In 1911 and 1912, the militant suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst embarked on two lecture tours of the USA.
Moving beyond the elite circles of the American women’s suffrage movement, Pankhurst got her hands dirty, meeting striking laundry workers in New York, visiting female prisoners in Philadelphia and Chicago and grappling with horrific racism in Nashville, Tennessee.
Bringing her own experiences of imprisonment and misogyny from her political work in Britain, she found many parallels between the two countries, but her writings on the subject were never published, until now.
In this short video, Katherine Connelly, editor of A Suffragette in America: Reflections on Prisoners, Pickets and Political Change, details how Pankhurst’s US experiences had a profound impact on her personal development as a political activist, and in turn, on the wider British suffrage movement.
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Produced by Chris Browne.
‘Sylvia Pankhurst: A Suffragette in America | Katherine Connelly interview‘, Copyright © Pluto Press, 2019
Filmed at the Lord Morpeth, E3 5NR (lordmorpeth.co.uk)