Sylvia Pankhurst

Sexual Politics and Political Activism

Barbara Winslow

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781839761638
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Sozialwissenschaftliche Biographien

Along with her mother Emmeline, and her sister Christabel, Sylvia Pankhurst was one of the leading women's suffrage activists in early twentieth-century England, working with the militant Women's Social and Political Union. Unlike her family, however, who looked to parliament and spoke to elite and middle-class women's concerns, Sylvia consistently looked to working women and the labour movement as central to her feminist politics.In this illuminating political biography, feminist historian Barbara Winslow recovers Sylvia Pankhurst's life and work for a new generation of socialists and feminists. From Pankhurst's organizing with immigrant and working women in London's East End to her revolutionary communism and growing internationalism and anti-fascism, Winslow gives us the story of a brilliantly inspiring unorthodox feminist and unorthodox socialist.With a preface from internationally recognized socialist feminist historian and activist, Sheila Rowbotham.

Chapter One

Early influences

The origins of Sylvia Pankhurst’s socialist feminism are rooted in her family’s activities in the Lancashire women’s rights and suffrage movement as well as in the emerging socialist and labour movement.¹ Her father, Richard Pankhurst, and mother, Emmeline Goulden, had been political activists who were moving away from the Liberal Party and towards the socialism of the Independent Labour Party (ILP), which stood for, among many things, independent political activity of the working class. Both were supporters of women’s rights and by the 1890s had grown impatient at the state of the women’s suffrage movement and the refusal of the Liberal government to campaign for women’s suffrage.

Pankhurst, born in 1882, her older sister Christabel, born in 1880, and her younger sister, Adela born in 1885, were expected to help their parents organize meetings or “salons”. A brother, Harry, was born in 1889. In the 1890s the Pankhurst circle was reading Fabian essays, published by the newly formed Fabian society, as well as Edward Bellamey’s Looking backward, Prince Kropotkin’s Fields, factories, and workshops, and Robert Blatchford’s Merrie England. This literature was fundamentally non-Marxist, anti-industrial, utopian and romantic. It nonetheless became the basis for Pankhurst’s later communism.

The Pankhurst home became a meeting place for intellectuals and activists from around the world – socialists, anarchists, radicals, republicans, feminists, atheists and freethinkers. This political atmosphere also contributed to Pankhurst’s later socialist-feminism. The revolutionary artist and founder of the Socialist League, William Morris, was a constant visitor and became one of Pankhurst’s earliest heroes. Artistically, he exerted a great influence on her, as is evident in her later suffrage drawings and designs, and his political influence was reflected in her later visionary non-industrialized communalism. In her parents’ home she also met Tom Mann, an internationally known trade union leader. Thirty years later they both would be founding members of different communist parties.

Pankhurst was also acquainted with the women political radicals of the day. She met Annie Besant, a leader of the London match girls’ strike, freethinker, birth control advocate and sexual radical. Harriot Stanton Blatch, daughter of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, was also an ardent feminist, a member of the Women’s Franchise League, and one of the Pankhurst’s closest friends. Pankhurst was particularly fascinated with Louise Michel, an anarchist-feminist leader of the 1871 Paris Commune.

In the summer of 1898 Pankhurst was at her adored father’s bedside when he died from a perforated ulcer. She was overcome with grief, and spent the rest of her life trying to live by one of his many admonitions: “If you do not work for others you will not have been worth the upbringing.”²

After Richard Pankhurst’s death, Emmeline took on part-time paid employment and continued her involvement with ILP politics. Christabel continued her education on the Continent. Pankhurst decided to become an artist. She won a prestigious scholarship to the Municipal School of Art in Manchester and then in 1901 was awarded the Lady Whitworth Scholarship for that year’s best woman student. At 14 she had spent nine months in Venice to study mosaic and fresco painters. Her experiences in Italy only strengthened her early commitment to social equality. Her Italian sojourn clearly influenced her later decision to give up being an artist to become a political activist: “What I saw of the nobility, whose society my compatriot [a Miss Newitt] dearly prized, did but heighten my desire for a new social order, and for a better status for women.”³

Pankhurst returned home to Manchester to help her mother run a business while Christabel started law school at Owens College, also in Manchester. Circumstances were changing in the Pankhurst family. In 1901, while attending a college lecture, Christabel met Eva Gore-Booth, the daughter of aristocratic Anglo-Irish landowners, and Esther Roper, a middle-class daughter of a manufacturing family. In 1897 both women founded the North of England Women’s Suffrage Society (NEWSS), which was one of the 16 affiliates of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), the established women’s suffrage organization founded in 1897 by Millicent Garrett Fawcett. The NEWSS differed from the NUWSS in that it sought membership primarily from working-class women. Gore-Booth and Roper were also involved in the trade union movement and in the ILP.

