New research! A signature in Baltimore

The handwriting is very shaky: "Votes for Women and may they bring fuller opportunities for development". The rather vague sentiment does not sound like the experienced suffragette orator, while the trembling script, though recognisably her handwriting, stands out from the usually confident pen strokes of the artistic Sylvia Pankhurst. But these are her words, signed E. Sylvia Pankhurst and dated March 28 1911.

Courtesy of Woman Suffrage in Maryland Collection, Special Collections, Enoch Pratt Free Library.

Compare the Baltimore signature with this one written in a book to her East London suffragette comrade Elsie Lagsding. (From https://sotherans.co.uk/products/pankhurst-e-sylvia-author-the-suffragette-the-history-of-the-womens-militant-suffrage-movement-1905-1910-n)

Where was Sylvia Pankhurst on 28 March 1911 and why was her pen shaking?

The message and signature is to be found in the autograph book of a woman called Emma Maddox Funck and is now kept alongside suffrage badges (or pins), sashes, and other campaign materials in the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore, Maryland. In the book we find contributions from such figures as Susan B. Anthony, one of the leading American suffragists, and Annie Cobden Sanderson, a British suffragette and daughter of the famous Liberal Richard Cobden.

Emma Maddox Funck (1853-1940). Image from https://documents.alexanderstreet.com/d/1009656489

Emma Maddox Funck was well placed to collect such signatures. She had been campaigning for women's suffrage since the early 1890s and was for sixteen years (from 1904 to 1920) the President of the Maryland Woman Suffrage Association. In that capacity she arranged for Sylvia Pankhurst, touring the United States in 1911, to give a lecture on women's suffrage on 28 March 1911 in the Osler Hall of the Medical and Chirurgical Building, at 1211 Cathedral street in Baltimore.

The Medical and Chirurgical building on Cathedral Street, Baltimore today where Pankhurst spoke on 28 March 1911

Sylvia Pankhurst stayed with Emma Maddox Funck and her husband Dr J. William Funck (a member of the Men's League for Women's Suffrage) at their home on Eutaw Place in Baltimore - about a 15 minute walk away from the Osler Hall.  

Sylvia Pankhurst and Emma Maddox Funck were quite different kinds of suffrage campaigners. Meeting a reporter in the library in Maddox Funck's home, Pankhurst tried to avoid commenting on her host's politics: "I cannot speak of the suffrage work in Maryland or Baltimore". But she was unable to maintain this stance for long. Interestingly, we once again see Pankhurst making more radical arguments in America (away from the increasingly conservative WSPU leadership) than she felt able to in Britain at this time. Asked about the failure of the recent women's suffrage Bill in Maryland, she insisted that only a completely inclusive measure could succeed: 

"The thing for women of Baltimore and of every other city and State to do is to unite in a demand for universal suffrage - women on the same terms with men. Don't have any educational or property qualification." (The Evening Sun, 28 March 1911, p.7).

At the very same time, the WSPU in Britain was championing a Bill that would enfranchise only a small proportion of women because of a restrictive property qualification!

Tactically, Pankhurst was probably closer to another Baltimore suffragist, one Edith Houghton Hooker (later aunt to Hollywood actress Katharine Hepburn), who formed the Just Government League, which employed more extrovert campaign measures such as open-air meetings. (You can see the different Maryland suffragist organisations on this excellent map).

Edith Houghton Hooker (1879-1948)

But though Pankhurst's militancy caused some American suffragists to keep their distance - or even to express open hostility - many others were keen to have her speak at their meetings. Some maintained that circumstances were different in Britain necessitating different tactics, others were attracted by the publicity gained by having a militant suffragette speaker who had been to prison. 

Nevertheless, Pankhurst and Maddox Funck might have discovered experiences in common. Both were artistic (Pankhurst was a trained artist, Maddox Funck a musician) but had chosen to dedicate their energies to fighting for women's rights. Both had sisters who had trained in law and struggled against discrimination (Christabel Pankhurst was prevented from practicing as a lawyer but used her skills to devastating effect when cross examining Cabinet Ministers in her 1908 trial, Etta Haynie Maddox was the first woman to practice law in Maryland and wrote the first women's suffrage Bill to be placed before the state of Maryland in 1910).

