work campaigning for the WSPU, for which she created designs for a range of banners, jewellery and graphic logos. Her motif of the 'angel of freedom', a trumpeting emblem had wider appeal across the campaign for women's suffrage, appearing on banners, political pamphlets, cups and saucers.

An exhibition of her artistic works took place at Tate Britain in 2013–14. Information about the exhibition, together with photographs of the artwork itself, is part of the Sheffield Hallam University Research Archive.

Pankhurst found it difficult to reconcile her artistic vocation with her political activities, eventually deciding that they were incompatible. She said: "Mothers came to me with their wasted little ones. I saw starvation look at me from patient eyes. I knew that I should never return to my art". By 1912, she had all but abandoned her artistic career in order to concentrate on her political activism.

  • Sylviapankhurst.com, a comprehensive information resource about Sylvia Pankhurst from Hornbeam Publishing Limited, sponsored by the UK Heritage Lottery Fund
  • Sylvia Pankhurst biography, spartacus-educational.com; accessed 4 April 2014
  • Sylvia Pankhurst Archive, libcom.org; accessed 4 April 2014
  • Estelle Sylvia Pankhurst papers archived at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam
  • Application for naturalisation of Mrs Margarethe Morgenstern and her husband Erwin, including a written plea from Pankhurst
  • , two articles by Pankhurst and Anton Pannekoek, first published in the Workers Dreadnought in 1922; first published as a pamphlet in 1974 by Workers Voice, a Liverpudlian Communist group.
  • Three pamphlets detailing the work of Sylvia Pankhurst as an anti-Bolshevik Communist, "Anti-Parliamentarism and Communism in Britain, 1917–1921" by R.F. Jones, Anti-Parliamentary Communism: The Movement for Workers Councils in Britain, Class War on the Home Front <!-- info missing -->
  • Sylvia Pankhurst: Everything is Possible – A documentary that chronicles the life and political campaigns of Sylvia Pankhurst and includes an exclusive interview with her son Richard Pankhurst and his wife Rita. The accompanying website includes images of a large number of security files held on Pankhurst, from the collection at the National Archives.
  • Profile, nrs.Harvard.edu; accessed 4 April 2014
  • Profile, radcliffe.Harvard.edu (Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University)
  • "I Was Forcibly Fed" by Sylvia Pankhurst, McClure's (August 1913)