The warm
glow of the human heart in dark times
On
transatlantic solidarity in dark times, friendship and the power of art as
resistance: thoughts on Sylvia Pankhurst ‘A Suffragette in America’ edited by
Katherine Connelly [i]
Editing and
publishing are practices that hold immense radical potential. Bringing a text
to the world changes the context of its reception, and this process of
publishing enables words written in a different time and place to reach new
audiences and travel beyond its author’s initial intention. Katherine
Connelly’s decision to edit and publish Sylvia Pankhurst ‘A Suffragette in
America’— a collection of Sylvia Pankhurst’s reflections on her sojourns to
America in the early 1910s is a significant intervention in the study of
radical history, Sylvia Pankhurst’s work and her significance within the
socialist and feminist canon, as well as the history of international struggles
to sustain humanity in dark times. The publication of the text a century after
it was written enables an eye opening experience for the twenty-first reader
who is likely to see America, the United Kingdom and the history of progressive
politics in a new light after engaging with the text.
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| Sylvia Pankhurst writing |
Estelle Sylvia
Pankhurst (1882- 1960) was a socialist, suffragette, anti-racist campaigner
whose entire life was dedicated to bettering the world she inhabited. Whereas
her mother and sister, Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst, became identified
with the suffrage struggle for women of privileged classes at the expense of
explicit exclusion of working class women by upper class women, Sylvia insisted
on universal suffrage qua universal. Her dedication to socialism brought her to
partake in an argument with Lenin around the Russian Revolution; she was
enthused for the events unfolding in St. Petersburg and Moscow and yet was
concerned by the authoritarian direction the Russian socialist government was
taking. Never wavering from the cause of expanding the political sphere for all
to partake, Sylvia’s life long anti-racism and anti-imperialism brought her to
Ethiopia where her life ended in 1960 as an honorary Ethiopian.[ii] Sylvia’s travels to the US,
Connelly shows forcefully, occurred in a moment in which the suffragette
movement in the UK was at an ideational
and pragmatic crossroads. Sylvia’s insights from the USA feeding into her
insistence on radical democracy and socialism changed the course of British
suffrage history, pushing it to a more militant path.
Reading
Sylvia’s travel writings in the 2010s unravels her radical understanding of the
force of history as well as the work needed to be done to make the world’s
wrongs into rights. Writing on diverse issues such as strikes in the Lower East
Side in New York, prisons and mass incarceration in Chicago, Ottawa and New
York State Sylvia insists on observing wrongs first-hand across the vast
continent. Whereas some British suffragettes went to upper class American
circles Sylvia went to Tennessee, disturbed by structural racism but observing
carefully responses to those deep wrongs as well as how those social movements
align with other struggles across the continent. Sylvia visited a native
American college, reflecting on land and culture theft embedded deep at the
heart of American culture. ‘What, with the passing of the ages, might the Red
race have become had the white men not gone with the fire and slaughter to make
war on them?’[iii]
The breadth and
width of the struggles in which she participated is overwhelming by
contemporary criterion, let alone in a time in which travel was much harder and
more complex.
Many elements
of the book resonate with our world, its struggles and dilemmas. And yet two
aspects of Sylvia’s engagement shine through as a lesson for us, reading the
book in 2019. Sylvia was always a participant, never a bystander. Her catalyst
for action threw her into struggles far and wide across America. Digging deep
at the heartlands of American society, her openness for conversation, her
perceptive eye noticing process just commencing are truly overwhelming to the
reader. Sylvia’s perception of deep wrongs alongside the ability to imagine a
world not yet here while insisting on possibilities to change even in the
bleakest conditions are a red thread throughout the book. Her empathy and
sensitivity towards the people she meets are boundless. ‘she might have been
anybody’s daughter’, she writes, commenting on a laundry worker in inhumane
conditions in NYC[iv]. Sylvia perceives, notes,
elaborates, chronicles the wrongs that lie at the heart of the society she
observes. But it is in the spirit of solidarity with those resisting those
wrongs and tirelessly working to make a better world that she writes and
observes.
As a result,
the conversations and friendships she forges change her life— and in turn,
socialist and suffrage history of the UK. Many moving moments in the book
capture the reader’s imagination, and yet in particular one that may surprise
the reader not aware or informed of Sylvia’s other strand in life—- a talented
visual artist herself, inspired by radical craftsmen William Morris, Sylvia visited the Neighborhood Playhouse at
the Henry Street Settlement, an institution making culture and art available to
immigrants and poor residents of the Lower East Side. She forged a friendship with Irene and Alice
Lewisohn, collaborators with the founder of the Neighborhood Playhouse while at
the Henry Street Settlement, Lillian Wald. The Lewisohn sisters were
impresarios and collaborators with such dance luminaries as Martha Graham and
Anna Sokolow. That friendship continued
many years after Sylvia’s initial visit, Connelly forcefully shows, as well as
inspired her to organize radical cultural festivals on the East Side of London.
‘ I lost my heart to the lovely Lewisohn sisters, expanding their wealth and
talents for the creation of a school of dance and drama of the young people of
New York’s East Side at Henry Street Settlement[v]’, she reflects. This openness and
spirit of camaraderie and friendship sustain the text as a true testament for
her solidarity with others.
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| The Neighborhood Playhouse founded by the Lewisohn sisters |
Reading A Suffragette in America in 2019 is a harrowing as well as inspiring
experience. It is striking how many of the struggles in which Sylvia
participated are ongoing. Mass incarceration, structural racism and sexism, the
penetration of the capitalist ethos into every corner of life and the
degradation of human beings into objects are still present. And yet, the spirit
of solidarity shines on; in 2019, collaborations across the ocean sustain;
conversations about social justice illuminate wrongs and help campaigners make
them into rights. Sylvia’s humanity teaches us still. Resistance can commence
in the smallest conversion; solidarity starts in the smallest corner of the
human heart. Sylvia writes about the performance she watches in the
Playhouse:’…as they danced on, It seemed to me that we were all whelmed by a flood
of love and joy and radiance, and that cleansed of pain and sin, and throwing
off social wrongs and false standards of life, we might begin to be brothers
and sisters from the hour.
So life
appeared to me, till the cold hard world outside dimmed the brightness and
warmth glowing in my heart, and seemed to bolster up anew barriers that I had
thought so easy to surmount[vi]’. Inspired by Sylvia’s humanity and
integrity, we continue to work until those barriers are all dismantled.
[i]
This piece is
dedicated to Leah Cox and Blakeley White-McGuire, whose work inspires me
greatly and whose transatlantic friendship sustains me.
[ii]
For further
context on Sylvia Pankhurt’s life see Katherine Connelly’s powerful previous
work: Sylvia Pankhurst: Suffragette, Socialist and Scrounge of Empire (Pluto,
2013). A forthcoming new biography of Sylvia Pankhurst by Rachel Holmes (Sylvia
Pankhurst: Natural Born Rebel, Bloomsbury: 2020) will bring radically new
insights and illuminations into the discussions of Sylvia’s life and work.
[iii]
Sylvia
Pankhurst (edited by Katherine Connelly), A Suffragette in America: reflections
on prisoners, pickets and political change, Pluto, 2019, p. 145.
