Sylvia Pankhurst: From Artist to Anti-Fascist

232 Pages·1992·25.6 MB·English

by  Ian Bullock

SYLVIA PANKHURST
Sylvia Pankhurst
From Artist to Anti-Fascist
Edited by
Ian Bullock
Lecturer in History
Brighton College ofTechnology
and
Richard Pankhurst
Professor of Ethiopian Studies
Addis Ababa University
Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN 978-1-349-12185-4 ISBN 978-1-349-12183-0 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-12183-0
© Ian Bullock and Richard Pankhurst 1992
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1992 978-0-333-54618-5
All rights reserved. For infonnation, write:
Scholarly and Reference Division,
S1. Martin's Press, Inc., 175 Fifth Avenue,
New York, N.Y. 10010
First published in the United States of America in 1992
ISBN 978-0-312-06840-0
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Sylvia Pankhurst: from artist to anti-fascist
edited by Ian Bullock and Richard Pankhurst.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-312-06840-0
1. Pankhurst, E. Sylvia (Estelle Sylvia), 1882-1960.
2. Feminists-Great Britain-Biography. 3. Artists-Great Britain
-Biography. 4. Socialists-Great Britain-Biography.
I. Pankhurst, Richard Keir Pethick, 1927- II. Bullock, Ian,
1941- .
HQ1595.P34S95 1992
305.42'092-dc20 91-25785
CIP
Contents
List of Plates vi
Acknowledgements vii
Notes on the Contributors viii
Preface xi
Introduction xv
1 Sylvia Pankhurst as an Art Student 1
Hilary Cunliffe-Charlesworth
2 Sylvia Pankhurst as an Artist 36
Jackie Duckworth
3 Suffragism and Socialism: Sylvia Pankhurst 1903-1914 58
Les Garner
4 Sylvia Pankhurst and the Great War 86
Barbara Winslow
5 Sylvia Pankhurst and the Russian Revolution: the 121
making of a 'Left-Wing' Communist
Ian Bullock
6 Sylvia and New Times and Ethiopia News 149
Richard Pankhurst
7 Sylvia Pankhurst's Papers as a Source 192
M. Wilhelmina H. Schreuder
Sylvia Pankhurst's Publications 199
Index 201
Acknowledgements
Many people have helped with the preparation of this book in a
variety of ways. We would particularly like to thank William
Alderson, Sue Bullock, Jacqueline Mulhallen, Rita Pankhurst and
Margreet Schrevel. We are grateful for the assistance of the Interna
tional Institute of Social History, the Fawcett Library and the Sylvia
Pankhurst Society, and for the permission of the National Museum
of Labour History and the Museum of London to reproduce illus
trations.
The authors' royalties from this book have been assigned to the
Institute of Ethiopian Studies at the University of Addis Ababa to
assist in buying works of art for its museum and thus contributing to
the preservation of Ethiopia's cultural heritage.
Ian Bullock
Richard Pankhurst
List of Plates
1. Untitled: portrait of a farm girl (National Museum of Labour
History)
2. Untitled: a young woman painting decorations onto wooden
ornamental plaques (National Museum of Labour History)
3. In a Glasgow Cotton Spinning Mill, changing a yarn package
(National Museum of Labour History)
4. An Old-Fashioned Pottery: transferring the pattern onto the
biscuit (National Museum of Labour Hi~:?tory)
5. Untitled: study of a woman's head (National Museum of Labour
History)
6. Untitled: full-length portrait of an old woman (National Museum
of Labour History)
7. Illuminated Address for WSPU prisoners (Museum of London)
8. WSPU Membership Card (Museum of London)
Notes on the Contributors
Ian Bullock teaches history at Brighton College of Technology. His
Sussex University D. Phil. thesis was on 'Socialists and Democratic
Form in Britain, 1880-1914' and his interest in Sylvia Pankhurst
developed out of further research on radical ideas of democracy. He
is currently co-writing a book on democratic ideas in the British
Labour movement, c. 1880-1914.
Hilary Cunliffe-Charlesworth lectures in design history at Sheffield
City Polytechnic where she is involved with the Centre for Women's
Studies. Her main area of research is the history of the Royal College
of Art, London. Her first degree was in fine art at Ravensbourne
