The Working-Class Suffragettes Must Not Be Forgotten
The women’s suffrage movement is too often remembered as exclusively middle-class and focused solely on votes for women. But socialist and working-class suffragettes played essential roles in the fight for equality.
Sylvia Pankhurst was a socialist and militant suffragette who campaigned for women’s right to vote. (Hulton-Deutsch Collection / CORBIS / Corbis via Getty Images)
The New York art world is funded by very rich people, and thus tends to reflect their politics, aesthetics, and preoccupations. That’s why it’s newsworthy and exciting that the Amant art space in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn, is right now highlighting an intriguing exploration of socialist feminism — for the second time this year.
Olivia Plender’s “Neither Strivers Nor Skivers, They Will Not Define Us,” is based on the artist’s research on Sylvia Pankhurst, an English socialist feminist. Pankhurst (1882–1960) is best-known as a suffragette, but she was also a trained artist, active in struggles against imperialism and racism, and helped found the Communist Party in the United Kingdom. The exhibition focuses mainly on Pankhurst’s work with the East London Federation of the Suffragettes, creative working-class organizing of the kind not usually described in histories of this period.
The exhibition displays and draws upon archival material, such as the manuscript for Pankhurst’s 1913 play Liberty or Death, which is based on her experiences organizing in East London. Pencil drawings of women getting arrested by police officers, eloquently straightforward and realistic, are displayed on the wall.
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