GUEST POST: Review of A Suffragette in America by Dana Mills

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.

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.

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.

^[iv] Ibid p. 71.

^[v] E. Sylvia Pankhurst, The Suffragette Movement.

^[vi] A Suffragette in America, p. 92.

Extract from 'A Suffragette in America'

For a preview of the material in the book, here's an extract on Sylvia Pankhurst and the uprising of working-class women in the United States, published on Pluto Press's blog.  

You can purchase a copy of the book from the Pluto Press website.

Striking garment workers in New York City, 1910

Photographs from the US tour

Delighted to be able to share these pictures from the US tour of A Suffragette in America.

Speaking and in conversation with Dana Mills at the Henry Street Settlement, NYC. Photographs courtesy of Phyllis A Sears.

Celebrating the end of the tour in NYC with Morgan Daniels and Dana Mills. Photographs courtesy of Phyllis A Sears.

Speaking at the beginning of the tour in Buffalo. Photographs courtesy of Pam Hatley.

Art and politics at Henry Street: culmination of the USA book launch tour

The USA tour is now over. It culminated at the Henry Street Settlement where I was in conversation with Dana Mills, currently writing on Rosa Luxemburg and an expert on dance and politics, enabling a rich discussion of Sylvia Pankhurst as a political artist. One of my favourite moments was reading an extract from Sylvia's manuscript which describes her visit to the lower East Side, entering a house full of "a bewildering number of kindly women" where she was taken to a Passover meal in:

"the great dining room, with its well-polished brass and copper and its two dark polished tables, laid, with little white mats and shining glass and silver, for the evening meal."

"The great dining room" at Henry Street Settlement with two menorahs and a samovar in front of a portrait of Lillian D. Wald, Settlement founder and friend of Sylvia Pankhurst.

In the book I argue that this was the dining room at the Henry Street Settlement. That was the room we were speaking in and when I invited the audience to look around the room there were gasps of recognition.

"a bewildering number of kindly women". Above, Alice Lewisohn, who founded the avant-garde Neighborhood Playhouse at the Henry Street Settlement and became a friend of Sylvia Pankhurst, recalls the atmosphere at Henry Street.

"with its well-polished brass and copper"

"and its two dark polished tables"

This was also the room in which one of the meetings that formed the NAACP was held. Many of those in attendance - W.E.B. DuBois, Lillian Wald (founder of the Henry Street Settlement), Henry Moskowitz, Oswald Garrison Villard - were in contact with Sylvia Pankhurst, indicating again her emphasis upon linking up struggles against different forms of oppression.

Henry Street meant a great deal to many people in the audience, some had attended theatre there, others recalled their grandparents taking piano lessons. This testifies to what Sylvia Pankhurst felt was so important about Henry Street (and the Hull House settlement in Chicago): that as well as recognising the very great need for economic change in deprived communities, these places understood and fought for everyone to have access to culture - to art, dance, music, literature and drama. And it was this approach that had turned the young Sylvia Pankhurst, as an aspiring artist, into a socialist. She later recalled her sense of injustice that her own childhood was so very different from that of most children in her native Manchester:

"Those endless rows of smoke-begrimed little houses, with never a tree or a flower in sight, how bitterly their ugliness smote me! Many a time in spring, as I gazed upon them, those two red may trees in our garden at home would rise up in my mind, almost menacing in their beauty; and I would ask myself whether it could be just that I should live in Victoria Park,and go well fed and warmly clad, whilst the children of these grey slums were lacking the very necessities of life. [. . .] there were were moments when I had an impulse to dash my head against the dreary walls of those squalid streets." (Pankhurst, The Suffragette Movement, pp.125-6).

Inspired by the more radical figures in the Arts and Crafts movement, especially William Morris, Sylvia saw art as a part of the struggle for a better world:

"I would be a decorative painter; I would portray the world that is to be when poverty is no more. I would decorate halls where people would foregather in the movement to win the new world, and make banners for the meetings and processions." (Pankhurst, Myself When Young, p.267).

