Dana Mills reflects on 'A Suffragette in America' today

Here are the beautiful words written by Dana Mills, writer, campaigner and author of a forthcoming biography of Rosa Luxemburg, for the Oxford launch of A Suffragette in America:

“In reaching any foreign country, one is immediately conscious of an all-pervading atmosphere that is markedly different to that of one’s own land, but this characteristic atmosphere is largely indefinable, and one’s appreciation of it is continually affected by the circumstances of one’s contact with it” (E. Sylvia Pankhurst, A Suffragette in America, p. 65)

Journeying with Sylvia Pankhurst and Katherine Connelly between Britain and America of the 1910s and the 2010s is a sojourn in learning about Sylvia, about her sisters and comrades but most specifically about ourselves. From the days in which De Tocqueville wrote Democracy in America—which as we know is largely a book about the French revolution—we know well travel writing can unravel much about who we are as much as that destination we get to know and appreciate becoming part of our spiritual hinterlands. Sylvia Pankhurst speaks to our psyches on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean here and now, and her sojourn in injustice and within her own psyche teaches us as readers profound lessons. Those who meet Sylvia on their journey are incapable of resisting her voice becoming part of their own atmosphere. She is very present in 2019. We are both eagerly awaiting the new—and much needed- biography of Sylvia seeing light this year by Rachel Holmes, to whom we are grateful for many things, separately—but also for introducing us to each other. Sylvia has never gone anywhere, and yet Kate’s book is crucial in making this vital connection between Sylvia’s 1910s American voyage and our times.

Sylvia’s voice which you shall encounter here today speaks profoundly to experiences that are our headlines in 2019: from mass strikes to mass incarceration; structural racism to native land and destruction of native culture. And I would like to pause here and speak of Kate’s editing that is very much in the spirit of Sylvia – from the Women’s Dreadnought, the Workers’ Dreadnought to New Times and Ethiopia News Sylvia knew herself the weight of chronicling and delivering texts, and the responsibility and potential of an editor. Kate’s work makes this book a rigorous and engrossing read; you, the reader, keep thinking, where does Sylvia go next? What is the next stage on her travels?  Publishing is a revolutionary practice, one that gives the text a new life, never exactly the one it had started when it first sojourned into the world. Thus Kate’s editorial work allows Sylvia’s reflections to achieve more and more of our own lands.

Sylvia reported gross injustices that brought her down and sent her spirit into dark abysses often. And yet her indefinable and indomitable passion for justice sustain the text as galvanizing and inspiring—calling us to continue the work, so much yet work to be done, in our own voyages onward  to make wrongs into rights. When summarizing from a Native American college she writes: “Onwards floweth the water, onward through meadows broad.

“How happy,” the meadows say, “art thou to be rippling onward”. And so today we say: “Onwards, A Suffragette in America!”

Comrades: (l to r) Katherine Connelly, Tracy Walsh of the Oxford International Women's Festival and Dana Mills celebrating the Oxford launch of A Suffragette in America