On Annie Cobden-Sanderson and Sylvia Pankhurst's radical American modernism: a photo essay

This is the transcript of a paper I was lucky enough to be able to present at the Transatlantic Women's Networks Conference: Cultural Engagements from the 19th Century to the Present conference, held at Lisbon's Universidade Católica Portuguesa on Thursday 11 May.Thank you to the organisers and the other participants for such a stimulating day. 

The paper is about two suffragettes: Annie Cobden-Sanderson and Sylvia Pankhurst. They were from different generations, Annie Cobden-Sanderson was born in 1853, Sylvia Pankhurst in 1882, but they knew each other and were imprisoned together in 1906. They both toured America, separately, and wrote about their reflections which is what I discuss here. Both women were socialists, influenced by the Arts and Crafts movement, and both were uneasy with the political direction of the dominant suffragette organisation, the Women's Social and Political Union. I argue that interesting parallels can be detected in their writing.

My paper, supported by photographs I took whilst researching Sylvia Pankhurst's American lecture tours, is below as a sort of photo essay. This is something I've wanted to write for ages and I hope it's an enjoyable read. 

Direction of travel? Retracing the footsteps of two militant suffragettes across the Atlantic

By Katherine Connelly

In February 1913, on the eve of launching a militant, working-class suffragette campaign in East London, Sylvia Pankhurst reflected on her two lecture tours of America, undertaken in the first three months of 1911 and again in the first three months of 1912. Pankhurst’s American manuscript is arguably one of her most experimental – a contrast to the style employed in her published histories (The Suffragette, in 1911, and The Suffragette Movement, in 1931) – it juxtaposed empirical studies of working conditions, with a dream-like evocation of a children’s performance of Sleeping Beauty in which youngsters from New York’s tenements danced as flowers in an allegory for the awakening spring. There was a transcription of a desperate letter from an immigrant prisoner, with descriptions of the fleeting landscape outside the train window – the latter a legacy of part of the book’s origins in letters written whilst travelling (of which more later).

 Pankhurst began her book on America, which she never completed and which was not published until 2019, with New York City, her point of arrival. She described the ‘grey’ and ‘dreary’ harbour ‘with its huge buildings, heavy, gloomy and intensely ugly, wrapped in a withering sullen cold without, and all breathless heat and glaring jarring lights and noise within’. But then the light changes: ‘I saw it translated by the brilliant sun, everything a-sparkle, everywhere crowding vivacious life.’ And then as the sun dips below the horizon, the light changes again and now -

How wonderful is New York from some high place at twilight, when the lofty buildings of commerce are fading into obscurity, and one sees, not their giant walls, faint and shadowy, but their thousand thousand windows like jewels of fire. Their golden patterning and the blue fading light cast a compelling glamour over this city of substantial and materialistic trade. It becomes ethereal as a city of dreams, beautiful and calm as the home of supermen.

New York City, 2017. Photo: K. Connelly

In the very next paragraph, the beautiful metaphor of fiery windows in skyscrapers transmogrifies into a ghastly reality as Pankhurst recalls walking in the funeral procession for the victims of the Triangle Fire – 146 workers, mostly women, mostly immigrants, who died after a fire broke out in the Triangle Shirtwaist factory in New York’s Greenwich Village. Their employers had illegally locked the doors on the workshop floor – to prevent workers’ stealing, it was said – and so the workers were trapped, the fire department did not have ladders tall enough to reach the factory floors which were at the top of the building.

For Sylvia, the Triangle fire epitomised a struggle she witnessed throughout her tours. She observed that

‘As one travels over that vast continent of America, teeming with wondrous natural resources, with endless possibilities of new growth, one sees, as in our older and more crowded land, everywhere the cruel waste of precious human energy, and the crushing out of fragile tender things. One sees, perhaps more clearly than in any other country, new ideals of civilization striving with the old. The sharp impersonal pitiless commercial enterprise, that everywhere crushes out the slothful inexactitudes and rough spasmodic kindlinesses and brutalities of the past, and would in its turn make the human beings that it uses ever more machine-like, one now sees faced with the new up-springing of public thought and action, that shall place higher than all else the happiness and development of human lives.’