Perhaps one clue to Pankhurst's shaky handwriting can be found in her experiences immediately before arriving at Maddox Funck's home the day before the meeting on 27 March 1911. 

Pankhurst's touring schedule was punishing and she was coming to the end of a three month tour. By 27 March, she had given public lectures in 12 different American states, besides Washington DC and others in Canada. On 24 March, three days before arriving in Baltimore, Pankhurst had addressed the state government in Michigan. On 25 March Pankhurst was the guest of honour at a luncheon in Detroit but something was clearly wrong: the press reported that she looked 'wilted and tired . . . as she held out a limp hand to her eager entertainers, confessing to the pangs of hunger and an unconquerable desire for rest.' 

It is easy to assume that she must have been exhausted by all the travelling, but perhaps we should listen to what Pankhurst herself said about how she felt. And Pankhurst was annoyed. When the lunch was over, 'men and women crowded about her, one calling her Boadicea and another Joan of Arc.' Pankhurst was uncomfortable with this "I don't like it a bit to be called those things", she said, explaining that she was "only one of thousands" of women campaigners. She went on, "[a]nother thing that annoys me terribly is to hear about the wonderfully good conditions existing in this country for women". What she had seen, especially in Chicago (as I explained in an earlier post), showed women were suffering intense exploitation and needed political rights as much as British women. No sooner had she explained that, than she was confronting the widespread misreporting of her age in America:

"No, it's not true that I'm only 20 years of age. I'm a good bit over that, and I don't know what makes them say it unless they're rather fond of telling lies." 

All her objections were to being treated as an anomaly: as a martyr, as a representative of peculiar English conditions, as very young (she was in fact 28 years old in March 1911). Such representations undermined her as a political activist and thus her arguments for women's political rights. It was vital she challenged them, but here we gain an insight into how draining that could be. After lunch, Pankhurst was taken to rest by Dr Mary Thompson Stevens (1864-1949), a prominent local campaigner and paediatrician. 

That evening, Pankhurst gave a speech that lasted three hours which was described as 'perhaps the finest plea for woman suffrage ever made in Detroit' (quotations from the Detroit Free Press quoted in Woman's Journal, 8 April 1911, p.107). 

Pankhurst was supposed to spend the following day resting and she was taken to see where the Pewabic Pottery was made - something that would surely have interested her as an artist who had once used as her subject pottery makers in Britain. But whilst there she was persuaded to talk about her prison experiences by those present. That night, she boarded a train to travel over 500 miles to Baltimore.

Upon arrival she experienced the same treatment which she found so frustrating in Detroit. 'Only 20 years old', proclaimed the local Evening Sun newspaper (27 March 1911, p.3). 'Looks More Like Schoolgirl Than Militant Suffragist', announced the Baltimore Sun before elaborating that because she looked like 'a high school girl . . . [i]t will be hard for her audience tonight to believe that throwing stones at windows, "rushing bobbies" and eating fudge are just the same to her' (28 March 1911, p.11). One report of her lecture even began with a particular pet hate: 'Miss Sylvia  Pankhurst, called the Jeanne d'Arc of English militant women suffragists . . .'

The WSPU leadership compared their campaign to Joan of Arc's, but Sylvia Pankhurst was uncomfortable being described in thus way.

Pankhurst remained determined to challenging misrepresentations. The Baltimore Sun reported that in her lecture in the Osler Hall she explained she had not described the police as "beastly bobbies" but as "brutes" (29 March 1911, p.16). This may also have been misreported as the following day Pankhurst visited the offices of the Baltimore Sun where she told them they had 'gotten the wrong idea' about the suffragettes' approach to the police: 'we don't classify them "as beastly bobbies" or brutes' because they held the government, not the police, responsible for violence towards the suffragettes (30 March 1911, p.8).