From 1901 to 1904 Christabel became a political protege of Roper and Gore-Booth, speaking at public meetings, going to factories, collecting petitions and serving in numerous trade union organizations. Emmeline was becoming re-energized, although Pankhurst claims that her mother’s jealousy over Christabel’s personal friendships and political activities prompted a renewed interest in the campaign for women’s suffrage.

By 1903 Emmeline and Christabel were moving away from the political ideals of Richard Pankhurst. In that year the ILP erected a building that was to be dedicated to Richard Pankhurst. While working on the decorations of the hall, Pankhurst discovered that women were not allowed to join this particular branch of the ILP because it was affiliated to a social club open to men who were not all members of the ILP. Women were not allowed in that social club and therefore not allowed in that ILP branch. The Pankhurst women were outraged that a hall dedicated to the man who had devoted his life to women’s equality would be maintained by an organization that did not allow women to join.

Then, to add insult to already smarting injury, Phillip Snowden, then on the executive board of the ILP, announced at a meeting in Pankhurst Hall that he actively opposed women’s suffrage. Christabel refused to speak to him; Emmeline openly declared she had wasted her time in the ILP and announced she wanted nothing more to do with labour representation until women’s issues were taken seriously.⁴

It was in response to what Emmeline and Christabel perceived as indifferent and hostile attitudes by much of the male leadership of the socialist and labour movement that on 10 October 1903 half a dozen women members from the ILP met at the Pankhurst home to found a group initially called the Labour Representation Committee. Christabel thought the name too clumsy and, since it was already the name of a women’s textile organization founded by Roper and Gore-Booth, she suggested the name be the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU).

As Emmeline and Christabel began to devote themselves to the WSPU, Pankhurst realized they could manage without her. In 1904 she won a scholarship to the Royal College of Art in London. She helped found the Fulham branch of the WSPU in 1905, attended women’s suffrage meetings in London, lobbied Parliament, and even gave an occasional speech.

While she was struggling with her art in London, the fledgling WSPU was looking for a new political direction. It held meetings, attracted some new women, most of whom were affiliated to the ILP, and asked prospective candidates for local office to state their attitudes on women’s suffrage. In 1905 Pankhurst, along with her mother and other members of the WSPU, went to Parliament to see if a women’s suf-frage bill allowing women to run for local elections would reach the floor of the House of Commons. Over 300 women were at first disappointed then furious while Members of Parliament laughed and cheered at anti-suffrage speeches. At the end of the parliamentary session Emmeline Pankhurst called upon the women to follow her outside to demonstrate and protest against the government. Emmeline Pankhurst believed that “[t]his was the first militant act of the WSPU”.⁵

In the summer of 1905 Pankhurst left London to campaign for the WSPU in Lancashire. She was 22 years old and fully committed to the socialism of the ILP, to women’s suffrage and to the issues of feminism. The early influences of her family and the political development in the north of England led Pankhurst to develop her unique commitment to working-class feminism.

Another factor that was instrumental in Sylvia Pankhurst’s political development was her relationship with Keir Hardie.⁶ Their friendship and later love affair developed Pankhurst’s attitudes towards love, marriage and sexuality as well as her political commitment to socialism and feminism. The relationship with Hardie also affected Pankhurst’s relationship with her mother and sister. To Pankhurst, Hardie was a friend, father figure and mentor, as well as a lover, and their relationship, which lasted from 1904 to 1913 or 1914, strengthened her political convictions and activism. It enabled her to stand up to her mother and Christabel as they not only broke from socialist politics but also turned on her.

James Keir Hardie played a central role in the creation of a politically independent labour movement in Britain. A founding member of the Independent Labour Party (ILP), he was the first Labour Party representative in Parliament.⁷ Born in 1856, Keir Hardie was the illegitimate son of a working-class Scotswoman, Mary Keir, who later married an often-unemployed, drunken seaman named David Hardie. Poverty characterized his boyhood; at the age of 8 he went to work in the coal mines. As a young man, he was a union organizer and labour journalist.

