'This is a free country, isn't it?' Militancy in Chicago

The last blog post ended by recalling Sylvia Pankhurst's lifelong opposition to the politics of Winston Churchill. New research that I've just undertaken in Chicago reveals that when Sylvia Pankhurst first arrived in that city, towards the beginning of her 1911 tour, she was confronted by questions about this Tory-turned-Liberal politician. A Suffragette in America recalls that Sylvia first came to Chicago on 18 January, arriving at Congress Hotel at midnight. Declining to speak to reporters because she wanted to sleep, she further angered the impatient press by informing them she was going to spend a few days writing. They had other ideas, harrassing Sylvia until she submitted to interviews. 

The Congress Hotel, Chicago where Sylvia was harrassed by journalists in 1911 and where she spoke in 1912.

The Chicago Daily News reveals some of their tactics: they proudly boasted that Sylvia 'found herself confronted by a reporter as she came from breakfast.' The reporter asked her about Winston Churchill: "What do you think of Winston Churchill's attitude in the great battle of the London police with the anarchistic burglars?"

They referred to the 'Siege of Sidney Street' in which two Latvian members of a gang implicated in a botched robbery were held up and involved in a gun fight with the police and army on a street in Stepney in East London. The introduction of immigration controls six years earlier, explicitly targeted at excluding East European Jewish immigrants, encouraged festering racism, particularly anti-Semitism. The Latvian gang were luridly portrayed as anarchists, part of a foreign, lawless conspiracy against Britain - hence, "anarchistic burglars"! Home Secretary Winston Churchill dashed to the scene, intent on grabbing himself a starring role in the 'battle' which was being caught on film.

Winston Churchill (in the top hat) at the siege of Sidney Street

So why was Sylvia being asked about this in America? Did the reporters seek to embarrass her by comparisons between the militant suffragettes and "anarchistic burglars", both of whom found themselves in combat with Churchill? Yes, it would seem. Sylvia ('impatiently', according to the reporter) declined to comment because she had not been in London when this took place, as she had been sailing to America, but would say that she thought Churchill would 'eventually' support women's suffrage. However, it was militancy that the press were obsessed with; their next question: "Do you expect to be arrested while in Chicago, as you were in London?" Sylvia declined to comment - and then added "I do hope, though, that Chicago policemen have better judgement than some we have in England. This is a free country, isn't it?"

These two questions: the role of militancy and the nature of 'freedom' in the USA would remain at the heart of Sylvia's encounters with Chicago over the four visits she made to the city in 1911 and 1912.

A substantial part of Sylvia's lectures in the US involved defending suffragette militancy. To justify their methods, Sylvia frequently drew parallels between suffragette militancy and the direct action of the American Revolution. The Boston Tea Party, an attack on private property motivated by disenfranchisement, was a favourite example.

Some American suffragists were supportive - and recognised that the promise of a suffragette speaking about imprisonment was a very effective way to get people to turn up to the local meeting! Others thought that militants discredited the cause, their actions serving to reinforce views of women as hysterical and irrational. Leading Illinois suffragist Catharine Waugh McCulloch belonged to the latter and on 29 January 1912 protested in a letter to a Wisconsin suffragist that Sylvia Pankhurst - as one of the women who "act like tomboys" - should have been invited to campaign there. Two days before McCulloch sent that letter, she was sharing a platform with Sylvia at a meeting in the Congress Hotel in Chicago. Probably Sylvia invoked the Boston Tea Party, because McCulloch delivered a rather bizarre attack on that iconic moment of American history - denouncing it as a male attack on the "feminine luxury" tea (rather than liquor) which only went to show that "men are selfish and have always been selfish in their political views and practices"!

But it was not only, or primarily, with reference to past acts of militancy that Sylvia Pankhurst understood her political activism. When Sylvia first arrived in Chicago, at the time she was being asked about anarchistic burglars at breakfast, a strike of garment workers, most of them women, was drawing to its bitter end after a long struggle. As we have seen from the questions asked by the Chicago press, militancy was understood by many to involve getting arrested. This experience was certainly one that the Chicago garment workers shared with the suffragettes, many of them were arrested and imprisoned for their actions. 

Morgan and I went to the site of that imprisonment to try to understand more about it. The striking Chicago garment workers were taken to Harrison Street police court and jail. This place was notorious for its insanitary conditions - the prison itself was said to have brought down the surrounding area into criminality and it was torn down in 1911. We went to the crossroads of Harrison Street and La Salle where it had been (for more on the site see Chicagology). The inner city rail line runs past it now. The old site itself is occupied by a large office block which directly replaced the jail (asking a worker there on a cigarette break if this used to be the site of a jail, I was informed "it still is!"), it being built in 1912.

