#sylvia pankhurst

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Yesterday marked the death of Sylvia Pankhurst - one of the finest revolutionary communists to have ever graced Britain's shores. We have rarely seen such fighters on this earth.

Sylvia was the most tortured suffragette, targetted for her insistence on including working class women within the demands of women's suffrage (much to the disdain of her mother and sister). She did not balk against repeated forced feeding, hunger striking and sleep striking.

She was one of a handful of communists in Britain who opposed the first world war. Her criticism of the war was ceaseless. Practically isolated, she organised relief for working class people in London with cost-price restaurants, free child care for mothers, and more.

She broke with the Labour Party over this, and never returned despite the enormous pressure put upon her by the British labour movement and, later, the Third Internationale. Her arguments with Lenin remain a key debate in communist and British politics.

Pankhurst stood resolutely with the Bolshevik revolution at its outbreak, and was pivotal in organising the "Hands Off Russia" campaign in Britain - which culminated in dock workers across the country refusing to load any munitions to ships.

Pankhurst was an outspoken opponent of racism. Her newspaper - then the Worker's Dreadnought - was the first newspaper in Britain to hire black journalists. When articles written by the Jamaican journalist, Claude McKay, were viewed as seditious, she went to jail for him.

Her support for Irish independence never wavered. She supported Larkin, the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union and United Builders' Labourers Union during the Dublin lock-outs. She stood by the Irish Citizen Army during the Easter Rising.

She was one of the first in Britain to recognise the dangers of fascism, her warnings and agitation beginning as early as 1920. Through this struggle, she became deeply involved in Ethiopian national liberation, where she spent the last years of her life.

All of this is just the tip of the iceberg of the contributions Sylvia made in her life. She did all of this at great cost to herself, enduring her mother and sister denouncing her in the press repeatedly, endless slander, rejection by the mainstream communist movement and worse.

Sylvia also belongs to the great pantheon of disabled revolutionaries, being diagnosed with endometriosis whilst in prison. This, along with the damage done to her organs by forced feeding, left her with often crippling stomach problems.

"I am going to fight capitalism even if it kills me. It is wrong that people like you should be comfortable and well fed while all around you people are starving." She fought until she died, but capitalism didn't kill her. At aged 78, Sylvia passed on.

She was given a state funeral in Ethiopia, and remains the only foreigner buried in the front of Holy Trinity Cathedral. An Ethiopian migrant, cited anonymously in Rachel Holmes' biography of Pankhurst, summed up what she meant to him thus:

"After God, Sylvia Pankhurst".

To learn more about Sylvia, we highly recommend Rachel Holmes' biography, "Sylvia Pankhurst: Natural Born Rebel".

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In a Glasgow Cotton Spinning Mill: Changing the Bobbin (1907) by Sylvia Pankhurst

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Sylvia Pankhurst, by Sylvia Pankhurst, chalk, circa 1907-1910

Sylvia Pankhurst, by Herbert Cole, chalk. circa 1925

Sylvia Pankhurst, by Bassano Ltd, bromide print, 25 February 1927

Estelle Sylvia Pankhurst (5 May 1882 – 27 September 1960) English feminist and socialist activist and writer. With her mother and sister, she was a leader in the suffrage movement, helping women in the UK claim their right to the vote.

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Sylvia Pankhurst, Suffragist, 1916.

©E.O. Hoppé Estate Collection

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Mrs Pankhurst, Christabel and Sylvia initially had high hopes of the Labour movement which, unlike other parties, professed itself to be in favour of women's suffrage, but they were to find (as women had been finding in many countries of the world once they claimed the right to vote) that there was a great discrepancy between a commitment in theory and the test of practice. They encountered the argument that there were many more important issues than women's suffrage; these important issues of course related to men.