Sylvia Pankhurst: art and politics

Henry Street, then, was the perfect place to end the tour. The tour itself consisted of launches in:

The Duende Bar, at Silo City in Buffalo, NY State
Mac's Backs-Books on Coventry in Cleveland, Ohio
City Lit bookshop in Chicago, Illinois
Milwaukee Central Library, Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Haskell Indian Nations University, Lawrence, Kansas
Red Emma's bookshop, Baltimore, Maryland
Henry Street Settlement, New York City, NY State

Speaking at Henry Street with Dana Mills, 2 July 2019. Photo: Cecilia Whalen.

There's still a lot more material, stories and history from the tour that I'll continue to post on the blog in the coming days.  For now, I'd like to take this moment to thank everyone who so generously put me and Morgan up during the tour, everyone who hosted the launches and managed the sales, everyone who attended and provided such interesting discussions - not only about the past, but about what we must do to change the present. I hope that this book will help inspire us today.

New York book launch tonight!

Tonight the book launch tour culminates with an event in New York City. This is going to be incredibly special as it will be at the Henry Street Settlement which Sylvia Pankhurst visited and deeply admired. She remained in contact with the Settlement's founder, Lillian D. Wald, after her return to Britain. The room we are meeting in is one that Sylvia Pankhurst almost certainly describes  in her manuscript (come and see if you think I'm right!) and was one of the places that brought the NAACP into being. So, this is an immensely special place filled with working-class, anti-racist and feminist history.

I am going to be in discussion about Sylvia Pankhurst's revolutionary text with the brilliant Dana Mills - like Sylvia, a writer who reflects on the past and an activist who tries to change the present. I look forward immensely to her book on Rosa Luxemburg as well as to discussing the radical dancers and artists that Sylvia encountered in NYC.

Please come and join me for what should be a very special night celebrating radical history and talking about what lessons we can learn. Tonight. 265 Henry Street, New York City, 10002. 6:30pm. Reserve your free ticket here. Invite friends on Facebook here.

'This is a free country, isn't it?' Militancy in Chicago

The last blog post ended by recalling Sylvia Pankhurst's lifelong opposition to the politics of Winston Churchill. New research that I've just undertaken in Chicago reveals that when Sylvia Pankhurst first arrived in that city, towards the beginning of her 1911 tour, she was confronted by questions about this Tory-turned-Liberal politician. A Suffragette in America recalls that Sylvia first came to Chicago on 18 January, arriving at Congress Hotel at midnight. Declining to speak to reporters because she wanted to sleep, she further angered the impatient press by informing them she was going to spend a few days writing. They had other ideas, harrassing Sylvia until she submitted to interviews. 

The Congress Hotel, Chicago where Sylvia was harrassed by journalists in 1911 and where she spoke in 1912.

The Chicago Daily News reveals some of their tactics: they proudly boasted that Sylvia 'found herself confronted by a reporter as she came from breakfast.' The reporter asked her about Winston Churchill: "What do you think of Winston Churchill's attitude in the great battle of the London police with the anarchistic burglars?"

They referred to the 'Siege of Sidney Street' in which two Latvian members of a gang implicated in a botched robbery were held up and involved in a gun fight with the police and army on a street in Stepney in East London. The introduction of immigration controls six years earlier, explicitly targeted at excluding East European Jewish immigrants, encouraged festering racism, particularly anti-Semitism. The Latvian gang were luridly portrayed as anarchists, part of a foreign, lawless conspiracy against Britain - hence, "anarchistic burglars"! Home Secretary Winston Churchill dashed to the scene, intent on grabbing himself a starring role in the 'battle' which was being caught on film.

Winston Churchill (in the top hat) at the siege of Sidney Street

So why was Sylvia being asked about this in America? Did the reporters seek to embarrass her by comparisons between the militant suffragettes and "anarchistic burglars", both of whom found themselves in combat with Churchill? Yes, it would seem. Sylvia ('impatiently', according to the reporter) declined to comment because she had not been in London when this took place, as she had been sailing to America, but would say that she thought Churchill would 'eventually' support women's suffrage. However, it was militancy that the press were obsessed with; their next question: "Do you expect to be arrested while in Chicago, as you were in London?" Sylvia declined to comment - and then added "I do hope, though, that Chicago policemen have better judgement than some we have in England. This is a free country, isn't it?"

These two questions: the role of militancy and the nature of 'freedom' in the USA would remain at the heart of Sylvia's encounters with Chicago over the four visits she made to the city in 1911 and 1912.