Harrison Street jail just before it was torn down (from Chicagology).

The site of Harrison Street jail today.

As Morgan observed, it was a jail in the heart of town: it was a significant presence in the city. The jail has been gone for over a hundred years but an incongruity remains. Giant buildings dedicated to banking, the ubiquitous expensive cafes frequented by the professionals working in this area sit right beside a shabbier Chicago, cheap cafes with hand written notices on the wall warning people they can't sit without buying food, homeless people stand on the street outside. Around the site of the old jail the land feels desolate and unfinished, tarmac is replaced by a sandy surface, when we visited this was punctuated by puddles filled with summer rain. The car park is 1 minute away but there are lots of cars parked up in this space, huddled up against the structure of the railway line.

The site of the jail today beside the rail line.

The building that replaced the jail, barbed wire from the car park.

The building that replaced the jail.

On 21 January 1911, Sylvia was taken to visit Harrison Street by Zelie Emerson - the woman who, a year later, would follow Sylvia to London. Together they established a branch of suffragettes in East London which centrally involved working-class women in the struggle for their political rights. The Chicago Daily News reported that when Sylvia visited Harrison Street 'she was especially interested in the cells girl garment workers had occupied'.

Zelie Emerson showing Sylvia Pankhurst the cells at Harrison Street published in the Chicago Daily News. The original negative is reproduced in A Suffragette in America.

Sylvia's judgement was unambiguous: "Fearful - shocking - appalling". At breakfast in the Congress Hotel, Sylvia said she hoped that the authorities would have better judgement in the US than in Britain. What she saw provided an answer: 

"Wherever I have gone in America I have been assured that suffragettes would never receive the treatment here that they receive in England," said Miss Pankhurst, "but" - then a sigh - " I think there would be little difference, if they incarcerate girls in these cells."

Sylvia looked at the treatment of the garment workers and she saw the treatment of the militant suffragettes. She saw them as a part of the same struggle and wrote to the press denouncing their treatment. 

Striking garment workers being arrested in Chicago.

Militancy was a defining feature of this period of British history and it was not confined to progressive movements. The prospect of Home Rule for Ireland drove the right to use their power inside and outside Parliament. In Parliament, the Tory Lords blocked welfare legislation and tried to gridlock the government. Outside, Bonar Law, the leader of the Conservative Party, oversaw drills of armed Ulstermen threatening civil war against the elected government. On the other hand, from 1910 until the outbreak of the First World War, Britain experienced the 'Great Unrest' as groups of workers across the country revolted against low pay and poor working conditions by undertaking strike action. Reactionaries saw revolutionary plots everywhere, no wonder they called the army into Stepney.

The Pankhursts were steeped in a radical tradition of seeking change through Parliament. The actions of the Lords, the fact that women's suffrage seemed further than ever posed a serious challenge to this view. Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst drew a pessimistic conclusion: that militancy would have to be coupled with elitism and reactionary alliances (Christabel was in secret correspondence with the Conservative leader) to make progress. Sylvia drew a more radical conclusion: if the British state would not yield to progressive change then there was something rotten about it, something fundamentally undemocratic at its heart. The solution was to link up with other groups who sought democratic change - workers in struggle, Irish fighters against British imperialism - and realise their collective strength to force change. In 1914, Sylvia Pankhurst, Zelie Emerson and the entire East London branch were expelled from Emmeline and Christabel's WSPU when Sylvia put that approach into practice by appearing on a platform alongside James Connolly, a socialist fighter for Irish freedom playing a leading role in working-class struggle in Dublin. It was because she also saw them as engaged in a struggle for democratic power over their own lives, that Sylvia identified with the garment workers of Chicago.

Railroads

Sylvia Pankhurst was reliant upon trains for her tour of North America. The triumph of the car and the oil industry since would render it impossible to replicate the schedule in this way today. Retracing just a few of Pankhurst's steps, Morgan and I use trains when we can but we are also taking the Megabus, Greyhound buses, taxis and lifts from generous friends in their cars. Although Sylvia had access to a superior and more coherent infrastructure, taking train journeys across such vast distances also prompted changes to her itinerary.

