51 Facts About Sylvia Pankhurst

Estelle Sylvia Pankhurst was a campaigning English feminist and socialist.

Sylvia Pankhurst was inspired by the Russian Revolution and consulted Lenin, but defied Moscow in endorsing a syndicalist programme of workers' control and by criticising the emerging Soviet dictatorship.

Sylvia Pankhurst was vocal in her support for Irish independence; for anti-colonial struggle throughout the British Empire; and for anti-fascist solidarity in Europe.

Estelle Sylvia Pankhurst was born at Drayton Terrace, Old Trafford, Manchester, to Emmeline Pankhurst and Dr Richard Pankhurst.

Dr Sylvia Pankhurst had been a founding member in 1872 of the National Society for Women's Suffrage, and played a role in drafting legislation that gave unmarried women householders a vote in local elections, and married women control over their property and earnings.

In 1893, Sylvia Pankhurst's parents joined the Scottish miner Keir Hardie, a family friend, as founding members of the Independent Labour Party.

In 1903, Sylvia Pankhurst went on to train as an artist at the Manchester School of Art.

In 1904, Sylvia Pankhurst won a scholarship to the Royal College of Art in London, but she was incensed to learn that of 16 scholarships awarded by the college each year, 13 were reserved for men, and that, in response to a parliamentary question, Keir Hardie should be told that the authorities "did not contemplate any change".

In 1906, Sylvia Pankhurst started to work full-time for WSPU, with Christabel and their mother.

Sylvia Pankhurst devised the WSPU logo and various leaflets, banners, and posters as well as the decoration of its meeting halls.

Sylvia Pankhurst was later to write that she witnessed "so much distress", that she felt unable to return to her " beloved profession".

Sylvia Pankhurst became a full-time organiser, with Alice Hawkins and Mary Gawthorpe, helping establish the WSPU in Leicester.

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.

Between February 1913 and August 1914 Sylvia Pankhurst was arrested eight times for protest actions in London.

Sylvia Pankhurst undertook two speaking tours in the United States: in the first three months of 1911 and again at the beginning of 1912.

Sylvia Pankhurst related her experience of going into factories, workshops, workhouses and prisons, of observing the application of Taylorist principles, and of witnessing in the South the virtual criminalisation of African Americans.

Sylvia Pankhurst visited strikers in their police cells, and observed that their conditions were as bad anything suffragettes had been subject to in Britain.

In Chicago, Sylvia Pankhurst had been in the company of Zelie Passavant Emerson.

Sylvia Pankhurst had encountered settlement houses in England: as a child she had visited the first of these, Ancoats Brotherhood in Manchester.

Sylvia Pankhurst noted that "the East End was the greatest homogeneous working-class area accessible to the House of Commons by popular demonstrations" and proposed that the "creation of a woman's movement in that great abyss of poverty would be a call and a rallying cry to the rise of similar movements in all parts of the country".

In January 1914, accompanied by Nora Smyth, Sylvia Pankhurst visited her sister Christabel in Paris to discuss the future of the ELFS.

Sylvia Pankhurst was equally insistent on supporting popular and labour struggles, and critical of what she considered to the WPSU's social elitism.

At the suggestion of Emerson, Sylvia Pankhurst started a WSF paper.

Sylvia Pankhurst was invited by Elizabeth McCracken to Belfast, where Christabel's wartime directive had put a halt to particularly militant campaign, to speak in support equal pay for women doing war work.

In 1915, Sylvia Pankhurst supported the International Women's Peace Congress, held at The Hague.

Lenin, who in his 1920 thesis Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder profiled the WSF, advised Sylvia Pankhurst that, tactically, the blanket rejection of parliamentarianism is a "mistake".

In preparation for the meeting, Sylvia Pankhurst published a manifesto in the Workers' Dreadnought.

Sylvia Pankhurst's contribution was to highlight the potential for extending their models of collective decision-making from the workplace into the domestic sphere.

On her return, Sylvia Pankhurst was sufficiently enthused to offer a paean to the new Soviet society:.

In September 1921, arguing that there had to be "free expression and circulation of opinion within the Party" and "an independent Communist voice, free to express its mind unhampered by Party discipline", Sylvia Pankhurst refused to hand over control of the Workers Dreadnought to the CPGB, and was expelled.

Sylvia Pankhurst had serialised Rosa Luxemburg's 1918 critique of Bolshevik policy, and had herself repeated Luxemburg's charge that in sanctioning the division of the land into small peasant holdings, the Bolsheviks had betrayed the revolution.

Sylvia Pankhurst had opened the Dreadnought to Alexandra Kollontai's "The Workers' Opposition", a critique of the developing Soviet bureaucracy, and to appeals from anarchists in Bolshevik prisons.

Sylvia Pankhurst put the Rising in the context of the resistance of Unionists to Irish Home Rule, and noted that it was they "who first armed".

Sylvia Pankhurst lauded the rebels' "high ideals", not least their promise of equal opportunities and equal rights for all the citizens of the Republic.

In India and the Earthly Paradise, published in Bombay in 1926, Sylvia Pankhurst proposed that the social and family life in ancient India had the essential features of communism: equality, fraternity and mutuality.

Sylvia Pankhurst addressed protests against the failure to grant India meaningful self-government and against the use of British air power against insurgent villages in Burma and the North-West Frontier.

Sylvia Pankhurst was among the non-Communist British sponsors of the Committee along with Charlotte Despard, Ellen Wilkinson, Vera Brittain and Storm Jameson, the Six Point Group and the National Union of Women Teachers.

Sylvia Pankhurst was a founding member of the anti-fascist Friends of Italian Freedom, the Italian Information Bureau and the Women's International Matteotti Committee.

Sylvia Pankhurst wrote to Winston Churchill, her constituency MP, concurring with him on the need for a more resolute foreign policy, but was unable to persuade him of the need for immediate action against the Italian invasion of Ethiopia.

Sylvia Pankhurst visited Ethiopia in 1944 and observed that, although "liberated" by the British, it was still under effective colonial occupation.

In 1956, the Governor of Jamaica, Sir Hugh Foot, was informed that Sylvia Pankhurst's paper was radicalising a "sect" who called themselves the "Rastafari".

Sylvia Pankhurst raised funds for Ethiopia's first teaching hospital, and wrote extensively on Ethiopian art and culture.

Sylvia Pankhurst dedicated Ethiopia: A Cultural History to Haile Selassie: "Guardian of Education, Pioneer of Progress, Leader and Defender of his People in Peace and War".

Sylvia Pankhurst died in Addis Ababa in 1960, aged 78, and received a full state funeral at which Haile Selassie named her "an honorary Ethiopian".

Sylvia Pankhurst is the only foreigner buried in front of Holy Trinity Cathedral in Addis Ababa, in a section reserved for patriots of the Italian war.

Sylvia Pankhurst is the subject of a mural, completed 2018 by Jerome Davenport, on the gable-end of the Lord Morpeth pub on Old Ford Road in Bow, London.

Sylvia Pankhurst objected in principle to entering into a marriage and to taking a husband's name.

Sylvia Pankhurst's son, Pankhurst's grandson, Alula Pankhurst is an Ethiopian scholar and social development consultant in Addis Ababa, and has been a contributor to the Ethiopia Observer which continues to publish.

From an early age Sylvia Pankhurst had an ambition to become a "painter and draughtsman in the service of the great movements for social betterment".

Sylvia Pankhurst trained at Manchester School of Art and then the Royal College of Art in London.

Sylvia Pankhurst found it difficult to reconcile her artistic vocation with her political activities, eventually deciding that they were incompatible.