New York City, 2017. Photo: K. Connelly

Five years earlier, another British militant suffragette, Annie Cobden-Sanderson, published in the American Independent magazine her impressions of America from her own three month tour in the winter of 1907-8. Cobden-Sanderson did not arrive into New York – as a former inmate of Holloway prison, she was worried she would be turned away as an undesirable alien – so she entered the country via Canada. But Cobden-Sanderson, like Pankhurst, chose to begin her account with New York City, from where she departed. Her memories are interlaced with the vanishing vista of the city and the progress of the voyage in a piece that seemed to capture the speed of the modern ocean liner (she travelled home on the Lusitania) and – perhaps – the experience of recollection itself.

Like Pankhurst, Cobden-Sanderson described the changing light in New York. Her final day in the city began on a ‘cold, clear’ January morning, speaking outdoors in Madison Square before visiting the Stock Exchange and then, in an eerie parallel that cannot be described as exactly coincidental, she remembered a fire:

‘At night I stood watching with a friend in Union Square watching the blazing of the latest great fire in New York. Far above the reach of the engines the flames leapt on high, and onto the roof had clambered the inmates’.

3 firefighters lost their lives that night.

Cobden-Sanderson’s conclusions anticipated Pankhurst’s – she wrote of the contrasts: the ‘greatness of the country,’ ‘vastness of its problems’, in ‘the striving for material bigness and prosperity, the absence of all mystery’.

Like the Marx Avelings before them, America seemed to recall to Cobden-Sanderson and Pankhurst Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto wherein the emergent industrial capitalism of the mid-nineteenth century was described as sweeping away ‘all fixed, fast-frozen relations,’ ‘ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions’, profaning all that was holy. These later generations of socialists found the voyage to America almost akin to travelling into the future, with America occupying the pioneering role that Europe had in the 1840s. The striking modernist tropes in Cobden-Sanderson and Pankhurst’s writings seems to me an attempt to reflect that in their prose.

Pankhurst and Cobden-Sanderson seemed to be concerned with a question posed by H. G. Wells, a contemporary socialist and writer who imagined voyages to the future. In Wells’ 1906 book of essays concerning his own transatlantic journey, titled The Future in America: A Search After Realities and which Cobden-Sanderson read in prison the year before her lecture tour, Wells asked “What is going to happen to the United States of America in the next thirty years or so?” Cobden-Sanderson asked herself if America had realised the ‘dreams of human exaltation’ held by her father, the famous Liberal champion Richard Cobden, when he visited America seven decades earlier.

You might ask if there is anything particularly notable about Cobden-Sanderson and Pankhurst’s strikingly similar responses to America: their writings are seemingly compatible with and referential to those theirs contemporary socialists. After all both women were adherents of an Arts and Crafts-influenced socialism in which visions of the future were indebted to William Morris’ imagined utopian London in his 1890 novel News from Nowhere. Cobden-Sanderson and her husband, the Arts and Crafts bookbinder T J Cobden-Sanderson, were intimate friends, artistic collaborators and neighbours to the Morris family. Sylvia Pankhurst’s parents were friendly with Morris who shaped Sylvia’s decision to train as an artist. He remained a political reference point throughout her life. I suggest, however, that it is precisely the centrality of the socialist concerns in their American writings that reveal the role these tours played in the development of a radical critique of the British militant suffragette movement – the very movement for which they were public advocates.

Retracing the American footsteps of Cobden-Sanderson and Pankhurst reveals the extent of their political wandering from the path expected by the autocratic leadership of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), the dominant militant organisation. The prototype for the militant suffragette lecture tour was established by the three tours of WSPU leader (and Sylvia’s mother) Emmeline Pankhurst. Arranged by a professional lecturing agency, they intended to galvanise international sympathy for the British suffragettes and increase pressure on the British government. In order to achieve these objectives, Emmeline Pankhurst did not ask her audiences to approve per se of controversial militant tactics, instead she contextualised them as legitimate responses to specifically British conditions of political oppression - the stirring descriptions of which (police brutality, imprisonments and forcible feeding) drew in large crowds. This iteration of the militant suffrage struggle implied the progressive superiority of the United States – something Emmeline Pankhurst played up to by comparing the contemporary militants’ demands and methods to those of the American Revolution (safely confined to that nation’s past).

