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).