Miss Estelle Sylvia Pankhurst

Other sources: http://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/C4769024
http://www.sylviapankhurst.com/about_sylvia_pankhurst/background.php
https://artsandculture.google.com/entity/m01j79_
Elizabeth Crawford, The Women's Suffrage Movement: A Reference Guide 1866?1928 (1999); Estella Sylvia Pankhurst, The Suffrage Movement: An Intimate Account of Persons and Ideas (1931); Mary Davis, Sylvia Pankhurst: A Life in Radical Politics (1999)

Database linked sources: https://www.suffrageresources.org.uk/activity/3209/whats-the-story-of-the-womens-suffrage-campaign
https://www.suffrageresources.org.uk/activity/3203/what-were-the-suffrage-campaigners-fighting-for
https://www.suffrageresources.org.uk/activity/3210/whose-suffrage-campaign-story-should-we-commemorate-with-a-statue

Family information: Daughter of Richard and Emmeline Pankhurst, WSPU founder. Sister to Christabel and Adela Pankhurst. She had one son, born in 1927.

Additional Information: Sylvia was a talented artist with a promising career. However, she gave it up to focus on winning the vote for women, with her family and the WSPU ? though this was a gradual process and a struggle for Sylvia, involving family pressure and her own commitment to following her political beliefs. During the early WSPU years, Sylvia likely produced the members' card for the WSPU, which featured a working class woman, brightly clothed and animated. Working class communities were always at the heart of Sylvia's activism for the suffrage movement and, increasingly, for the socialist cause. Throughout the suffrage campaign, she produced banners, murals and designs for WSPU processions, and was arrested in 1906 for obstructing the police outside Parliament. She was imprisoned again in 1907 for her part in a deputation to the Houses of Parliament, after which she toured the country, documenting through her art the lives of working class women. She was absent when a split occurred within the WSPU, resulting in the formation of the Women's Freedom League (WFL) in 1907. It was also that year that her mother Emmeline and sister Christabel gave up their membership of the Independent Labour Party (ILP). Sylvia did not, and her political differences with her family grew. After the window smashing of 1912, Sylvia committed fully to the cause, especially given the sacrifice that others were making, and set about a whirlwind of political campaigning and demonstrating. At the same time, her sister Christabel had called for an arson campaign, which Sylvia thought was a mistake, and had ousted the popular Pethick-Lawrences, which Sylvia thought a disgrace; and as a WSPU member, Sylvia was now unable to help Labour Party candidates who endorsed votes for women because her sister's orders were to work instead against the goverment's (Liberal Party) candidates. During this time, Sylvia had been building support in the working class communities of London's East End. She was arrested several times during that year, mostly for stone-throwing, but was quickly released when her family kept paying the fines. She was determined to serve more time in prison, which she eventually did, going on hunger strike and pacing her cell day and night until temporarily released under the 'Cat and Mouse Act'. Then began the 'game' of cat and mouse between Sylvia and the police, as she went on the run to avoid recapture, mobilising the East End communities, now called the East London Federation of the WSPU, to marches and meetings. Christabel informed Sylvia that the 'membership' of the East London Federation (by which it seems she meant working class women and men) did not match her vision for the WSPU. Finally, in the light of all their differences, Sylvia separated herself and her East End organisation from the WSPU ? renaming it the East London Federation of Suffragettes (ELFS). The ELFS's rousing of men and women of the East End may have had some impact on government ministers, but the outbreak of war in 1914 interceded, and Sylvia turned to helping East End communities in the difficult times to come. She also worked to form, with Labour leaders, the Adult Suffrage Joint Committee. Sylvia later published her account of the 'votes for women' years in her book The Suffragette Movement.

Other Suffrage Activities: During the First World War, Sylvia, a pacifist, joined the Women's International League for Peace. She also continued to lobby, together with women from the East End, for votes for women and against the proposed age limit for women to vote under the 1918 Representation of the People Act. She briefly joined the Communist Party in the 1920s.