Hardie became a close friend and political ally of Richard and Emmeline Pankhurst as a result of their common political commitments to the ILP in the 1890s. After Richard Pankhurst’s death, Hardie remained friendly with Mrs Pankhurst and stayed close until the schism between the WSPU and the ILP made the friendship impossible to sustain. Pankhurst also considered him a friend and looked forward to his visits to the Pankhurst home. He was one of the earliest and staunchest supporters of the WSPU.

Hardie had an unconventional marriage to Lily Wilson and had one daughter, Nan. He and his wife lived apart for most of their marriage, and when Hardie was elected to Parliament in 1900, Lily did not move to London with him. Hardie claimed to be a strict teetotaller and Calvinist and led a very austere life while serving as an MP. But he did have a number of affairs with other women. Before becoming involved with Pankhurst, he had been intimate with a Welsh woman, Annie Hines. It was even rumoured in socialist circles that he was having an affair with Emmeline, when in fact he was beginning his relationship with Pankhurst.

In an unpublished short story of 1932, Pankhurst wrote about an older man – clearly Hardie – who had been duped into a loveless marriage with a woman who claimed to share his interests. Another woman – much younger and clearly Sylvia Pankhurst – falls in love with him, but refuses to become sexually involved until she is convinced his is a marriage in name only. The young woman’s mother believes that the Hardie character is in love with her and becomes furious with her daughter when she finds out otherwise. This story is of course fiction, but its picture of sexual rivalry between mother and daughter is clearly one way in which Pankhurst dealt with her mother’s later renunciation of her.⁸

Pankhurst renewed her friendship with Hardie in 1904 when she moved to London to become an art student. At some point it developed into an intimate relationship. Hardie may have been the first man with whom Pankhurst had sexual relations; certainly none of her writings gives any indication that she had other sexual encounters. She was not particularly straitlaced, coming as she did from a family of sexual radicals; she had read the literature of sexual radicalism and was especially influenced by the ideas of Walt Whitman and Edward Carpenter. She also had been moved by novels that dealt with the plight of young unmarried women who have affairs with married and older men.⁹

Her two closest friends in London were Keir Hardie and her brother Harry. Hardie took the two young Pankhursts under his wing, inviting them to his flat in Nevill’s Court and taking them to lunch, dinner, or Parliament. He also began seeing Pankhurst alone. She wrote that the friendship began with “rambles in the weald of Kent” and visits to his apartment.¹⁰ She was fascinated with every detail of his life, including his austere apartment, decorated with engravings of an 1867 franchise demonstration and portraits of Walt Whitman, Robert Burns and William Morris. Hardie kept a picture of Pankhurst over his mantle and two of her paintings on the wall. His taste in reading paralleled hers: Shelley, Byron, William Morris, Scott, Shakespeare and Walt Whitman, although Robert Burns was his favourite. Both read the “modern” writers, such as Ibsen, Anatole France, Galsworthy and Shaw.¹¹ The two became devoted companions, sharing secrets, for example, about their childhoods. Hardie confided to Pankhurst that he was illegitimate, something that pained him deeply;¹² while professing many radical ideas about love and marriage, Hardie himself was conventional in many respects, and illegitimacy was not conventional. He also knew that if such information became general knowledge it could hurt him politically: legitimacy, although perhaps not important to some socialists and sexual radicals, was very important to the working class.

Convention meant so much to Hardie that he never left his wife to marry Pankhurst. Although their affair was known in some circles, they were not public lovers. General knowledge of their affair would have hurt Hardie politically. If Pankhurst was saddened, disappointed or angered at Hardie’s refusal to marry her, or to put her first in his affections publicly, she never mentioned it in her writings. Nor did she ever write about the complications and contradictions of having an affair with a married man.

Hardie helped all the Pankhursts launch the WSPU but worked most closely with Sylvia Pankhurst. Her relationship with him created friction between her and her mother and sister. Whether or not sexual jealousy was involved in this friction, there was at this time growing disagreement among the Pankhursts over the question of whether or not to work with the Labour Party and with men. With some justification, Christabel wrote in the ILP News (in August 1903) that socialists could not be counted on as allies in the struggle for women’s rights. “Some day when they are in power, and have nothing better to do, they will give women votes as a finishing touch to their arrangements.” She ended the article declaring, “Why are women expected to have such confidence in the men of the Labour Party? Working men are just as unjust to women as are those of other classes.”¹³ In 1906, the WSPU severed its ties with the ILP, and in 1907 both Christabel and Emmeline resigned from the organization.

As the suffragette campaign escalated after 1910, Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst, well aware that the leadership of ...