Trains breaking down or being delayed were responsible for Sylvia missing a number of speaking engagements and having to change plans at the last minute, dispatching telegrams when possible to keep her hosts informed. It required considerable flexibility and confidence to pull off such a tour successfully. One such delay occurred on the 12 February 1911 when Sylvia's train from Toronto was three hours late. She had been expecting to go to Geneva, in upstate New York, but now rearranged to go to from Buffalo to Syracuse, from there to Rochester and on to Geneva for the 14th instead (to return to my earlier point, our trip in the reverse direction from Syracuse to Geneva necessitated a bus to Auburn and then a taxi to Geneva there being no public transport available).

Sylvia Pankhurst's lecture in Geneva (Library of Congress).

There are a number of sites in upstate New York state that testify to its radical history of abolitionist and feminist activity. The underground railroad, a network of people who helped those escaping slavery to get to Canada, ran through this area. Outside the library in Schenectady, there are statues of the Auburn-based anti-slavery politician, William Seward and the political activist Harriet Tubman, who herself escaped slavery and through breathtakingly courageous actions helped hundreds of others to do the same.

William Seward and Harriet Tubman at Schenectady.

Harriet Tubman's home in Auburn is now a museum. A statue of Frederick Douglass stands on a crossroads in Rochester - like Tubman he had escaped slavery and become a powerful abolitionist advocate. And like Tubman he was a vocal exponent of women's suffrage. The driver of the taxi on that trip from Auburn to Geneva told us that his sister lived in one of the oldest houses in the area where a concealed hole in the wall was thought to have been somewhere people were hidden. 

This is also the area the women's suffrage movement was born, in the 1848 conference at Seneca Falls. That's memorialised today by a National Park. This event will gain greater prominence with the approach of the centenary of the 19th amendment - which granted votes to women nationwide, at least, it did so in theory: in practice racist lawmakers and terrorist groups frequently denied black people's civil rights. 

It is important to remember, then, that the women's suffrage movement and the anti-slavery movement emerged as a common cause, different forms of oppression being understood as products of the same system. This accounts for the geographical proximity of these campaigning sites. We should also recall that the subsequent adoption of racism by some leading suffragists played into the hands of white supremacist politicians and weakened the campaign for women's suffrage. 

It was the connections between these struggles that brought Sylvia to Geneva. Here lived two long-standing women's suffrage campaigners, Elizabeth Smith Miller and her daughter Anne Fitzhugh Miller. Elizabeth was a cousin of leading suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the daughter of leading abolitionist Gerrit Smith. In February 1911, they invited Sylvia to stay with them at Lochland, their beautiful home with its extensive grounds. The place card for Sylvia's seat at luncheon is preserved in the Library of Congress. 

Sylvia Pankhurst's place card at Lochland (Library of Congress).

Sylvia had little enthusiasm for the elite social occasions in which it was expected she would participate, but it probably fair to assume that, as an activist and artist, she would have been interested in the Miller family's commitments to progressive causes, their involvement at the centre of cultural life in Geneva and the beauty of Seneca Lake which Lochland overlooks. Lochland is still there today, with its tall slim white pillars and wide porch on which the Millers held 'piazza parties' for women's suffrage. It is now a home for adults with learning disabilities.

Elizabeth Smith Miller and Anna Fitzhugh Miller at Lochland.

Seneca Lake.

When Sylvia arrived, life at Lochland was perhaps rather more subdued than it had been in previous years. Elizabeth Smith Miller was ill and would pass away three months later. Neither she nor Anne were able to attend Sylvia's public lecture in Geneva that evening.

The lecture took place at the elegant Smith Opera House in town. We met up with theatre and suffrage expert Chris Woodworth who kindly took us on a tour of the building. Chris informed me that the choice of venue was not at all coincidental: it was where women's suffrage conferences and meetings had been held, and was somewhere connected with the Millers and their circle. The frontage is rather similar to the one Sylvia would have seen, with Shakespeare's face on one side of the door. The interior has been restored to the Art Deco style adopted in the interwar period, which Sylvia would not have seen. However, the dimensions of the building are largely the same and, standing on the stage, it is possible to gain an insight into the performance she would have been required to deliver. It is an indication of Sylvia's status that the Opera House was 'nearly filled' when she spoke there on 14 February.

The Smith Opera House today.

The stage.

The auditorium.

Standing on the stage (photo: Chris Woodworth).

There was quite a programme that night which began and finished with songs from the local Hobart College Quartette. There were speeches of welcome and introduction before Sylvia delivered her address, which was followed by questions, taken by Sylvia and the Chair of Church Work at the National Woman Suffrage Association, and then a series of 'national hymns' from England, Italy, Sweden, Austria, the Netherlands, France, Germany, Russia, Norway and America!

