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.
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| "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.
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| 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).
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| City Hotel, Schenectady |
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| Slick's, opposite the site of Red Men's Hall |
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| The site of Red Men's Hall today |
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| 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.
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| 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.
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