Keir Hardie was one of the few staunch supporters (if not the only one). Many of the other men - past colleagues of Dr Pankhurst - who came to the Pankhurst house to talk politics were extensively grilled by Christabel on their stand on woman's suffrage, and none of them gave satisfactory answers as far as the Pankhursts were concerned. 'Bruce Glasier,' states Sylvia, ‘far from realizing the new spirit that had taken possession of our home, offended badly. It was not essential, he argued, that the whole people should be enfranchised. So long as the division were not upon class lines.’ An old and familiar argument. But Glasier went further and argued as John Stuart Mill's father had done about eighty years before that ‘those outside the suffrage would be represented by those within; their interests would be the same. There was no distinction of interest on sex, but only on class lines’ (S. Pankhurst, 1931, p. 167). As Anna Wheeler had been enraged by James Mill, the Pankhursts were infuriated by Bruce Glasier and his colleagues: ‘This opinion, common enough amongst Socialists of the time was bitterly resented,’ states Sylvia (ibid.).

Men did not and do not hear what women are saying. So what was to be done? As far as the Pankhursts were concerned they decided it was a waste of energy to keep telling men! If after so many years of discussion and debate, of clear and cogent argument, 'radical' men could persist with their line of reason that women had no specific grievances and what minor 'difficulties' did exist would be ironed out after men had fixed up the world for themselves, one would have to be a dunce or a masochist to pursue a policy of trying to change men's minds. That women should stop talking to men about what was to be done, and start talking to each other, was a strategy that gained in popularity among the Pankhursts over the incident of the Pankhurst Hall.

The Hall had been financed by the appeal launched on Dr Pankhurst's death. The Pankhurst women were quite involved in its construction, with Sylvia giving much of her time to it by assuming the responsibility for its decoration. One can imagine their anger, then, when they found they were not allowed to use Pankhurst Hall, for women were not permitted to become members of that particular branch of the Independent Labour Party. This humiliation was rendered even more galling when they discovered that men who chose not to be members of the ILP, were nevertheless permitted to use it. This was too much: it ‘proved the last straw which caused Mrs Pankhurst to decide on the formation of a new organization of women’, said Sylvia (ibid.). She came to the conclusion that 'she had wasted her time in the ILP' (ibid., p. 68), and she wasn't going to waste it any more. There was nothing else for women to do but to assume responsibility for their own quest for political representation: on 10 October 1903 the Women's Social and Political Union was formed. Sylvia reports that the break with the Labour party was not undertaken lightly by Mrs Pankhurst, and that she was extremely distressed, but under the circumstances she thought women had no choice but to work for themselves.

-Dale Spender, Women of Ideas and What Men Have Done to Them

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Estelle Sylvia Pankhurst was an English feminist and socialist activist and writer. Following encounters with women-led labour activism in the United States, sh...

Link: Sylvia Pankhurst

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World Premiere in a Library!

The London Library A brilliant night at the London Library with the world premiere of a play ‘Between Two Fires’ written by Sylvia Pankhurst on toilet paper when she was imprisoned! Review to follow. And details of talk by Labour MP Chris Bryant.

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https://romaniasweetromania.com/2023/01/mihai-eminescu-tu-i-neamul-nevoii/

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31/2023: Esther Roper, 4. August 1868

Sie setzte sich für die Rechte von Arbeiterinnen ein und brachte das gender-kritische Magazin Uranie heraus.

By Unknown author, Public Domain Bereits kurz nach ihrer Geburt in Chorley, Lancashire – ein Ort, der von den nahegelegenen Kohleminen und Textilindustrie geprägt war –, verließen die Eltern von Esther Roper England als Missionare(1). Ihr Vater war ehemaliger Fabrikarbeiter, ihre Mutter stammte aus einer Familie irischer Einwanderer, bei denen Esther aufwuchs. Sie besuchte eine Schule der Church…

[monriatitans]

I'm Mica (she/her) Offset your carbon footprint on Wren: https://www.wren.co/start/ponderful The first 100 people who sign up will have 10 extra trees planted in their name! PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/ponderful KO-FI: https://ko-fi.com/ponderful LINKTREE: https://linktr.ee/PonderfulYT 

Gender Critical ideology, previously known as "trans-exclusionary radical feminism" or "TERF", claims to be feminist while sounding like the opposite. Isn't. That. Weird? Let's have a look at the history of White Feminism, all the way from the fight for women's suffrage, the women's liberation movements of the 60s, up until the present day & the current attacks on women's rights by the Christian Conservative & Far Right; how might the exclusionary tendencies of white feminists mirror the current push against trans rights by so-called "gender criticals" aka TERFs? And why do they keep falling into misogynistic, biological essentialist, sexist dichotomies in order to exclude trans women from their feminism?