"Beastly bobbies" or "brutes" or just following government orders? Police violence against suffragettes, Black Friday, 18 November 1910.

The description of the police was perhaps not the Baltimore Sun's only reporting error. A few days after the meeting, a letter was written to the publication objecting to their claim that 75 people had attended Pankhurst's lecture. In fact, the writer claimed, the audience numbered 400! (Baltimore Sun 31 March 1911, p.6).

The lecture on 28 March was emotionally highly charged. For some reason it began nearly half an hour late. Emma Maddox Funck opened the meeting, followed by the Reverend Joshua E. Wills, pastor of the Second Baptist Church. The reverend delivered a fiery speech in which he attributed a recent anti-women's suffrage speaker's proclamations of male superiority to having 'been feted and feasted for two hours' beforehand in a hotel.

But Pankhurst was evidently still not herself; her speech was preceded by '[f]ive minutes' stage business with a pitcher of ice water' (Evening Sun 29 March 1911, p.10). But Pankhurst knew her speech, and she provided 'thrilling descriptions' of imprisonment and police violence. Then, quite uncharacteristically, she broke down in tears.

This was the same day that she wrote that message in a trembling hand. Perhaps it was exhaustion from the tour, perhaps it was the draining experience of fighting for respect and accurate representation in every place she went, or perhaps it was something else altogether. 

We recall that one of the frustrations Pankhurst faced was the assumption that poor conditions for working women were an English phenomenon, unknown in America. Her own research, which she would write about in her manuscript on America (now published as A Suffragette in America) proved how far from the truth this was. 

One event, above all, demonstrated how appalling conditions were for working-class American women. This took place at the Triangle Shirtwaist factory where the employers' callous disregard for the safety of the garment workers led to 146 of them being killed when a fire broke out in the workplace. Most of the dead were women, most of them were from immigrant backgrounds. Pankhurst attended the funeral for the victims and would write powerfully about this in her manuscript on America. Her words show that Pankhurst was haunted by the harrowing details of the fire:

'a fire that was fatal because ordinary means of exit were inadequate, fire escapes too short to reach the factory's monstrous height, and when the girls sprang from the roof, their tender bodies came hurtling down with an impelling force, that tore the sheets held out for them to shreds.' (p.66)

The fire broke out on 25 March 1911. We know that three days later, in Baltimore, Pankhurst was determined not only to speak about wrongs in England, but also in America. After those five minutes spent with the ice water, perhaps as she tried to compose herself, she began her speech: 'she said conditions in America have impressed her not at all.' (Evening Sun, 29 March 1911, p.10). It is inconceivable that - three days after the fire - Pankhurst would not have heard the news. How could the fire not have played on her mind as she spoke about conditions in America?

The fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist factory, 25 March 1911.

In June 2019, I read Pankhurst's words on the Triangle fire at a book launch for A Suffragette in America in Baltimore. There was an obvious place for the launch: Red Emma's, a renowned radical bookshop with its own bar and restaurant.

'A Suffragette in America' book launch at Red Emma's.

It was an incredible experience to bring Pankhurst's text there amidst volumes on labour history, women's rights, anti-racism, struggles against imperialism - and so many other questions that Pankhurst cared so passionately about. Imagine how I felt, then, when I realised what the building next door was: the Ostler Hall where Pankhurst had spoken in 1911. My hands shook a bit too.

Speaking at Red Emma's.

The Women of Peterloo

On the 200th anniversary of the Peterloo Massacre, I am reposting this piece I wrote originally published on Counterfire on the women of Peterloo. Sylvia Pankhurst's great grandfather attended this hugely important demonstration and it remained a source of inspiration to her vision of the democratic struggle.