College of Art and Design, Bromley, followed by MA research on the
depiction of the British agrarian revolution at the RCA.
Jackie Duckworth won the Allen Lane Penguin Prize for her MA
thesis on 'Arts and Crafts in the Suffragette Movement'. She is
currently a part-time lecturer at the Chelsea School of Art and prac
tises as a tapestry artist and a community textile artist.
Les Garner teaches at Thames Polytechnic, London. His interest in
Sylvia Pankhurst developed from his research for his PhD thesis on
the ideas of the women's suffrage movement. This was later pub
lished as Stepping Stones to Women's Liberty - Feminist Ideas in the
Women's Suffrage Movement 190D-1918. He is also the author of A Brave
and Beautiful Spirit: Dora Marsden 1882-1960.
Richard Pankhurst, Sylvia's son, is Professor of Ethiopian Studies at
the Institute of Ethiopian Studies of Addis Ababa University. He is
the author of Sylvia Pankhurst, Artist and Crusader and of several
studies on early nineteenth-century British socialism, as well as of
works on various aspects of Ethiopian history.
M. Wilhelmina H. Schreuder worked at the International Institute
of Social History, Amsterdam, until her retirement in 1988. She
managed and arranged the Sylvia Pankhurst collection there and co
authored the Inventory of the E. Sylvia Pankhurst Papers 1863-1960. At
present she is working on Dutch Quaker history.
viii
Notes on the Contributors ix
Barbara Winslow has been active in the women's movement in
Britain and the United States for over twenty years. She teaches
women's studies at Hunter College, New York. She is currently
studying the women's liberation movement in the Pacific North
west, 1965-75.
Preface
My mother never forgot her father's maxim that 'life is nothing
without enthusiasms'. Imbued, like her father (and before him his
hero John Stuart Mill), with a belief in the possibility-and overrid
ing need - for human betterment, she was passionately engaged
over the years, as the following studies show, in several important,
and, in their different ways, exciting movements. Though the causes
she espoused may at first sight appear disconnected, she regarded
each of them as part of a wider struggle against privilege and op
pression, waged by and for the underdog; and in the various phases
of her life she committed herself to each and all of the movements in
which she was involved with more or less equal determination,
perseverance and commitment.
Though imbued with the ambition to become an artist, and to
devote her artistic abilities to the cause of human progress, she
became an intimate participant in the suffragette movement, and
was for a time a London representative of her mother Emmeline's
then Manchester-based Women's Social and Political Union. She
endured hunger, thirst and sleep strikes in the suffragette struggle
against the refusal of Britain's then Liberal government to grant
women the vote. Eventually, however, she broke with her mother
and sister Christabel, and founded her own geographically nar
rower, but socially more broadly based as well as organisationally
more democratic, East London Federation of the Suffragettes; and
began to edit her own weekly newspaper.
Like her father, and her mother in the latter's early days, she was
a pacifist for most of her life. She opposed World War I (which her
mother and sister supported), devoted herself to welfare work and
agitation in the East End of London, welcomed the Bolshevik Revo
lution in Russia (which she regarded as a major act of human eman
cipation), travelled, secretly and illegally, to Moscow to attend one
of the first conferences of Lenin's Communist International, gained
prominence as an internationally-minded socialist opposed to allied
intervention against the newly-established Soviet Union, and, while
criticised by the Russian leader in his monograph Left Wing Commu
nism, was imprisoned in Britain for her convictions.
Soon disenchanted with the Communist movement which she
had originally championed- one of the first to enter, she was also
xi