Programme for Sylvia Pankhurst's lecture.

Consistent with her emphasis on the importance of suffrage for working women, Sylvia spoke about women's working conditions and wages in England and the US. Considering that in A Suffragette in America and in her speeches she objected to claims that America had excellent working conditions without sweating and low pay, we may be sceptical of the newspaper's report that 'conditions in America . . . she has learned since her visit here are better in this country than in her own country.'

She also spoke about imprisonment, the beginning of militancy - and one Winston Churchill. During the 1906 general election campaign, Sylvia attended a Liberal Party rally and asked Churchill if he supported votes for women. Invited to the platform to pose her question, she listened as Churchill contemptuously proclaimed that he would not be "henpecked" into supporting women's suffrage. Sylvia was then dragged off the platform by the Liberal stewards who locked her in a back room and threatened her with violence. She escaped by clambering out of the window - upon which she addressed the assembled crowd. In Geneva, Sylvia predicted that 'at the next election [Churchill] will undoubtedly be defeated.' (The next election was in fact postponed by the First World War.)

Thirty nine years after the 1906 general election, Sylvia was able to cast her vote directly against Winston Churchill when she voted in the post-war election in Woodford where she lived, and the constituency Churchill represented. They were lifelong political opponents: Sylvia opposed the First World War during which Churchill was Minister of Munitions, she championed the Bolshevik Revolution which Churchill was so determined to crush, and from the 1920s onwards she denounced his appeasement of Italian fascism. A historian of the women's movement herself, Pankhurst never forgot the importance of linking up struggles for democracy.

With A Suffragette in America outside the Smith Opera House (photo: Chris Woodworth).

Photos from Cleveland launch

Thanks so much to Mac's Backs-Books on Coventry in Cleveland for a lovely book launch last night. This is a truly great bookshop which you would never guess from the outside has three floors and its own restaurant. Lots of enticing radical books. It was a pleasure to share stories about Sylvia's time in Cleveland: speaking with Pauline Perlmutter Steiman (Gloria Steiman's grandmother), visiting the workhouse and her sharing a platform with Anna McGinty from the garment workers' strike in the city. Thanks Cleveland! Looking forward to Milwaukee this afternoon.

Audio: A Suffragette in America at Bristol Transformed

Here's a link to the recording of the talk I gave about A Suffragette in America at Bristol Transformed recently.

You can purchase the book here.

Katherine Connelly speaking at Bristol Transformed. Photo: Susan Newman.

Sylvia in Schenectady: class struggle in the Mohawk Valley

In the last blog post, we left Sylvia Pankhurst in Boston in March 1912. Stunned by the news of mass window smashing by suffragettes in London, Sylvia had to face the outrage of erstwhile supporters and explain why women had been driven to take this action.

She began persuading her audiences to vote on sending two telegrams: one to the British Prime Minister condemning his repression of the suffragettes, the second to the WSPU affirming support for them. Sylvia had been increasingly concerned at the WSPU's elitist trajectory - on principle, because she felt the marginalisation of working-class women undermined the struggle for democracy; tactically, because she feared the suffragettes would be unable to sustain the struggle with a few activists. The telegrams were a collective response aimed at demonstrating wider support for the suffragettes.

After Boston, Sylvia threw herself into one last campaign in the US. It was to be the most radical of all the ones she was involved with. In the spring of 1912, the relatively new and extrovert Women's Political Union organised a campaign in the Mohawk Valley as part of efforts to win women's suffrage in New York state. In the course of this tour, Sylvia arrived in Schenectady where she spoke on 27 March in Red Men's Hall.

"Not as a Right, but as an Economic Necessity", Pankhurst speaks in Schenectady

The name of the hall speaks to a process of colonisation and subjugation. Schenectady had been home to the Mohawk people, before the land was colonised by settlers who cast Native Americans as 'Red' people. Sylvia was acutely aware of the way that Native Americans had been driven out by colonisers and forced to live in 'reservations', their culture subjected both to destruction and commodification. She wrote powerfully about this in the sixth chapter of her manuscript.

Schenectady, a city made famous by General Electric, elected socialists to City Hall, with George R. Lunn as mayor, in 1911, becoming one of a number of places with socialist local government in this period. Another was Milwaukee, which Sylvia keenly examined. Like the Milwaukee socialists, the Schenectady socialists are still associated with the creation of parks. Central Park in Schenectady stands as an enduring and beautiful testament to that period.