We can learn from the inspirational struggle of working-class women against a violent and corrupt Tory government 200 years ago in our fight against the Tories today, argues Katherine Connelly

The famous contemporary image of the Peterloo Massacre shows a crowd of working men, women and children being trampled and sabred by soldiers on horseback. On the platform, alongside the star speaker Henry ‘Orator’ Hunt, is a woman dressed in white. She is holding fast to a banner pole, crowned with a red Cap of Liberty, with a banner depicting Justice triumphant with Corruption underfoot. The woman’s name was Mary Fildes, she was twenty-seven years old, the president of the Manchester Female Reform Union and mother of five children.  She would soon become a target of the violence. The special constables, who arrived to arrest the speakers, beat her with their truncheons. When she tried to escape from the platform her dress caught on a nail and, whilst trapped, suspended above the ground, she was slashed with a sabre by a soldier who seized her banner as a trophy.

Coloured engraving of the Peterloo Massacre with Mary Fildes on the platform. Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Mary Fildes’ prominence on the platform, and the way she was targeted by the authorities, testified to the vital role that women played in this struggle for democracy.

The women organise

Six weeks before the massacre, on 5 July 1819, tens of thousands of workers gathered for an open-air meeting in Blackburn to demand political reform. The Manchester Observer, a radical newspaper, understood that the Blackburn meeting was a signal to the authorities:

“They now begin to see that the people have more weight than themselves, and if we mistake not, they will soon begin to feel the scale preponderate on the side of those, they have hitherto been treating with such insolence and contempt.”

What had been seen – that the workers were many and the wealthy elites were few – would soon be felt because workers were now experiencing the power of collective organisation. Mass working-class meetings were hardly unusual in Lancashire in the summer of 1819. But something unusual did happen at this meeting because half-way through a group of women turned up. They explained that they were the Committee of the Blackburn Female Reform Society and they wanted to be on the platform. The Chairman of the meeting asked the huge crowd to make a pathway for the women to get through – a request that was ‘instantly complied with’.

The women had come prepared. According to the Manchester Observer, they presented the Chairman with ‘a most beautiful Cap of Liberty, made of scarlet silk or satin, lined with green, with a serpentined gold lace, terminating with a rich gold tassel.’

The Manchester Observer

The crowd erupted, shouting “Liberty or Death” and “God bless the women”. Then one of the women, a Mrs Alice Kitchen gave a ‘short emphatic speech’ asking for the Cap to be placed on the top of the banner. The banner was lowered, and the Cap placed on the flagpole, to the acclamation of the mass meeting. The women had also written an address which they asked the Chairman to read – and the crowd shouted “read, read! read! the women for ever!” The address bore the evidence of intense political discussions.

A whole class of people,‘the best artizans, manufacturers, and labourers of this vast community’, found themselves reduced to ‘a state of wretchedness and misery, and driven [. . .] to the very verge of beggary and ruin’. In an economic recession, with soaring levels of unemployment in the local textile industry, the Tory government introduced the Corn Laws to allow wealthy landowners to profit from the high price of bread – whilst working people starved because they couldn’t afford to buy food. As working women, they shared with ‘our fathers, our husbands, our brothers, our relatives and our friends, in the overwhelming misery of our country’ and they knew the situation was getting worse.

Revolutionary ideas

The solution they proposed was political reform. If we think about the political system the workers of Lancashire lived under, we can appreciate how radical their ideas were. In 1819, the parliamentary system was openly corrupt. The large, industrial city of Manchester did not have its own MP, whilst Old Sarum, a hill in Wiltshire, had two MPs and no residents! Dunwich in Suffolk had an MP – but most of the constituency itself had actually fallen into the sea. These were called ‘rotten boroughs’. On top of all this, only the richest people in society were allowed to vote. Voting took place in public, so the most powerful could control how everyone else with the privilege used their votes – resulting in ‘pocket boroughs’: boroughs that were in the pocket of the landowner.

