Upcoming talks to celebrate International Women's Day!

Really excited to be able to announce that I'm going to be joining what look like fantastic panels around this year's International Women's Day.

East London Federation of Suffragettes member, Annie Lake, speaking with strikers at Morton's factory, 1914.

On Tuesday 7th March, I'm going to be talking about the East London Federation of Suffragettes at the Cockney Cultures event 'Cockney Women Together'. I'll be joined by Kim Bennett, the Pearly Queen of Woolwich, Louise Raw, author of Striking a Light, the definitive account of the 1888 matchwomen's strike, Sam Johnson, great-granddaughter of Sarah Chapman, one of those striking matchwomen, and artist Sba Shaikh.

It's taking place from 12.30-13.30 at Four Communications Group 2 Whitechapel Road London E1 1FX and you can book a free place here. 

Then on Thursday I'm travelling up to Salford to the wonderful Working-Class Movement Library for the 'Radical Motherhood: Then and Now' conference where I'll be joining a roundtable discussion exploring the ways that mothers have engaged in and reshaped radical movements, from the suffragettes to ACT-UP and beyond.

I'll be talking about the schemes that Sylvia Pankhurst set up to support working-class mums during the First World War, and tracing their origins in industrial struggle. Very excited to hear from the other panelists. The Eventbrite page explains:

Dr J. Michelle Coghlan (UofM) will kick off our discussion by turning to nineteenth-century US women anarchist activists who challenged conventional forms of motherhood in ways that continue to resonate in our own moment.

Dr. Katherine Connelly (Arcadia) will then discuss the free nurseries that Sylvia Pankhurst established in East London, and offer some personal reflections on balancing motherhood and contemporary community organizing.

Dr. Nicholas Grant (UEA) will turn our attentions to South African anti-apartheid activist Dora Tamana and her travels to the World Congress of Mothers in Switzerland in 1955, showcasing how Tamana’s embodied activism was crucially rooted in her framing of herself as a mother.

And, finally, Dr. Monica Pearl will close our panel with a discussion of the politics of motherhood in AIDS activism, both in relation to women’s AIDS memoirs and Dr. Pearl’s own experiences as an ACT-UP activist in the 1980s, before we open the floor for further conversation with the audience.

This one's sold out now, but I believe that it might be recorded so I'll be sure to post details after the event. 

Whilst in the North-West I'm going to be doing some research for my new book, a project that developed out of A Suffragette in America. For more updates . . . watch this space! 

Review of 'Between Two Fires': the play Sylvia wrote in prison

Yesterday I posted my review of Sylvia, a musical currently playing at The Old Vic, about the life of Sylvia Pankhurst. 

But there's more theatre news about Sylvia! Recently, Rachel Holmes, author of a magnificent new biography of Pankhurst, has painstakingly reconstructed and published the play Sylvia wrote on scraps of toilet paper whilst in prison. Below is my review, first published on Counterfire.

Sylvia Pankhurst, Between Two Fires, arranged and edited by Rachel Holmes, introduction by Helen Pankhurst (London: Methuen Drama, 2022), 41pp.

Sylvia Pankhurst’s long-lost play carries a powerful message about fighting oppression, argues Katherine Connelly

Toilet-paper transcripts  

In 1921, former suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst was imprisoned one final time. By now a prominent communist, her newspaper the Workers’ Dreadnought called for working-class resistance to growing unemployment, impoverishment and racism. The authorities used wartime legislation that had not been repealed to imprison Pankhurst in Holloway for six months.

In prison, Pankhurst was denied pen and paper: the very materials with which she had terrified the establishment. In a book of poems she published after her release, titled Writ on Cold Slate, she reflected: ‘thought in prison shall be writ / save on cold slate and swiftly washed away.’ 

But Sylvia Pankhurst was not so easily silenced. In fact, she did something quite extraordinary: she wrote a play on toilet paper and, using tactics the suffragettes had perfected years earlier, smuggled it out of prison. Not all of it survived, but Pankhurst preserved the pieces that remained. As her granddaughter Helen has written, this shows that she ‘didn’t want them extinguished’. After her death, Sylvia Pankhurst’s son Richard deposited the fragments at the British Library. They remained there until Rachel Holmes rediscovered them when writing her monumental biography, Sylvia Pankhurst: Natural Born Rebel.

After painstaking work transcribing this most fragile of archives, Rachel Holmes has published the ‘Toilet Paper Transcripts’ and completed Sylvia Pankhurst’s act of resistance. Together they have broken through the prison bars, allowing us to hear the voice of the imprisoned Sylvia Pankhurst. The result contains exciting implications for our understanding of history and the present.  

