SYLVIA Pankhurst From Artist to Anti-Fascist

Edited by

Ian Bullock Lecturer in History Brighton College ofTechnology and

Richard Pankhurst Professor of Ethiopian Studies 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 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 : 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 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 , 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 , 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 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 - 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, , 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 -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 ; 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 (which her mother and sister supported), devoted herself to welfare work and agitation in the , 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 , 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 xii Preface one of the first to leave - she nevertheless preserved the socialist, as well as the feminist and internationalist beliefs she had inherited from her father. Having acquired a deep interest in Italy, where she had lived as an art student and which she had subsequently visited as an international socialist, she was one of the earliest foreign critics of fascism, and, with a view to encouraging feminist and other opposition to it, founded an International Women's Matteotti Com• mittee, named in memory of the Italian Socialist deputy murdered on Mussolini's orders. Opposition to Italian fascism led her to become a keen defender of independent Ethiopia (then internationally better known as Abyssinia) which she regarded as Mussolini's second victim- Italy herself having been, in her view, the first. Appalled by the Duce's unprovoked attack on a defenceless independent African country, as well as by the fascist bombing of foreign Red Cross ambulances and the use of poison gas, she rallied to the cause of the League of Nations, and founded an anti-fascist weekly newspaper to defend the Ethiopian cause. There she castigated the appeasement policies 9f the then British and French governments, supported the Spanish Republic in its life and death struggle with Franco, was denounced by Mussolini's pen, and at the same time joined many then emerging Africian nationalist leaders in their denounciation of colonialism. Though long a pacifist, she was an enthusiastic supporter of the British decision to go to war with Nazi Germany, urging that fascism should be 'fought to the finish'. The Gestapo placed her name on the list of persons to be arrested in the event of a German occupation of Britain. After Mussolini's declaration of hostilities against Britain and France, and the resultant defeat of the Italians in East Africa, she nevertheless felt duty-bound to support Ethiopia, the country whose cause she had espoused, against British attempts to reduce it virtu• ally to the status of a protectorate. She subsequently laboured hard to raise funds to endow Ethiopia with its first modem hospital, named after Emperor Haile Sellassie's daughter Princess Tsehai (who had served as a nurse in London during the Blitz) and also worked against the return to Italy to its former African colonies, as well as to ensure Ethiopia access to the sea, without which, she was convinced, the country's development would be virtually impossible. Subsequently, leaving London in 1956 at the age of seventy-four, she travelled enthusiastically to Ethiopia, where she founded and edited another journal, and was actively involved in establishing one of the country's first welfare societies. Preface xiii My mother's career, it is apparent, does not fall easily into any simple pattern. It has nevertheless seemed by many to be worthy of further study, and it is for this reason that the present contributors• each a specialist in a different area of research-have banded together to examine some of the most important aspects of her life, her ideals and her work.

Richard Pankhurst Introduction

This book has its origins in a conversation at the end of 1987. Why, we asked, was it so difficult for anyone to produce a satisfactory biography of Sylvia Pankhurst? We quickly came to the conclusion that the major problem was the diversity of her activities. Most people who knew anything about her were interested in one particular phase of her life. To be able to write about her life as a whole, one would need knowledge and expertise in early twentieth-century British art and art education; the complexities of not just the suffragette campaign but of the wider 'votes for women' and feminist movements at the beginning of the century; pre-1917 socialism; the early Com• munist movement and its dissident offshoots both in Britain and internationally; the rise of fascism and the struggle against it. In all these things Sylvia Pankhurst had a part - sometimes a crucial one. Certainly, anyone aspiring to write her life story would need to be well-versed in all of these aspects of early twentieth• century history. But then the greater complications present them• selves. Out of Sylvia's anti-fascism grew her involvement- which in one way or another occupied the last third of her life -with Ethiopia, and with the wider anti-imperialist movement. Later, such com• mitments, at least in a theoretical way, would become a standard part of being on the Left in Europe and the United States. But Sylvia was a pioneer in this as in several other fields. Furthermore, her commitment was total, involving as it did uprooting herself at an age when most people would regard themselves as retired and emigrating to a place which, much more truly than Czechoslovakia in 1938, could be described as 'a faraway country of which we know little'. Even to those with some knowledge of history, Ethiopia's past is often shadowy. It burst forth into the brilliant sunshine to defeat an attempt at Italian conquest in the late nineteenth century. In more tragic hues, it was an early victim of the brutal late imperialism of European fascism. But apart from the years 1896 and 1935-6 it re• mains for most of us hidden in the twilight, at least until the re• newed attention of more recent years. To find someone equally adept in the suffragist, socialist, Com• munist, and anti-fascist worlds over a period of more than thirty years was asking a great deal. To find such a person with sufficient understanding also of the Ethiopian background to make sense of

XV xvi Introduction Sylvia's experiences with and in that country suggested needles and haystacks. Yet on the other hand, there were many people who had or were researching and writing about one particular aspect of Sylvia Pankhurst's long career. The Sylvia Pankhurst papers in the Inter• national Institute of Social History in Amsterdam will never vie with the Rijksmuseum as a tourist attraction, but they are by the standards of such archives well visited. Instead of trying to produce a biography, why not try and put some of the results of these disparate labours together? The result is this book. This is certainly not an attempt at a collectively-written biography. We have tried to look at the major areas of Sylvia's activities but we are well aware that we have left many gaps. Nor would any of the contributors claim to be giving either an exhaustive or a definitive account of their particular topic. What we can claim is that each contribution puts into print for the first time either new, previously unpublished material, such as the results of Hilary Cunliffe• Charlesworth's researches on Sylvia as an art student, or a new interpretation of some phase of her activities, or both. We are seek• ing to open, or continue, a series of debates both about a woman who was quite remarkable by anyone's standards, and about our understanding of the campaigns, movements and struggles which filled almost all of her waking hours from an early age until her death in 1960.

Ian Bullock