A substantial part of Sylvia's lectures in the US involved defending suffragette militancy. To justify their methods, Sylvia frequently drew parallels between suffragette militancy and the direct action of the American Revolution. The Boston Tea Party, an attack on private property motivated by disenfranchisement, was a favourite example.

Some American suffragists were supportive - and recognised that the promise of a suffragette speaking about imprisonment was a very effective way to get people to turn up to the local meeting! Others thought that militants discredited the cause, their actions serving to reinforce views of women as hysterical and irrational. Leading Illinois suffragist Catharine Waugh McCulloch belonged to the latter and on 29 January 1912 protested in a letter to a Wisconsin suffragist that Sylvia Pankhurst - as one of the women who "act like tomboys" - should have been invited to campaign there. Two days before McCulloch sent that letter, she was sharing a platform with Sylvia at a meeting in the Congress Hotel in Chicago. Probably Sylvia invoked the Boston Tea Party, because McCulloch delivered a rather bizarre attack on that iconic moment of American history - denouncing it as a male attack on the "feminine luxury" tea (rather than liquor) which only went to show that "men are selfish and have always been selfish in their political views and practices"!

But it was not only, or primarily, with reference to past acts of militancy that Sylvia Pankhurst understood her political activism. When Sylvia first arrived in Chicago, at the time she was being asked about anarchistic burglars at breakfast, a strike of garment workers, most of them women, was drawing to its bitter end after a long struggle. As we have seen from the questions asked by the Chicago press, militancy was understood by many to involve getting arrested. This experience was certainly one that the Chicago garment workers shared with the suffragettes, many of them were arrested and imprisoned for their actions. 

Morgan and I went to the site of that imprisonment to try to understand more about it. The striking Chicago garment workers were taken to Harrison Street police court and jail. This place was notorious for its insanitary conditions - the prison itself was said to have brought down the surrounding area into criminality and it was torn down in 1911. We went to the crossroads of Harrison Street and La Salle where it had been (for more on the site see Chicagology). The inner city rail line runs past it now. The old site itself is occupied by a large office block which directly replaced the jail (asking a worker there on a cigarette break if this used to be the site of a jail, I was informed "it still is!"), it being built in 1912.

Harrison Street jail just before it was torn down (from Chicagology).

The site of Harrison Street jail today.

As Morgan observed, it was a jail in the heart of town: it was a significant presence in the city. The jail has been gone for over a hundred years but an incongruity remains. Giant buildings dedicated to banking, the ubiquitous expensive cafes frequented by the professionals working in this area sit right beside a shabbier Chicago, cheap cafes with hand written notices on the wall warning people they can't sit without buying food, homeless people stand on the street outside. Around the site of the old jail the land feels desolate and unfinished, tarmac is replaced by a sandy surface, when we visited this was punctuated by puddles filled with summer rain. The car park is 1 minute away but there are lots of cars parked up in this space, huddled up against the structure of the railway line.

The site of the jail today beside the rail line.

The building that replaced the jail, barbed wire from the car park.

The building that replaced the jail.

On 21 January 1911, Sylvia was taken to visit Harrison Street by Zelie Emerson - the woman who, a year later, would follow Sylvia to London. Together they established a branch of suffragettes in East London which centrally involved working-class women in the struggle for their political rights. The Chicago Daily News reported that when Sylvia visited Harrison Street 'she was especially interested in the cells girl garment workers had occupied'.

Zelie Emerson showing Sylvia Pankhurst the cells at Harrison Street published in the Chicago Daily News. The original negative is reproduced in A Suffragette in America.

Sylvia's judgement was unambiguous: "Fearful - shocking - appalling". At breakfast in the Congress Hotel, Sylvia said she hoped that the authorities would have better judgement in the US than in Britain. What she saw provided an answer: 

"Wherever I have gone in America I have been assured that suffragettes would never receive the treatment here that they receive in England," said Miss Pankhurst, "but" - then a sigh - " I think there would be little difference, if they incarcerate girls in these cells."

Sylvia looked at the treatment of the garment workers and she saw the treatment of the militant suffragettes. She saw them as a part of the same struggle and wrote to the press denouncing their treatment. 

Striking garment workers being arrested in Chicago.