Reflecting on suffragette activism  

The play shows that while in prison for communist activism, Sylvia Pankhurst was reflecting on the suffragette movement. This fact alone makes it a unique source. Before now, Pankhurst’s assessments of the suffragette movement have generally fallen into two categories. Her first book, The Suffragette (1911) was written in the midst of the struggle, but she later distanced herself from it because it largely reproduced the narrative of the movement’s leadership and suppressed her own criticisms. Her later book, The Suffragette Movement (1931), was undoubtedly Sylvia Pankhurst’s definitive account of the campaign.  

The ‘Toilet Paper Transcripts’ (1921) provide Sylvia Pankhurst’s perspective on the campaign exactly between these two points, while she was intensely involved in the international communist movement. It would have been understandable if Pankhurst, in prison once again, had dramatized her own incredibly heroic role and frequent imprisonments as a suffragette in her toilet-paper play. Instead, the fragments reveal Pankhurst’s profound commitment to the importance of collective action, with scenes about community activists that drew on her experience of organising in working-class East London. As Helen Pankhurst observes: ‘for Sylvia, the addressing of envelopes and the folding of circulars, i.e. the hands-on realities of politicking and of people’s lives are given attention – not taken for granted.’   

Suffragettes vs Labour  

The heart of the play addresses the increasing diversion between the suffragette movement and the Labour Party. Initially, the militant suffragettes had emerged from labour circles, but over time these links were severed. The Labour Party was divided over the question of votes for women. Many were uncomfortable with the campaign because it did not address dismantling the voters’ property qualification and therefore seemed destined to exclude most working-class women. Some others supported votes for women on the basis that it challenged women’s particular exclusion. And there were also misogynists who were opposed to women’s political rights altogether.

Meanwhile, the leadership of the suffragette movement demanded the Labour Party prioritise votes for women above all other issues by voting against every measure of the Liberal government (whether progressive or not) until the government agreed to back women’s suffrage. Their growing hostility to the Labour Party accompanied their rejection of mass action in which large numbers of working women could participate, favouring instead individualistic actions by more privileged women.

Sylvia Pankhurst had intimate experience of these divisions. The militant suffragettes were led by her mother and older sister, Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst, who eventually expelled her for organising working-class suffragettes in East London, and offering solidarity to locked-out trade unionists in Dublin. While she was active as a suffragette, Sylvia Pankhurst’s lover was Keir Hardie, Labour MP and former leader of the Labour Party. He died in 1915, six years before she wrote the play.  

The play addresses the emotional pull of all these different loyalties through the relationship of Freda McLaird (Sylvia Pankhurst) and Noah Adamson (Keir Hardie). Interestingly, the one who is described as being caught ‘between two fires’ (which Rachel Holmes aptly chose as the title for the untitled play) is Adamson/Hardie rather than McLaird/Pankhurst.  

It is Freda who explains to Noah that the suffragette leaders fail to see that Labour is not only ‘lukewarm at best’ on women’s suffrage, ‘but on every question’ (p.28). She refers to the ‘Anti-Guzzling League’ which Hardie had planned to stop Labour MPs ‘guzzling’ in the House of Commons bar with the Liberals.

Pankhurst, of course, was writing this in 1921 when she was arguing against the leader of the Bolshevik Revolution, Lenin, that communists should have no relationship with the Labour Party, except to denounce it as traitorous to working people. In the play, she rather awkwardly positions Adamson/Hardie as an exception who might leave Labour ‘on the fundamental question of the Class struggle’ (p.28), which was somewhat wishful thinking.

However, Freda’s complaint that many in the Parliamentary Labour Party were ‘proud of being made friends of the Liberals and Tories’ (p.29) is a valuable insight today. Faced with a Labour leader who seems far more comfortable with the Tories than the former socialist leader of his own party, some have romanticised the history of the early Labour Party. Pankhurst reminds us that the Labour Party was never a principled, socialist party, and its attacks on socialists have a long history.  

Sylvia Pankhurst and Keir Hardie’s relationship  

Another interesting aspect of the play is the potential insights it offers into Hardie and Pankhurst’s relationship. Hardie was married, and his relationship with Pankhurst was kept relatively private. That Pankhurst preserved their love letters and this play, which explicitly discuss the relationship, suggests she wanted it to be acknowledged as part of her life story.  

