Sylvia Pankhurst Was One of Britain’s Great Revolutionaries
Repeatedly imprisoned for the cause, Sylvia Pankhurst was one of the leading figures in the struggle for women’s suffrage in Britain. What many don’t know is that Pankhurst also played an important role in the early history of British communism.
A schoolgirl passes a large mural depicting suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst, created in 2018 by Australian artist Jerome Davenport, on the wall of a pub in East London on March 6, 2023. (Isabel Infantes / AFP via Getty Images)
On November 2, 1920, Britain’s best-known revolutionary, Sylvia Pankhurst, was found guilty of sedition at London’s Mansion House courtrooms and jailed for six months. She remained unbowed.
“Although I have been a socialist all my life, I have tried to palliate the capitalist system,” she told the court. “But all my experience showed that it was useless trying to palliate an impossible system. This is a wrong system and has got to be smashed. I would give my life to smash it.”
Sylvia was no stranger to state repression. Over the previous decade, she had been jailed numerous times and tortured by force-feeding while imprisoned because of her role as a campaigner for women’s suffrage. Between June 1913 and June 1914 alone, she was arrested ten times, going on hunger and thirst strike each time in protest at the refusal of the British authorities to treat the suffragettes as political prisoners.
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