Militancy was a defining feature of this period of British history and it was not confined to progressive movements. The prospect of Home Rule for Ireland drove the right to use their power inside and outside Parliament. In Parliament, the Tory Lords blocked welfare legislation and tried to gridlock the government. Outside, Bonar Law, the leader of the Conservative Party, oversaw drills of armed Ulstermen threatening civil war against the elected government. On the other hand, from 1910 until the outbreak of the First World War, Britain experienced the 'Great Unrest' as groups of workers across the country revolted against low pay and poor working conditions by undertaking strike action. Reactionaries saw revolutionary plots everywhere, no wonder they called the army into Stepney.

The Pankhursts were steeped in a radical tradition of seeking change through Parliament. The actions of the Lords, the fact that women's suffrage seemed further than ever posed a serious challenge to this view. Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst drew a pessimistic conclusion: that militancy would have to be coupled with elitism and reactionary alliances (Christabel was in secret correspondence with the Conservative leader) to make progress. Sylvia drew a more radical conclusion: if the British state would not yield to progressive change then there was something rotten about it, something fundamentally undemocratic at its heart. The solution was to link up with other groups who sought democratic change - workers in struggle, Irish fighters against British imperialism - and realise their collective strength to force change. In 1914, Sylvia Pankhurst, Zelie Emerson and the entire East London branch were expelled from Emmeline and Christabel's WSPU when Sylvia put that approach into practice by appearing on a platform alongside James Connolly, a socialist fighter for Irish freedom playing a leading role in working-class struggle in Dublin. It was because she also saw them as engaged in a struggle for democratic power over their own lives, that Sylvia identified with the garment workers of Chicago.

Railroads

Sylvia Pankhurst was reliant upon trains for her tour of North America. The triumph of the car and the oil industry since would render it impossible to replicate the schedule in this way today. Retracing just a few of Pankhurst's steps, Morgan and I use trains when we can but we are also taking the Megabus, Greyhound buses, taxis and lifts from generous friends in their cars. Although Sylvia had access to a superior and more coherent infrastructure, taking train journeys across such vast distances also prompted changes to her itinerary.

Trains breaking down or being delayed were responsible for Sylvia missing a number of speaking engagements and having to change plans at the last minute, dispatching telegrams when possible to keep her hosts informed. It required considerable flexibility and confidence to pull off such a tour successfully. One such delay occurred on the 12 February 1911 when Sylvia's train from Toronto was three hours late. She had been expecting to go to Geneva, in upstate New York, but now rearranged to go to from Buffalo to Syracuse, from there to Rochester and on to Geneva for the 14th instead (to return to my earlier point, our trip in the reverse direction from Syracuse to Geneva necessitated a bus to Auburn and then a taxi to Geneva there being no public transport available).

Sylvia Pankhurst's lecture in Geneva (Library of Congress).

There are a number of sites in upstate New York state that testify to its radical history of abolitionist and feminist activity. The underground railroad, a network of people who helped those escaping slavery to get to Canada, ran through this area. Outside the library in Schenectady, there are statues of the Auburn-based anti-slavery politician, William Seward and the political activist Harriet Tubman, who herself escaped slavery and through breathtakingly courageous actions helped hundreds of others to do the same.

William Seward and Harriet Tubman at Schenectady.

Harriet Tubman's home in Auburn is now a museum. A statue of Frederick Douglass stands on a crossroads in Rochester - like Tubman he had escaped slavery and become a powerful abolitionist advocate. And like Tubman he was a vocal exponent of women's suffrage. The driver of the taxi on that trip from Auburn to Geneva told us that his sister lived in one of the oldest houses in the area where a concealed hole in the wall was thought to have been somewhere people were hidden. 

This is also the area the women's suffrage movement was born, in the 1848 conference at Seneca Falls. That's memorialised today by a National Park. This event will gain greater prominence with the approach of the centenary of the 19th amendment - which granted votes to women nationwide, at least, it did so in theory: in practice racist lawmakers and terrorist groups frequently denied black people's civil rights. 

It is important to remember, then, that the women's suffrage movement and the anti-slavery movement emerged as a common cause, different forms of oppression being understood as products of the same system. This accounts for the geographical proximity of these campaigning sites. We should also recall that the subsequent adoption of racism by some leading suffragists played into the hands of white supremacist politicians and weakened the campaign for women's suffrage. 