Special thanks to everyone who lent their voices! Go follow them! Caelan Conrad -   / caelanconrad   Art of Paya -   / @artofpaya7862   Zoe Bee -   / @zoe_bee   Mainely Mandy -   / mainelymandy   Neil & Sarah from The Liberal Cook -   / theliberalcook   Little Hoot -   / littlehoot   

And thanks to Katy Montgomerie & Caelen Conrad for allowing me to use clips from their work! Check out the full videos here: Inside A Cult Part One -   • Gender Critical :...   Interview with Jo Maugham -   • Interview with Jo...   

SOURCES & RESOURCES DOC - https://docs.google.com/document/d/1c... 

TIMESTAMPS The Story of Sylvia Pankhurst - 00:02 Feminism - 08:31 Interlude by Wren - 14:53 More Feminism - 17:27 Gender Critical - 28:00 Biological Essentialism  - 31:45 The Sexist Dichotomy of GCs - 58:19 

"This video was sponsored by Wren"

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This is why we still need Women’s History Month.

By Martha Gill

What was life like for women in medieval times? “Awful” is the vague if definite answer that tends to spring to mind – but this is an assumption, and authors have been tackling it with new vigour.

The Once and Future Sex: Going Medieval on Women’s Roles in Society by Eleanor Janega, and The Wife of Bath: A Biography by Marion Turner both contend that women were not only bawdier but busier than we thought: they were brewers, blacksmiths, court poets, teachers, merchants, and master craftsmen, and they owned land too. A woman’s dowry, Janega writes, was often accompanied with firm instructions that property stay with her, regardless of what her husband wanted.

This feels like a new discovery. It isn’t, of course. Chaucer depicted many such cheerfully domineering women. The vellum letter-books of the City of London, in which the doings of the capital from 1275 to 1509 were scribbled, detail female barbers, apothecaries, armourers, shipwrights and tailors as a matter of course. While it is true that aristocratic women were considered drastically inferior to their male equivalents – traded as property and kept as ornaments – women of the lower orders lived, relatively, in a sort of rough and ready empowerment.

It was the Renaissance that vastly rolled back the rights of women. As economic power shifted, the emerging middle classes began aping their betters. They confined their women to the home, putting them at the financial mercy of men. Female religious power also dwindled. In the 13th century seeing visions and hearing voices might get a woman sainted; a hundred years later she’d more likely be burned at the stake.

“When it comes to the history of gender relations, storytellers portray women as more oppressed than they actually were”

Why does this feel like new information? Much of what we think we know about medieval times was invented by the Victorians, who had an artistic obsession with the period, and through poetry and endless retellings of the myth of King Arthur managed somehow to permanently infuse their own sexual politics into it. (Victorian women were in many respects more socially repressed than their 12th-century forebears.)

But modern storytellers are also guilty of sexist revisionism. We endlessly retread the lives of oppressed noblewomen, and ignore their secretly empowered lower-order sisters. Where poorer women are mentioned, glancingly, they are pitied as prostitutes or rape victims. Even writers who seem desperate for a “feminist take” on the period tend to ignore the angle staring them right in the face. In her 2022 cinematic romp, Catherine called Birdy, for example, Lena Dunham puts Sylvia Pankhurst-esque speeches into the mouth of her 13th-century protagonist, while portraying her impending marriage – at 14 – as normal for the period. (In fact the average 13th-century woman got married somewhere between the ages of 22 and 25.)

But we cling tight to these ideas. It is often those who push back against them who get accused of “historical revisionism”. This applies particularly to the fantasy genre, which aside from the odd preternaturally “feisty” female character, tends to portray the period as, well, a misogynistic fantasy. The Game of Thrones author George RR Martin once defended the TV series’ burlesque maltreatment of women on the grounds of realism. “I wanted my books to be strongly grounded in history and to show what medieval society was like.” Oddly enough, this didn’t apply to female body hair (or the dragons).

