Sylvia Pankhurst: From Artist to Anti-Fascist PDF
Preview Sylvia Pankhurst: From Artist to Anti-Fascist
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
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