Cobden-Sanderson and Sylvia Pankhurst’s footsteps strayed far beyond the contours of the WSPU’s political objectives. Cobden-Sanderson, in fact, was not a member of the WSPU when she travelled to the US, having just resigned from the organisation, objecting to its jettisoning of its socialist roots. Although officially it was her husband who was on tour, lecturing on bookbinding, Annie Cobden-Sanderson was invited to speak about her experiences as a high-profile suffragette prisoner, when she had been a WSPU member. She therefore appeared to American audiences as a representative of that organisation. Yet her tour was enmeshed within an Arts and Crafts network which took in, for example, Hull House – Jane Addams’ Chicago Settlement House where T. J. Cobden-Sanderson’s former student Ellen Gates Starr was practising and teaching Arts and Crafts bookbinding. Moreover, Gates Starr shared the Cobden-Sanderson’s appraisal of the importance of organising among working women, she was an active member of the Women’s Trade Union League. The concerns of Arts and Crafts practitioners with the conditions of capitalist production found expression in Cobden-Sanderson’s American reflections which addressed not only women’s conditions but those of all workers; she observed, for example, that in mining towns ‘men work in misery and filth, and are killed and maimed by unprotected machinery, and a money-influenced and dependent judiciary refuses compensation.’ She also identified the continuance of old oppressions, fought against by previous reformers like her father, re-emergent in the quest for profits in the present. She referred to the cotton plantations in Mississippi as perpetuating a ‘semi-slavery’.

Sylvia Pankhurst similarly deviated from the WSPU leadership’s politics, even though she was lecturing as their official representative. Like Cobden-Sanderson, she was enchanted by the Arts and Crafts inspired practitioners at Hull House in Chicago and Henry Street Settlement in New York. Her writings on America developed far more from her writings for socialists than for suffragists. Her book drew heavily on letters she wrote to her lover, the Labour MP Keir Hardie and articles she wrote for his South Wales based newspaper, The Pioneer, under a pseudonym. In 1912, she quite literally deviated from the expected path, taking control from the professional agency who failed to secure sufficient bookings and travelling instead to the American South where other lecturers, including her mother, had not ventured. She subsequently wrote harrowingly about legacy of slavery in the racism she witnessed in the workplaces and prisons during the era of Jim Crow.

The slave huts Sylvia Pankhurst saw at Andrew Jackson's Hermitage, Nashville, Tennessee in 1912. Photo: K. Connelly, 2018.

Like Cobden-Sanderson, Pankhurst was interested in conditions of production. She wrote about the ‘model’ laundries, where the influence of Taylorism reduced the worker to monotonous, repetitive tasks. She also wrote about Haskell, a college for Native Americans where she observed the deliberate destruction of students’ capacity for indigenous cultural production, replaced instead by training for integration into factory work. She lamented seeing ‘floral patterns, exactly like those which are designed, in the least possible time, by the jaded sweated factory wage slaves, who cannot pause to observe real flowers’. What a contrast to the celebration of the natural world she witnessed in the children’s performance of Sleeping Beauty!

It is important to note that institutions like the model laundries and Haskell college were presented to Pankhurst as examples of progressive, modern America. Pankhurst and Cobden-Sanderson’s defiant adherence to socialist politics, informed by the culture of the Arts and Crafts movement, ensured that their engagement with America was one which destabilised the notions of progress held by many American progressives as well as the WSPU. In so doing, they emphasised solidarity with American activists and identified commonalities in their respective struggles across national boundaries. In response to Wells’ question, they seemed to have two answers, reflective of the dynamic processes to which they were witness. 

"Rise Up!" Graffiti at the site of the Triangle fire. Photo: K. Connelly, 2017.

America had both the resources and productive capacity to build an inhuman society organised around gargantuan profits and skyscrapers crammed full of sweated workers, or it could establish an egalitarian society of fellowship in which all enjoyed the country’s seemingly endless resources. Which one would triumph? ‘Kaleidoscopic you move in crowds’ wrote Cobden-Sanderson of America. The kaleidoscope turns, the light changes, which way? The answer, both resolved, would be determined dynamically – in struggle. After America, neither Cobden-Sanderson nor Pankhurst confined themselves to the question of women’s suffrage as defined by the WSPU. Cobden-Sanderson joined the Women’s Freedom League, taking up a multitude of causes including that of feeding poor children in East London. On her return from America in 1912, Sylvia Pankhurst began organising WSPU groups also in working-class East London, which were expelled from the WSPU after co-operating with the labour movement. Pankhurst’s collaborator in this endeavour was Zelie Emerson, a member of the Women’s Trade Union League she had met whilst on tour in Chicago. That direction of travel, I think, can partly be mapped in America.