By contrast, the women in Blackburn proposed making parliament subject to the power of the people through ‘annual parliaments, universal suffrage, and election by ballot’. Historians generally assume that ‘universal suffrage’ in this period meant universal male suffrage. Perhaps so, but this did not mean that women did not see themselves as political participants in the present. The Blackburn Female Reform Society warned that

“had it not been for the golden prize of reform held out to us, that weak and impotent as might be our strength, we should long ere thus have sallied forth to demand our rights, and in the acquirement of those rights to have obtained that food and raiment for our children, which God and nature hvae [sic] ordained for every living creature; but which our oppressors and tyrannical rulers have withheld from us.”[i]

The women activists, it seemed, saw their role as spurring on the men to fight for political reform, whilst reserving the right to take revolutionary, direct action themselves if that reform was denied. The red Cap of Liberty the Blackburn Female Reform Society presented was an indication of their political inspiration: it had been worn by the revolutionaries in France.

The Blackburn Female Reform Society was the first of many women’s clubs that sprang up in the weeks before Peterloo and appeared to adopt similarly radical politics. On 20 July 1819, Susannah Saxton, the Secretary of Manchester Female Reformers published their address which denounced England’s ‘unjust, unnecessary, and destructive war, against the liberties of France, that closed its dreadful career on the crimson plains of Waterloo’.[ii] The female reformers’ calls for liberty and attack on the tyranny of the British government was language drawn from the French Revolutionaries – the enemies of the British state.

Women at Peterloo

Women played an important role in mobilising for the demonstration on 16 August in Manchester. A fascinating article by M.L. Bush records one woman ‘visiting north-west towns in early July in order to stress the need for political change and offer precise instructions on how to make pikes.’[iii] Other women probably played a similar role to suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst’s great grandmother, a fustian cutter in Manchester, who ‘sent her husband’ to the demonstration.[iv]

But many women attended the demonstration in person, often marching with their female reformers’ club as a group. The famous radical Samuel Bamford, who marched with the Middleton contingent to the demonstration, remembered:

“At our head were a hundred or two of women, mostly young wives, and mine own was amongst them. – A hundred or two of our handsomest girls, - sweethearts to the lads who were with us, - danced to the music, or sung snatches of popular songs.”[v]

The banners the women carried were declarations of their political commitment. ‘Annual Parliaments and Death to those in Authority who Oppose their Adoption’ read the Rochdale women’s flag; ‘Let Us Die Like Men and Not Be Sold Like Slaves’ – the women of Royton.[vi]

The ruling elites understood that the demand for political reform was a threat to their power and they were determined the movement should be crushed. Soldiers in the British army, as well as the local volunteer yeomanry forces – who had their sabres sharpened in advance, and police constables stormed the demonstration, slashing, beating and shooting at the protestors. Hundreds were injured, around 18 are thought to have been killed, of whom four were women. Bush shows that women were disproportionately targeted – at most they comprised an 8th of the crowd, but they made up a 3rd of those recorded as wounded.[vii] Their presence on the day was probably seen as an especial affront to the established ‘order’.

After Peterloo

Bush’s work shows that immediately after the massacre women were in the forefront of the protests, attacking businesses where owners were supportive of the yeomanry.[viii]

Beyond the immediate response, women’s political activism in 1819 had an enduring legacy. In the early 1830s, there was a renewed revolutionary movement for political change. Parliamentarians, terrified once more of losing their power, began to calculate how much change they could accommodate without handing power to the masses. In the 1832 Reform Bill they agreed upon a small extension of the franchise and reform to remove the old pocket and rotten boroughs.

One of the MPs who felt this was inadequate was Henry ‘Orator’ Hunt – the star speaker at Peterloo. Now MP for Preston, he not only called for universal male suffrage but introduced the first petition for women’s civil rights into the House of Commons. Sir Frederick Trench, the Tory MP for Cambridge, mocked the proposal, saying ‘it would be rather awkward if a jury half males and half females were locked up together for a night, as now often happened with juries’ as it ‘might lead to rather queer predicaments.’ Sensing hypocrisy, Henry Hunt responded that he ‘well knew that the hon. and gallant Member was frequently in the company of ladies for whole nights, but he did not know that any mischief resulted from that circumstance.’[ix] The petition, however, was contemptuously laughed out by the MPs. The 1832 ‘Great’ Reform Act would in fact be the first to explicitly exclude women from the vote.