Some writers on Pankhurst have patronisingly reduced her relationship to finding a ‘father figure’ (Hardie was much older, originally her parents’ friend). The relationship depicted in the play, by contrast, supports Holmes’ depiction (and before her Caroline Benn in her biography of Hardie) of Pankhurst as a partner who ‘typically holds her ground’ (Holmes, p.223).

In the play we see McLaird helping rewrite an article in Adamson’s name, which should surely now prompt a renewed look at Hardie’s writings for Pankhurst’s involvement. Adamson is portrayed as the dreamer who hopes that they might have a child, while McLaird is the realist who points out that the consequences would be practically and politically devastating. Moreover, as Holmes’ biography shows, Pankhurst was acutely aware of the difficult position in which Hardie’s wife would find herself. McLaird voices the human pain in a society rigidly organised on the institution of marriage: ‘I shouldn’t like to be the cause of making anyone else unhappy’ (p.31).

Striking resolution  

What kind of resolution does Pankhurst see for those caught, like herself and Hardie, between the ‘two fires’ of the women’s and labour movement? In a compelling part of the play, Pankhurst dramatizes the kind of industrial unrest that coincided with the last four years of the suffragette movement. Pankhurst would later recall: ‘Strikes, especially of women, and some of them only lasting a few days, were breaking out on all sides of us’ (The Suffragette Movement, p.543). 

This atmosphere is captured in the play as characters rush in to announce workers walking out, including the gas workers (a key industry in East London):  

    ‘There’s five hundred out: the whole shop. Started with the manager giving one of the men the sack         and spread all through the place, the girls came out as solid as the chaps. [. . .] They’ve got married         men working in there for eighteen shillings a week and women as low as five’ (p.15).

Sylvia Pankhurst’s socialist conclusion is that working people can, and must, overcome the divisions sown from above when they struggle for their rights themselves. It is a conclusion that is as relevant today as it was in 1921. Let’s hope that this play will finally get the public performance it deserves, over a hundred years after it was written in secret in a British prison cell.

Review of 'Sylvia' at The Old Vic

First published on Counterfire, I repost my review of 'Sylvia', directed by Kate Prince, written by Kate Prince with Priya Parmar, music by Josh Cohen and DJ Walde, playing at The Old Vic in London until the 8 April 2023.

Sylvia is a glorious celebration of the suffragette struggle, but it doesn’t do its heroine justice, finds Katherine Connelly

At the end of the first act, audience members were in tears they were so moved by this powerful evocation of the suffragette movement. Act One culminates with the suffragettes, arms linked, confronting horrendous levels of police violence on their demonstration outside parliament on 18 November 1910, later dubbed ‘Black Friday’.

Perhaps the scene makes you cry because all of a sudden this is not about something that happened over a hundred years ago. It looks like the police attack on the vigil for Sarah Everard, inevitably recalling the epidemic of police violence against women – the full, awful extent of which has not yet come to light. That’s what this musical does best: it proclaims the relevance of the suffragette struggle.

‘Feels like revolution’

It is a wildly ambitious performance told through dance and is mostly sung throughout, fusing soul, funk and hip hop. That’s a brilliant decision, because as the writer and director Kate Prince explains, quoting Alonzo Westbrook, ‘hip hop is the artistic response to oppression’ and ‘Funk feels like revolution to me’.

It’s a refreshing break from the Mary Poppins trivialisation of the ‘sister suffragette’. In Sylvia, the music reflects Sylvia Pankhurst’s politics by generalising from one experience of oppression to identify common cause with others fighting for emancipation. Here the music reminds us that the suffragettes were among our bravest civil-rights campaigners.

The depiction of the suffragettes is inspiring, and Beverley Knight is mesmerising as the charismatic Emmeline Pankhurst. It is impossible not to be caught up in the joyous rebellion of the performance. Even better, this is not a simplistic or uncritical depiction of the suffragette movement; the musical tackles the growing elitism of the campaign, its compromises and growing hostility to socialist politics.

At the centre is socialist Sylvia Pankhurst, movingly portrayed by Sharon Rose, as she struggles to balance her familial loyalty to her mother and older sister, the suffragette leaders Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst, against her relationship with Labour’s Keir Hardie and her commitment to fight against the particular problems faced by working-class women.

There is a spectacular, agonising, blazing row sung between Emmeline and Sylvia just before the mother expels her daughter from the campaign. All this takes place against a well-researched wider political backdrop. We see the aristocrats organising to defend the old order, the sordid compromises within the Liberal Party, and the threats from vigilantes to the suffragettes menacingly evoked in the song ‘I Know Where You Live’.