Central Park, Schenectady

According to the local newspaper, the Schenectady Union-Star, Sylvia 'expressed great surprise' when informed of the local socialist administration. Perhaps this was her interviewer's reading of suppressed enthusiasm, as Sylvia loyally adhered to the WSPU non-party stance, explaining that suffragettes 'are not of any political persuasion. When they win their rights well - then it will be something else, she said' (Union-Star, 26 March 1912, p8).

Interview with Pankhurst in the Union-Star. The picture is in fact of Christabel, not Sylvia.

Or perhaps Sylvia was genuinely unaware of the Schenectady socialists until that moment. The press interview was conducted where Sylvia was staying, amidst 'the reproduction of old masters, the odd pieces of bric-a-brac, the elegant yet tasteful furnishings' in the home of 'Mrs Edward Everett Hale'. A little time in the archives revealed she was not the wife of the famous author, but a daughter-in-law married to his son and namesake. We would find her more easily had she been referred to by her own name! Her name was Rose Postlethwaite Perkins Hale. Rose Hale was an active feminist, the president of the local Women's Political Union she later became the first woman school commissioner in Schenectady. Her husband, Edward Everett Hale (or "Jack" as he was called), stood as the Progressive congressional candidate in 1912, the year of Sylvia's visit. Perhaps all the talk in the Hale house was about the Progressives.

Rose Postlethwaite Perkins Hale (1866-1963)

Officially non-party, Sylvia nevertheless presented her interviewer with a socialist case for women's suffrage based, like her subsequent manuscript, on her research into capitalist America:

"Women need the ballot to protect themselves and their children. It would mean better laws, the bettering of labor conditions. Girls and women work in New York for nothing, or almost nothing."

This was a foretaste of what she would say, in far more direct terms, in Red Men's Hall. But where was it? It was once a significant venue hosting political rallies and boxing matches, but its name disappears from the newspapers. One account gave the location as the corner of Ferry Street (now South Ferry) and Liberty Street but these streets form a crossroads providing four potential corners. Sometimes, you have to go to the bar to do historical research - and so it proved in this case. Me and Morgan walked into Slick's, an attractive building constructed of slatted wood painted dark green. The bar's current owner, who took the place on in the 1970s, instantly recalled the Hall and pointed to the wall where there were black and white photographs of the City Hotel to which a hall was appendaged (for a time called Anthony Hall, but the bar owner remembered people calling it Red Men's Hall). Slick's, formerly 'The Corner', had survived since before the time of Sylvia's visit, but the Hotel/Hall was no more. In its place are parking spaces for the nearby flats.

City Hotel, Schenectady

Slick's, opposite the site of Red Men's Hall

The site of Red Men's Hall today

The wall around the parking spaces where Red Men's Hall once was

It was on the site of those parking spaces that a fiery political meeting was held on 27 March 1912. The hall, bedecked in banners, was packed to hear Rose Hale introduce the speakers. Sylvia Pankhurst, the militant who had gone to prison, was the star speaker. At this meeting, as with a number of those in the Mohawk Valley campaign, Sylvia shared the platform with Rose Schneiderman, a socialist and trade unionist who played a crucial role in organising among immigrant women in New York - those the male 'craft' trade union leaders had written off as unorganisable (and regarded as undesirable). But for Pankhurst and Schneiderman, the gross injustices of American capitalism relied upon the disenfranchisement of working-class women.

Rose Schneiderman (1882-1972)

That night, Schneiderman called for the vote on behalf of the 800,000 working women she represented in the New York Women's Trade Union League. Pankhurst demanded democratic control to confront capitalist exploitation: 'Women need the vote, not as a right, but as an economic necessity' (Union-Star, 28 March 1912, p6).

Schneiderman and Pankhurst made this case night after night in the Mohawk Valley. Upon her return to Britain, Pankhurst organised a series of huge demonstrations in support of the imprisoned suffragettes and a branch of working-class suffragettes in East London which would be expelled by the WSPU leaders who did not want these women in their ranks. For her part, Pankhurst did not forget the socialists of Schenectady. We know she was following their progress while she was trying to change the direction of the WSPU because in her manuscript she wrote about the way the Schenectady socialists stood up to the profiteering of the privately owned Ice Trust in the summer of 1912. Like her approach to Milwaukee, Pankhurst's interest was on what difference socialists could make once elected in the face of unaccountable economic organisations. It remains an urgent political question.

I'll be speaking about Pankhurst in upstate New York in Buffalo at 6pm tonight.

