Sylvia Pankhurst - Suffragism

Suffragism

In 1906 Sylvia Pankhurst started to work full-time with the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) with her sister and her mother. In contrast to them she retained an affiliation with the labour movement, and unlike them she concentrated her activity on local campaigning with the East London Federation of the WSPU, rather than leading the national organisation. Sylvia 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. By 1914 Sylvia had many disagreements with the route the WSPU was taking: while the WSPU had become independent of any political party, she wanted an explicitly socialist organisation tackling wider issues than women's suffrage, aligned with the Independent Labour Party. She had a very close personal relationship with anti-war Labour politician Keir Hardie. In 1914 she broke with the WSPU to set up the East London Federation of Suffragettes (ELFS), which over the years evolved politically and changed its name accordingly, first to Women's Suffrage Federation and then to the Workers' Socialist Federation. She founded the newspaper of the WSF, Women's Dreadnought, which subsequently became the Workers' Dreadnought. It organized against the war, and some of its members hid conscientious objectors from the police.