Sylvia Pankhurst

Sylvia Pankhurst is an English syndicalist and suffragette, known for her grass roots activism in Britain in the early 1900s. Despite her dedication towards socialism, leftist movements were quashed in the 20s and 30s especially with the election of Oswald Mosley as Prime Minister. Because of this, Pankhurst fled Britain in the early 1930s, now living in Germany.

Despite her self imposed exile she hopes to see the Mosley regime toppled, and is one of many who is actively working with various resistance movements all throughout the British Isles.

## Introduction into activism (1900-1919)

She began her activism in 1906 at 24 years old when she joined the Women's Social and Political Union, alongside her sister and mother. Being interested in art at a very young age and being quite talented, she used her talents to help with the WSPU, devising its logo and various leaflets, banners, and posters as well as the decoration of its meeting halls. The same year was when she was first arrested, campaigning for women's suffrage in England. Despite this, she continued her activism and in 1911 she published a propagandist history of the WSPU's campaign from the WSPU's newpaper: Votes for Women. However, as time went on personal relations with her family became tense through her recent involvement in the Labour Party. Her activism for women's rights began to expand as she became more radicalized and wished for the WSPU to be socialist and hoped for it to tackle issues larger than women's suffrage. From this, she was expelled from the WSPU, and afterward she founded the Worker's Socialist Federation or WSF in 1914.

During the Great War, she, and by extension the WSF was very anti-war, and continually opposed the ongoing conflict. With the WSF she set up "cost-price" restaurants in the poorer districts of London to help feed the poor who needed it and around the same time it set up a toy factory for unemployed women. In 1915, she threw her support to the International Women's Peace Conference which resulted in some of her allies leaving her. Once the Great War ended in 1917, she had become more involved in socialist politics and was introduced to syndicalism. As the war ended, the dire situation in Germany led her and many socialists to support various German syndicalist movements sending aid to the population that was in a dreadful need of supplies. As tensions in Germany escalated, in February the German Civil War began and just 1 month later the Cairo War was also launched.

Sylvia, although opposed to the Great War, seeing it as nothing more than imperialist capitalist nations bickering originally backed the Cairo War, but then began to oppose the remainder of the war. She supported the Egyptian Uprising and the Irish Civil War, but did not support the numerous states declaring war on Britain only to gain colonial land for their own country, caring less about the people such as Japan, Siam, Venezuela and Italy. In the end however she was pleased by the weakening of the British Empire as a result of the war, and once the German Civil War ended with red flags hoisted atop every building in Berlin, she had remarked "As with the liberation of the German state from the Entente and the weakening of the British Colonial state from the previous two wars, it seems that the next decade has something new in store for us, and it might just be our chance for total global liberation".

## 1920s-present day

In 1922, she began to study syndicalism, its principles and the development of the German Union closely and decided to visit the country. Staying for one week in Berlin, she wrote in her newspaper "Workers' Dreadnought", "*It was something completely different. The Germans, despite going through so much pain and trauma of the past decade, took the initiative to help rebuild their state and send any aid to their neighbors. Berlin had the environment of a small and quite city, being so damaged from the previous war. But the people had such enthusiasm for the new regime, as the red flags still stood over most buildings, including the now rebuilt Reichstag"*. She also wrote that her trip to Berlin was a major reason in her becoming a syndicalist activist. Britain throughout the 1920s had become very stagnant from the Cairo War, but she used any funds she had to help send aid through the WSF. Throughout the 1920s, support for the British government had begun to falter, and Sylvia took up the opportunity, trying, in vain to rally anyone who might listen to the syndicalist cause. But it was no use. Politicians such as Oswald Mosely gained much more support from the general population as the British left was routinely suppressed. Knowing this, and with frequent attacks on the WSF and by extension, herself, in 1926 she moved to Edinburg, Scotland as Scotland had become a thriving place for British leftists, with England and Wales seeing any sort of leftist opposition and influence routinely crushed.

In Edinburg her influence carried on, unlike in England, and for the next few years the WSF grew in size. When the Great Crash occurred it left Sylvia and the WSF bankrupt and in early 1928 the WSF was disbanded, as it lacked the proper funds to continue its activist work. Sylvia would manage to avoid homelessness, but even without the WSF her message in Scotland spread far and wide, urging the people of Scotland to rebel and to overthrow the capitalist state that created such issues that allowed the Great Crash to even happen in the first place. The divide between England and Scotland would grow slowly and slowly until the 1931 elections would reach a breaking point for the island. When the South African War had taken place Sylvia again was in support for the rebellion and was overjoyed once she heard the British government had surrendered, allowing African socialists to rule their own country, and creating the first leftist state in Africa. However, the war's lose by the British government skyrocketed support for Oswald Mosely during British elections, to which he won by popular vote and became prime minister of Britain.

Because of this and rumors of an opposition purge by the Mosley government, Pankhurst and many other socialists and anti-Mosleyists alike fled Britain. Sylvia, for her part fled Scotland to Ireland, before permanently settling in the German Union, a fierce activist for the Union led government.