Sylvia Pankhurst in Boston: race, militancy and marching on the State House

Boston MA held an important place in Sylvia Pankhurst's tours of North America. Sylvia went there twice in 1911 and on two further occasions in 1912. She first arrived in Boston on 10 January 1911 when she spoke to a thousand people in Ford Hall. Although Ford Hall is no longer there, its name endures in the Ford Hall Forum which continues to host public lectures.

Morgan and I investigated the sites of Sylvia's three other encounters with the city which traverse a dramatic change in the suffragette campaign and its reception in America. Our first task was to walk the route of the demonstration in which Sylvia marched in the front row on 23 February 1911.

This was a Women's Day demonstration, a precursor of International Women's Day. The history of Women's Day returns us to the sites we walked in an earlier post, around the lower East Side of New York City, and the people that we encountered there. The Day was initiated by Theresa Malkiel, a Jewish immigrant who left the Russian Empire to settle in New York where she became a leading trade unionist in the garment trade and a prominent member of the Socialist Party. In 1909 she launched Women's Day as a means to link the demand for women's suffrage to the labour movement.

In 1911, socialist women in Boston proposed a Women's Day march on the State House where women's suffrage was being voted on by the Massachusetts state government. The march began in Park Square by the Lincoln Freedmen Memorial which can still be found there (although Park Square is now hemmed in by high rise towers).

The Lincoln Freedmen Memorial in Boston

This monument from 1879 is a reproduction of one commissioned three years earlier by African Americans who had been liberated from slavery. The original had been dedicated to Abraham Lincoln by Frederick Douglass, who had himself escaped slavery and become a leading anti-slavery campaigner, and ardent supporter of women's suffrage. As I previously argued in an interview in Jacobin, Sylvia was well aware of the links between the anti-slavery and women's suffrage movements, her own family's activism was rooted in that tradition. No doubt Sylvia would have understood the symbolism of starting the march there.

However, as an artist and activist keenly interested in questions of representation, she may have been critical of this memorial to emancipation in which a shirtless black man kneels beneath Lincoln the liberator. The struggle of black Americans, not least of those who fought in the Union army, is completely erased in this monument. The words on the plinth read 'A race set free and a country at peace Lincoln rests from his labors'. But by the time Sylvia arrived in America, the hopes of those who fought for radical Reconstruction had been bitterly crushed, racial equality was not achieved and in the South Jim Crow laws enforced segregation supported by white terrorist groups. Meanwhile, the failure of the women's suffrage movement to make significant progress drove many of its leaders to turn to employ racist arguments to try to advance their cause. It is possible that the Lincoln Freedmen memorial was chosen by the socialists as the starting point of the march as a rejection of this development in the suffrage movement.

The march started at 7.30pm, after dark in winter, and so the demonstration was lit by torches. The flickering of the flames would have lit up the banners for the various sections: there were suffragists, socialists including the Harvard Socialist Club, and delegations of Finnish and Lettish women. There were 1,500 demonstrators and Sylvia was in the front line, testifying to how significant a figure she was deemed to be.

The women walked three sides of the large park nearby, along Boylston street, left onto Tremont street and then left onto Beacon street which inclines towards the Massachusetts State House. This was no silent protest, music was provided by a drum and fife band and the throngs of people who lined the streets applauded the procession; it was said there was not one jeer.

The route of the march

The State House remains an imposing building, protected by huge black wrought iron gates, it is reached by wide, steep stone steps that ascend towards a large red brick building, with white pillars, topped by a golden dome. This was the building in which the campaigners were to put their case and among those who addressed the State House thàt day was Sylvia Pankhurst - a special exception had been made to allow a foreigner to speak.

Massachusetts State House

Sylvia spoke about the conditions in prisons in Chicago, where striking garment workers had been locked up and which she had been shown by Zelie Emerson (with whom she would later set up the East London Federation of Suffragettes). Once again, we see Sylvia insisting that modern, capitalist America was desperately in need of democracy. She deftly addressed her own status as a 'militant' by urging the legislators not to push American women to these tactics by refusing them their rights. Her speech was applauded and highly regarded. As well as legislators, Sylvia also addressed a packed public meeting in Ford Hall and overflow meetings outdoors. The meetings finished at 11pm. The legislators did not heed Sylvia's warning: they voted against equal suffrage.

Sylvia had to defend her militancy the following day when she went back to Boylston street to the headquarters of the Massachusetts Woman's Suffrage Association and of the Woman's Journal at number 585. There she spoke alongside another British woman, Emma Brignall, who expressed her disapproval of the militant suffragettes. According to the Boston Globe, Sylvia 'said she regretted that any one should criticise the suffragettes, and then captivated her audience in a few minutes with her charm of manner.'

