BOOK REVIEW
THE WOMEN’S SUFFRAGE MOVEMENT, E. SYLVIA PANKHURST, 1931
MARCH IS WOMAN’S HISTORY MONTH.
I have written previously about Sylvia Pankhurst in reviewing a biography of her life by Patricia Romero. For those not familiar with her life this autobiography, although written in 1931, only takes us through her fight for the vote for women in England and her pacifist opposition to Britain’s participation in World War I. Thus, the reader is deprived of her take on her experiences as she moved leftward with Lenin and the Communist International after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and her descent in the 1920’s into radical mysticism that ultimately led to her becoming, in essence, a publicity flak for Halie Selassie in Ethiopia. A rather sad ending for someone who in the pre-World War I period stood for votes for women, including working class women, and at least a formal opposition to British imperialist war designs.
The case of Sylvia Pankhurst, and her conflict with her mother Emmeline and older sister Christabel at various stages in the women’s suffrage fight, is almost a chemically pure case of the limits of bourgeois feminism. There is very little overlap between those politics and the socialist fight for women’s rights and social equality. It is hard to believe now what all the fuss was about but at the turn of the 20th century the fight for women’s suffrage in England, as in the United States, was a key issue that especially agitated middle and upper class women. The Pankhursts, mother and daughters, were in the forefront of the struggle with their Women’s Social and Political Union.
Although, for the most part, Sylvia was a cog in her mother and older sister’s machine, when the issue rose to the level of parliamentary action Sylvia proved far more radical, at least in form, than they were. While Emmeline and Christabel were ultimately concerned about votes for middle and upper class women of property, leaving the vast bulk of women disenfranchised, Sylvia in 1912 went on her own in order to fight for the vote in the working class districts of London’s East End. Thus, on even an entirely supportable democratic demand like the right to vote the class line, if somewhat blunted in this case, rather than the sex line proved decisive. The treacherous subordination of their movement by the elder Pankhursts on behalf of British participation in World War I and continued participation by the faltering Provisional Government in Russia further drew that line between socialism and bourgeois feminism.
The Pankhurst-led fight for the vote also brings up a couple of other issues around tactics and program. At one point the Pankhursts, including Sylvia, were involved in a campaign of private and governmental property smashing, civil disobedience and hunger strikes in order to publicize the fight for the vote. These are tactics associated with more militant types of politics. Nevertheless their campaigns, whether fruitful or not, while courageous and in Victorian England bound to stir trouble do not necessarily lead to radical conclusions. The case of Gandhi in India and Martin Luther King in the United States demonstrate that militant tactics absent any overriding strategy for fundamental social change are not enough.
On program two items stick out. First, the male-exclusionist nature of the Women’s Political and Social Union not only further demonstrates the limits of bourgeois feminism but also made no sense around the fight on a democratic issue by limiting the appeal that the organization made to men (some 20 per cent who were also excluded from the vote). Secondly, Sylvia made real progress in program by having her East End organization support universal suffrage and linking it to war- related issues. It is that move by her to the left and toward some form of socialist solution to women’s issues and the war question that militants can honor today. That she could not move forward politically says something about the British left milieu of the time as well as about her own limitations. Understanding those limitations going in one can nevertheless profit from reading this book.
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