This is interesting. Most of our historical biases tend to run in the other direction: we assume the past was like the present. But when it comes to the history of gender relations, the opposite is true: storytellers insist on portraying women as more oppressed than they actually were.

“The history of gender relations might be more accurately painted as a tug of war between the sexes”

The casual reader of history is left with the dim impression that between the Palaeolithic era and the 19th century women suffered a sort of dark age of oppression. This is assumed to have ended some time around the invention of the lightbulb, when the idea of “gender equality” sprang into our heads and right-thinking societies set about “discovering” female competencies: women – astonishingly – could do 

things men could do!

In fact the history of gender relations might be more accurately painted as a tug of war between the sexes, with women sometimes gaining and sometimes losing power – and the stronger sex opportunistically seizing control whenever it had the means.

In Minoan Crete, for example, women had similar rights and freedoms to men, taking equal part in hunting, competitions, and celebrations.

But that era ushered in one of the most patriarchal societies the planet has ever known – classical Greece, where women had no political rights and were considered “minors”.

Or take hunter-gatherer societies, the source of endless cod-evolutionary theories about female inferiority. The discovery of female skeletons with hunting paraphernalia has disproved the idea that men only hunted and women only gathered – and more recently anthropologists have challenged the idea that men had higher status too: women, studies contend, had equal sway over group decisions.

This general bias has had two unfortunate consequences. One is to impress upon us the idea that inequality is “natural”. The other is to give us a certain complacency about our own age: that feminist progress is an inevitable consequence of passing time. “She was ahead of her time,” we say, when a woman seems unusually empowered. Not necessarily.

Two years ago, remember, sprang up one of the most vicious patriarchies in history – women were removed from their schools and places of work and battoned into homes and hijabs. And last year in the US many women lost one of their fundamental rights: abortion. (Turns out it was pro-lifers, not feminists, who were ahead of their time there.)

Both these events were greeted with shock from liberal quarters: how could women’s rights be going backwards? But that only shows we should brush up on our history. Another look at medieval women is as good a place to start as any.

 Martha Gill is a political journalist and former lobby correspondent

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Janet “Jenny” McCallum was born in Dunfermline on July 21st 1881.

Jenny, as she became known, was the eldest of the thirteen children of John and Jenny McCallum. Her father worked on the construction of the Forth Bridge. She worked in a linen weaving factory and she was unusual in becoming a working-class woman who was active in the women’s suffrage movement.

Jenny was arrested, fined then imprisoned for her part in a demonstration at the Houses of Parliament.

In 1907 she organised what was called a “Great Demonstration” where the national leaders of the Women’s Social and Political Union would come to West Fife.

By 1908, she had joined Anna Munro in the Women’s Freedom League. The league was a break away group from the WSPU who objected to the autocratic management of the Pankhursts. By 27th October 1908 she was in London. She had abandoned her job in a Dunfermline linen factory. Jenny and 14 others were arrested after staging a demonstration in Old Palace Yard outside the houses of parliament; “a newspaper report says "four very athletic suffragettes clambered on a statue”.“. She was given the choice of paying a £5 fine or serving a sentence and chose a one month sentence. After leaving Holloway Prison she went to Glasgow on behalf of the WFL.

Jenny returned to Dunfermline and after some time she went back into work so that she could help support her mother and sister. She married Harry Richardson in 1915 and they had three children. In 1919 she came to the fore in a dispute with the Scottish National Housing Company. She gathered attention for the Rosyth tenants who were involved in what was presented as a women led rent strike. The dispute led to some tenants appearing in court and McCallum was able to arrange for Sylvia Pankhurst to speak on their behalf.

In the 1920s Jenny and Harry decided to emigrate as there was little work in Scotland. By the time votes for women were agreed, she was living in South Africa.

Jenny McCallum died in Pretoria in South Africa 1946.