585 Boylston street today

The headquarters of the Massachusetts Woman's Suffrage Association and the Woman's Journal were behind the windows on the middle floor on the right

One person she impressed that day was Alice Stone Blackwell, the editor of the Woman's Journal. Alice was the daughter of Lucy Stone and Henry Browne Blackwell, two leading abolitionists and women's rights campaigners - again, we find the causes were early intertwined. Alice had Sylvia's book The Suffragette republished by the Journal.

Alice Stone Blackwell (1857-1950)

Sylvia returned to the headquarters on Boylston street under very different circumstances in 1912. A proposed women's suffrage Bill had been sabotaged by the British government and the suffragettes responded with a mass campaign of window smashing. Sylvia's mother Emmeline Pankhurst faced a long imprisonment and her older sister Christabel Pankhurst had fled into exile. In the US, Sylvia found some of her lectures cancelled and a renewed hostility towards the militants.

On 19 March, after giving a lecture in Brockton, where she won unanimous agreement from the audience to cable their support for the militants and condemnation of the British government, Sylvia dashed over to Boylston street to catch the end of a meeting. Upon arriving, she was asked to speak. The report in the Globe indicates the personal toll of the tense political situation, she was said to look 'very frail' and 'her voice trembled when she spoke of her mother in jail'. But despite this, 'she expressed her hope in the ultimate victory in what she termed a fight for "human rights"'.

The militants' experience of intense state repression cast doubt on the notion that change comes through gradual evolution. 585 Boylston street is still there today. It is no longer a campaign headquarters, the ground floor is a pharmacy, upstairs is a dental association. But outside on the pavement there were women with clipboards raising money for Planned Parenthood. They were talking about how especially important this had become now that the Trump administration was emboldening state governments to attack women's abortion rights.

Sylvia Pankhurst knew from experience that progress was neither inevitable nor permanent. Every right had to be fought for, gains could come under renewed attack and have to be defended again. She saw this most starkly in the rise of fascism which represented an existential threat to everything Sylvia had dedicated her life to: workers' rights, women's rights, racial equality and democracy. In response she created a women's anti-fascist organisation and one of the people she wrote to, to urge her support, was Alice Stone Blackwell who she had met over 20 years before on Boylston street in Boston. In the face of an emboldened far-right, Sylvia's response was to campaign, drawing on a tradition of linking up struggles. I suggest we do the same.

Sylvia Pankhurst returns to Cambridge MA

I am very excited to be launching the US book launch tour of A Suffragette in America today in Cambridge, MA. I'm going to be speaking in the Nelson Mandela room in the Democracy Center, 45 Mt Auburn Street at 4.30pm.

Happily, this venue is very close to Brattle Hall, where Sylvia Pankhurst spoke on 11 January 1911, a week after she first arrived in the US for the first time on her lecture tour.

Brattle Hall today

Today Brattle Hall contains a cinema and restaurant. Close to Harvard University, the venue was ideally suited to enable students to hear a militant suffragette. Later in 1911, Sylvia's mother, leading militant Emmeline Pankhurst, was barred from speaking at Harvard and spoke instead at Brattle Hall.

Harvard students were among the audience, which included over 200 women, when Sylvia Pankhurst spoke there in January 1911 under the auspices of the Cambridge Political Equality League. A few weeks later, Sylvia marched on the State House in Boston alongside members of Harvard Socialist Club that she might well have met at that Brattle Hall meeting. But I'll tell that Boston story in tomorrow's post . . .

New research: Sylvia Pankhurst and the fire at Public School 62

On 7 April, in the last days of her 1911 lecture tour, Sylvia Pankhurst visited Public School 62 on New York's lower East Side. According to the Evening World, this was an 'unexpected visit' which indicates that Sylvia had planned it herself. She was impressed by what she saw, telling a reporter "We have nothing like this in England . . . That's why I never went to public school" (Evening World 8 April 1911). It's an intriguing comment. According to Sylvia, her father Dr Richard Pankhurst had wanted his daughters to attend school in London, but her mother Emmeline Pankhurst was resolutely opposed fearing this would hamper their individuality. When the family moved back to Manchester in the early 1890s, Sylvia was sent to Manchester High School for Girls where she felt very much like an outsider. Her father, an agnostic, had his children excused from religious instruction and Sylvia found many teachers as well as pupils were hostile to her family's radical politics. What was it about P.S. 62 (as it was known) that Sylvia found so attractive?