Some problems

Any historical adaptation necessitates precisely that – adaptation. Writers and performers must be allowed creative licence to change and rework details in order to better convey the truth of a story in a way that fits the medium, and to tell old stories to new audiences. As such, there are some changes, which despite not being very historically accurate (for example, in reality Sylvia had a far less harmonious relationship with George Lansbury), do nevertheless help to explain general political truths.

But there are other significant alterations that seriously diminish the power and politics of the performance. There is a very strange moment when Sylvia cautions Christabel that her relationship with Annie Kenney might damage her reputation in the press. It is not clear why this implication of homophobia has been inserted; to make Sylvia more ‘complex’?

It is inexcusable. It isn’t true. And it introduces an element of doubt into the sincerity of Sylvia’s commitment to fight all forms of oppression. It would have been far more interesting and liberatory to stick with the truth: that suffragettes exploited double standards about female sexuality to create a space where lesbian relationships were commonplace. To borrow loosely from Diana Souhami, there’s no suffragette movement without lesbians.

The same was true of Sylvia Pankhurst’s East London Federation of Suffragettes, in which many leading members were lesbians. A strong case can be made for Sylvia’s bisexuality, and the period in which she had her closest relationships with other women is that covered in the play. It is a shame to erase this.

Militancy

Sylvia’s position on suffragette militancy (civil disobedience) is also misleadingly portrayed, focussing solely on her objection to violence. While it is true that she found violence against human beings abhorrent, and therefore worried about the potential consequences of the arson campaign, Sylvia also appreciated that the suffragettes had critically questioned dominant assumptions about violence.

Through their acts of resistance, the suffragettes exposed the violence of the British state, while also revealing that the same state regarded attacks on inanimate, private property as ‘violence’. What Sylvia Pankhurst objected to was those militant tactics that alienated vast swathes of the public because she believed that only a mass movement could achieve the democratic change they sought. Her position on militancy was political and nuanced, perfectly suited to being articulated through the verbal dexterity of hip hop.

But when her objection is reduced to ‘I don’t want blood on my hands’ or, worse, something so vacuous it could be hash-tagged by any corporation (‘be the change that you want to see’), it falsely individualises and depoliticises her dilemmas. There is no justification for this in a play that contains an almost unbelievable level of political detail at the beginning; it even finds time to mention Churchill’s disagreements with the Conservatives on free trade!

The result is that the drama of the piece drains away after Sylvia’s expulsion when, in founding a working-class suffragette campaign in East London, she took the initiative that makes her such an important figure in socialist feminism. The misleading characterisation of ‘pacifist’ Sylvia means that we don’t see her window smashing or her extensive campaign of hunger-striking (her ultimatum to continue doing so outside of prison is therefore rather confusing when it is mentioned).

And while Emmeline Pankhurst enjoys a wonderful ‘Suffrajitsu’ number celebrating the jujitsu-ing suffragettes who take on the police (and what a cathartic moment that is!), there is no mention of Sylvia Pankhurst’s People’s Army. In this, dockers and suffragettes drilled in the streets of East London and fought back against the police in battles that saw broken arms, cracked skulls and public meeting halls torn up across the borough. It can’t be maintained that it wouldn’t be dramatically interesting.

Where did the revolution go?

And, most problematically, there is no mention of Sylvia Pankhurst’s support for the Bolshevik Revolution. This leads to a disorientating conclusion with Sylvia and her supporters eagerly campaigning for and then celebrating universal suffrage in 1928.

But by then, the real Sylvia Pankhurst had lost interest in parliamentary politics. And while we see Emmeline Pankhurst become a Conservative Party candidate, we don’t see Sylvia Pankhurst become a communist and one of the most significant supporters of the Bolshevik Revolution in Britain. Why not? The play is about Sylvia, after all.

There’s one brief, unexplained reference to her making a statement in support of ‘Home Rule in Ireland’, but there’s no reference to her brave support for the Easter Rising against British imperialism in Ireland in 1916. Or her support for Indian independence. Or her opposition to British imperialism in the Middle East. And, strangely surely for a play with a predominantly black cast, no mention of her anti-racism and anti-fascism.

Of course, Pankhurst was an immensely hard-working activist and it would be unfair to expect every cause she espoused to be included in one play. However, the decision to make the story one in which for Sylvia ‘The Victory’ comes with universal suffrage in 1928 provides an unconvincing happy ending for an audience that knows better. So did Sylvia: she finished her history of the suffragette movement with the words: ‘Great is the work which remains to be accomplished!’