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 . . .