Sylvia Pankhurst is a well-recognised and important figure renowned for her campaigning for women's rights and for improving conditions for working class people. However, it is much less known that she started her adult life as an artist having studied professionally and then used her education to produce pamphlets for Women’s Social & Political Union (WSPU) and to record the life of working class women in the East End. Estelle Sylvia (she later dropped her first forename) was born in Manchester on 5 May 1882. She was born to a prominent family of activists and reformers, her father (Dr Richard Pankhurst) was a barrister who drafted the first Women’s Suffrage Bill in 1869 and was a feminist. He was also responsible for the Married Women’s Property Act of 1884. Her mother, Emmeline, was the founder of the WSPU - known as suffragettes, they were the most militant group campaigning for women’s voting rights.
Sylvia had a privileged upbringing and was part of frequent intellectual discussions at home. Her parents were friends with William Morris and other great figures of the time, such as George Bernard Shaw, Thomas Mann and others. Her father’s ideals inspired her the most as she later sought to campaign for worldwide peace, and against fascism and racism in his stead. He once told her: ‘if you do not work for others, you will not have been worth the upbringing’.
Richard Pankhurst died when she was sixteen, and in the same year she won a free place at the Manchester School of Art. She won many awards there, including a travel bursary enabling her to travel to study in Venice in the summer of 1902. It is believed that she painted the above picture there whilst travelling. She worked in oils, gouache and watercolours, copying mosaics and religious works. At this stage, Sylvia planned to pursue an artistic career and she was able to gain a two year scholarship (and had the highest grade of any candidate) to study at the Royal College of Art in South Kensington from 1904 to 1906. During her time there, she discovered that most scholarships were awarded to men and tried to bring attention to the issue. She persuaded a family friend to present the issue in Parliament, though no change had been made.
During this time, her mother secured her first commission, which would have a tremendous impact on all their lives. Sylvia was to decorate Pankhurst Hall in Salford, built by the Independent Labour Party and named after her father. Sylvia soon discovered that women would not be admitted to the building, inspiring her mother Emmeline to found WSPU which Sylvia together with her sisters joined. From 1907 to 1912 Sylvia produced many designs for the WSPU including the famous ‘Angel of Freedom’. She designed badges, banners and flyers that would incorporate WSPU colours - purple, white, and green.
In 1907, she toured industrial communities in Norther England and Scotland, documenting the work and life of women workers. She used her skills to create gouache studies showing different industries she encountered. Her artworks together with her written accounts provided a vivid insight into the struggles of working communities and highlighted the need for improvement in conditions. In 1908 and later in 1909 and 1911, her paintings were published in a series of articles illustrating situations and conditions she witnessed. Many of the paintings shown are now missing and are not held in any known collections. Some of these were recently acquired by Tate and are now on display at Tate Britain in London.
For these works Sylvia chose gouache as the most suitable medium for working quickly under factory conditions which were often hot and airless. She wrote of cotton mills in Glasgow ‘the almost deadening noise of machinery and the oppressive heat’, which was ‘so hot and airless that I fainted within an hour’.
In the summer of 1910 during a lull in suffragette activity, she travelled to Austria and Germany with Annie Kenney, a fellow suffragette. During this holiday she made sketches and drawings of local life, including the ‘Passion Play’ series which were sold at Bonhams in 2012.
Towards 1912 the suffragette movement grew increasingly more active and Sylvia had less and less time for painting. In October, she helped set up a new WSPU group in Bow (East London) where she came across the appalling conditions of working class women. Towards 1913-14, Sylvia began to focus more on resolving social class inequalities under capitalism, including focusing on the conflict between classes. This differed significantly from the position of her mother and sister, who supported a system of giving the vote to women with money and property only. At the same time, Sylvia became increasingly uncomfortable with the violent tactics adapted by the WSPU.
In 1914 Sylvia was expelled from the WSPU when she supported the Labour movement and Home Rule in Ireland. She also opposed the war, unlike most suffragettes. Sylvia’s group was now renamed the East London Federation of Suffragettes and she launched her own publication. She was imprisoned in 1920 for publishing articles supporting communism and encouraging sailors to mutiny, though the articles were not actually written by her.
In 1924, she moved to rural Woodford with her partner Silvio Corio, an Italian revolutionary. Their son Richard was born in 1927. Her position as an unmarried mother was hugely unusual for the time. For the rest of her life, she campaigned vigorously against political oppression and promoting human rights. She also became a passionate advocate for Ethiopia and moved there in 1956. She died in Ethiopia in 1960. Few of her paintings can be seen by the public. The four in Tate’s collection were acquired from her grandchildren. Her design works can be seen at the Museum of London, and several studies have been sold to private collections. However, many works still remain missing, though photographic records of them survived.
Sylvia Pankhurst started out as a traditionally trained painter, who then used her education and talent to tirelessly campaign for women’s rights and to show the life of working class women. She spent her whole life trying to improve the lives of people and remained an activist till the end. Her works now serve as not only an important anthropological and historical insight, but also attest to her skill as an artist and her passion for her subjects.
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