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.