Young Sylvia Pankhurst (image from E. Sylvia Pankhurst papers, IISG)

Yesterday, Morgan and I went to the lower East Side to find out more about this visit and its impact on Sylvia. P.S. 62 was situated on Hester Street between Norfolk Street and Essex Street facing Seward Park. In 1911 it was claimed to be the 'biggest school in the world', (Evening World 8 April 1911). One account described it as a 'white granite building, pillared, porticoed and five stories high' (Milton Meltzer, Dorothea Lange, Syracuse University Press, 2000, p10). In its place today is a large basketball court overlooked by high-rise blocks of flats.

The site of P.S. 62 today

To find out what had happened, we made the short walk across Seward Park to the nearby branch of the New York Public Library. Directed to local history and archives on the third floor, we met Andrew Fairweather who kindly told us about the school's fate. In the late 1920s, this vast structure found itself in the path of the F train subway line and so it was knocked down and replaced by the Seward Park High School.

Andrew sent me a history of P.S. 62 which revealed the scope of the school's work and a clue to Sylvia's admiration for it. P.S. 62 opened in 1905 and was described as 'truly a temple dedicated to learning', with two shops, two gymnasiums, shower baths, science rooms, 'large airy classrooms' and 'the largest auditorium and lobby built in an elementary school' (Robert B. Brodie, 'The Passing of Public School 62'). It was in that 'magnificent auditorium' that Sylvia attended the school's morning assembly of 1,200 students who sang 'in beautiful harmony'. (Evening World 8 April 1911).

The school was particularly associated with the local District Superintendent of schools, Julia Richman (1855-1912). Born to a middle-class Jewish family in New York, Richman chose to help impoverished children who lived on the lower East Side. At the beginning of the twentieth century, this part of New York was where many immigrants first settled, a large proportion of them Jewish, fleeing anti-Semitic pogroms in the Tsarist Russian Empire. In the New World, they encountered overcrowded housing to live in and sweatshops to work in. Richman evidently conceived of schools as playing a reforming and elevating role and P.S. 62 would have a number of prominent alumni, including the successful basketball player Nat Holman and the photographer Dorothea Lange, most famous for capturing the dispossessed of Depression Era America. Richman rented a home near the school which functioned as a Settlement House.

Julia Richman (1855-1912)

One of the arguments in A Suffragette in America is that Sylvia was profoundly influenced by a number of Settlement Houses, particularly those run by women. It is not hard to understand why Sylvia woukd have wanted to see P.S. 62 and why she felt it to be a progressive institution. Although Richman championed assimilation, with the cultural erasure that implies, she nevertheless refused to cast the children of the lower East Side as lifelong, 'foreign' outsiders. Likewise, Sylvia resisted those in the suffrage movement who did not believe that working-class women could be fighters for their own emancipation.

On 8th April, the Evening World reported Sylvia's visit to the school, which is how I was able to find out about it. But in the report, Sylvia's visit is incidental to the main story: the outbreak of a fire at the school. Sylvia had just just left when the fire alarms began to ring, but it's likely she would have heard the commotion: 'the east side was thrown into an uproar by the engines responding to the third alarm.' (Evening World). The story in the papers was one of praise for the orderly evacuation of the huge school which ensured the safety of all the students.

We can understand how fearful local residents must have been when we recall that on 25 March 1911 a fire had broken out at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, on the top floors of a building in Greenwich Village, close to the lower East Side. Because the managers habitually locked the doors (if workers had to file out of one door they could be searched before leaving), the workers found themselves trapped. That day, 146 workers, most of them women, most of them from immigrant backgrounds, were killed in the fire, or in desperately fleeing the flames by jumping to their deaths on the pavement below.

Only two days before the fire alarms sounded at P.S. 62, thousands of people marched through New York in the funeral procession organised by the International Ladies Garment Workers Union for the Triangle's victims. Sylvia Pankhurst was one of those who joined the procession. If she heard the alarms on the 7th April, she must have been fearful of the outcome.

Funeral procession for the victims of the Triangle fire

Certainly, the pupils and local residents would have thought of the Triangle. Many would have known the victims, their families and co-workers. The difference in the outcome of the fire at P.S. 62 revealed that what happened at the Triangle was not inevitable: rather it was the consequence of employers who regarded their profits as of far greater value than the lives of their workers. That conclusion was an important one which Sylvia Pankhurst took from her 1911 tour.

Graffiti outside the site of the Triangle fire, 2017

I'll be talking more about Sylvia Pankhurst and her radical contact with the lower East Side on 2nd July at 265 Henry Street at 6.30pm. Go to the Facebook event to see more.