The demands that working men and women developed in 1819, for secret ballots, annual parliaments and universal suffrage, were central demands of the Chartist movement in the 1830s and 1840s in which women played active political roles. Some of the survivors of Peterloo are known to have followed the struggle for democratic rights throughout the nineteenth century well into their old age. In 1884, a group of 11 Peterloo veterans – 4 women and 7 men – from Failsworth attended a demonstration in support of the Third Reform Act. A reporter from the Oldham Chronicle spent time with these ‘old and sturdy Reformers’ who told their stories of Peterloo in song, one of the elderly women promising to sing a 15 verse song as long as someone would volunteer to ‘keep her pipe lit’.[x] (In the event, the song proved so engaging the volunteer let the pipe go out.)

Peterloo veterans protesting in 1884. Image from Oldham Evening Chronicle.

In the militant women’s suffrage struggle in the early twentieth century, it was the socialist suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst who championed the memory of Peterloo. In the summer of 1912, she challenged the suffragette leadership, who were increasingly dismissive of working-class activists, by organising a series of mass demonstrations around the country where Caps of Liberty were added to suffragette banners – in tribute to the working-class activists who began the struggle for democratic change.[xi] When Pankhurst and her working-class supporters in East London were expelled from the campaign in 1914, they kept the Cap of Liberty as their emblem.

Sylvia Pankhurst's East London Federation of Suffragettes annual report with Cap of Liberty emblem.

The struggle that working men and women began at Peterloo is unfinished. It was a struggle for democratic power for working people which could end poverty, inequality and unjust wars. Today we have a Tory government almost as contemptuous of democracy as they are of working-class people. In September the Tories will meet for their party conference in Manchester – a short walk from the site of Peterloo. At that point, we need to make them see and feel that they are few and we are many by joining the protest outside and participating in the struggle for democracy today.


[i] All quotations from Manchester Observer, 10 July 1819, p.636.

[ii]Manchester Observer, 31 July 1819, p.664.

[iii] M.L. Bush, ‘The Women at Peterloo: The Impact of Female Reform on the Manchester Meeting of 16 August 1819’, History, vol.89 (04/2004), p.222.

[iv] E. Sylvia Pankhurst, The Suffragette Movement: An Intimate Account of Persons and Ideals (London: Virago Limited, 1977), p.53.

[v] Samuel Bamford, Passages in the Life of a Radical: The Autobiography of Samuel Bamford Vol. II,edited by W.H. Chaloner (London: Frank Cass and Co. Ltd, 1967), p.200.

[vi] Bush, ‘The Women at Peterloo’, pp.220-1.

[vii]Ibid, pp.224-5.

[viii]Ibid, pp.222-3.

[ix]https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1832/aug/03/rights-of-women

[x]http://www.pixnet.co.uk/Oldham-hrg/members/sheila/peterloo/pages-other/veterans.html

[xi] Katherine Connelly, Sylvia Pankhurst: Suffragette, Socialist and Scourge of Empire (London: Pluto Press, 2013), p.48.

Video interview in the Lord Morpeth

I am delighted to share this short video where I talk about Sylvia Pankhurst's tours of North America in 1911 and 1912 and the extraordinary manuscript that she wrote about her experiences in which she explores questions of race, sex and class, capitalism and democracy - and which has been published now for the first time. It was extremely special to be able to film this interview in the Lord Morpeth pub on the Old Ford Road, right next door to where the headquarters of Sylvia Pankhurst's East London Federation of Suffragettes stood. In the video, I argue that Pankhurst's experiences in America fundamentally influenced her decision to set up this radical suffragette organisation.

If you like what you hear, you can delve deeper by buying Sylvia Pankhurst's book here.

Thanks to Chris Browne from Pluto Press for the filming