It was the connections between these struggles that brought Sylvia to Geneva. Here lived two long-standing women's suffrage campaigners, Elizabeth Smith Miller and her daughter Anne Fitzhugh Miller. Elizabeth was a cousin of leading suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the daughter of leading abolitionist Gerrit Smith. In February 1911, they invited Sylvia to stay with them at Lochland, their beautiful home with its extensive grounds. The place card for Sylvia's seat at luncheon is preserved in the Library of Congress. 

Sylvia Pankhurst's place card at Lochland (Library of Congress).

Sylvia had little enthusiasm for the elite social occasions in which it was expected she would participate, but it probably fair to assume that, as an activist and artist, she would have been interested in the Miller family's commitments to progressive causes, their involvement at the centre of cultural life in Geneva and the beauty of Seneca Lake which Lochland overlooks. Lochland is still there today, with its tall slim white pillars and wide porch on which the Millers held 'piazza parties' for women's suffrage. It is now a home for adults with learning disabilities.

Elizabeth Smith Miller and Anna Fitzhugh Miller at Lochland.

Seneca Lake.

When Sylvia arrived, life at Lochland was perhaps rather more subdued than it had been in previous years. Elizabeth Smith Miller was ill and would pass away three months later. Neither she nor Anne were able to attend Sylvia's public lecture in Geneva that evening.

The lecture took place at the elegant Smith Opera House in town. We met up with theatre and suffrage expert Chris Woodworth who kindly took us on a tour of the building. Chris informed me that the choice of venue was not at all coincidental: it was where women's suffrage conferences and meetings had been held, and was somewhere connected with the Millers and their circle. The frontage is rather similar to the one Sylvia would have seen, with Shakespeare's face on one side of the door. The interior has been restored to the Art Deco style adopted in the interwar period, which Sylvia would not have seen. However, the dimensions of the building are largely the same and, standing on the stage, it is possible to gain an insight into the performance she would have been required to deliver. It is an indication of Sylvia's status that the Opera House was 'nearly filled' when she spoke there on 14 February.

The Smith Opera House today.

The stage.

The auditorium.

Standing on the stage (photo: Chris Woodworth).

There was quite a programme that night which began and finished with songs from the local Hobart College Quartette. There were speeches of welcome and introduction before Sylvia delivered her address, which was followed by questions, taken by Sylvia and the Chair of Church Work at the National Woman Suffrage Association, and then a series of 'national hymns' from England, Italy, Sweden, Austria, the Netherlands, France, Germany, Russia, Norway and America!

Programme for Sylvia Pankhurst's lecture.

Consistent with her emphasis on the importance of suffrage for working women, Sylvia spoke about women's working conditions and wages in England and the US. Considering that in A Suffragette in America and in her speeches she objected to claims that America had excellent working conditions without sweating and low pay, we may be sceptical of the newspaper's report that 'conditions in America . . . she has learned since her visit here are better in this country than in her own country.'

She also spoke about imprisonment, the beginning of militancy - and one Winston Churchill. During the 1906 general election campaign, Sylvia attended a Liberal Party rally and asked Churchill if he supported votes for women. Invited to the platform to pose her question, she listened as Churchill contemptuously proclaimed that he would not be "henpecked" into supporting women's suffrage. Sylvia was then dragged off the platform by the Liberal stewards who locked her in a back room and threatened her with violence. She escaped by clambering out of the window - upon which she addressed the assembled crowd. In Geneva, Sylvia predicted that 'at the next election [Churchill] will undoubtedly be defeated.' (The next election was in fact postponed by the First World War.)

Thirty nine years after the 1906 general election, Sylvia was able to cast her vote directly against Winston Churchill when she voted in the post-war election in Woodford where she lived, and the constituency Churchill represented. They were lifelong political opponents: Sylvia opposed the First World War during which Churchill was Minister of Munitions, she championed the Bolshevik Revolution which Churchill was so determined to crush, and from the 1920s onwards she denounced his appeasement of Italian fascism. A historian of the women's movement herself, Pankhurst never forgot the importance of linking up struggles for democracy.

With A Suffragette in America outside the Smith Opera House (photo: Chris Woodworth).