A Suffragette in America
Sylvia Pankhurst's visits to America profoundly shaped her radical worldview – and threw her into some of the era's most high-profile battles between workers and their bosses.
In January 1911, Sylvia Pankhurst undertook a lecture tour of North America which lasted just over three months, and she would return for a second tour of similar length in January 1912. In the course of these tours, she travelled thousands of miles undertaking a frenetic schedule of engagements: ‘I travelled almost every night, and spoke once, twice or thrice a day.’ She did all this to tell audiences about the militant suffragettes’ struggle for votes for women in Britain, a struggle in which she was an active participant.
Lecture tours provided opportunities to amplify the suffragettes’ own story of the campaign as well as a chance to embarrass and put pressure on the British government by winning over crowds in the wider English-speaking world. In Canada, the suffragettes appealed for solidarity for their cause within the British Empire. America, by contrast, allowed access to a self-consciously modern nation. When Sylvia first arrived in America, women already had the right to vote in Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, Idaho and Washington, DC.
During her first tour, Sylvia was promoting the book she was still hastily finishing – The Suffragette: The History of the Women’s Militant Suffrage Movement, 1905–1910. By the time of her second tour in 1912, the book had been published in Britain and America, making Sylvia one of the first historians of the suffragette movement. Written at a time of increasing state repression of the campaign, the book uncritically reproduced the heroic narrative propagated by the leaders of the militant suffragettes’ Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), Sylvia’s mother Emmeline and older sister Christabel Pankhurst. Sylvia suppressed any expression of her own misgivings about the growing elitism of the campaign, its marginalisation of working-class women and its increasing hostility towards the socialist and labour movements from which it had sprung. The two voyages to North America removed Sylvia from the intense political and personal pressures of the British suffragette movement – and it was here that she began to conceive of a very different book.
In 1911, Sylvia’s tour took her from New York, Boston and Philadelphia on the East Coast, through the states of the Midwest as far south as Kansas, before travelling north to Canada where she spoke in Ottawa and Toronto, and then through New York State to Washington, DC. These were followed by more engagements on the East Coast and then a journey across the country to Colorado and California. After this she returned to New York, speaking in Kansas, Michigan and Maryland on the way. Sylvia was feted by some of America’s wealthiest suffragists and her lectures were booked into the largest venues in the towns and cities she visited. She was put up in grand, modern hotels but she also spent days travelling on sleeper trains which broke down in the middle of the night, disrupting carefully planned itineraries.
The 1912 tour was organised around a sparser series of engagements; the novelty of the first tour could not be replicated and the escalation of militancy in Britain was alienating some former supporters. This afforded Sylvia a greater opportunity to determine her own schedule and to explore beyond the elitist boundaries in which much of the American suffragist movement was contained. Wanting to ‘see a Socialist city’, Sylvia spent a week in Milwaukee, Wisconsin where a socialist mayor had recently been elected. Since touring British suffragettes had not yet been to the South, she also decided to go to Tennessee, where she encountered the legacy of slavery and challenged racial segregation. This time there were fewer elegant hotels. In her writings and letters, she described staying in a shabby, provincial hotel in Lebanon, Tennessee, to speak to a group of socialist students; in Canada’s St John, she stayed in the home of the progressive Hatheway family and in the early morning was driven to the railway station in a sledge across the snowy landscape; in Chicago, she stayed with her cousin’s family (her father’s brother, John Pankhurst, had emigrated to America in his youth) only to find herself frustrated with the ‘empty headed’ wife of the household. Significantly, it was the more challenging 1912 tour that provided most of the material for Sylvia’s writings on America.
The Struggle of Working Women
Sylvia’s lecture tours took place at an exciting time in American history, later termed the ‘Progressive Era’. Aggressive, capitalist expansion and innovation saw huge fortunes amassed by a few through the exploitation of the many. The American working class was developing rapidly as women, African Americans, Native Americans and immigrants were increasingly dragged into its ranks. At the same time, this process produced growing resistance to inequality. The ideas of feminists, socialists, trade unionists and reformers provided hope to those embroiled in bitter, desperately fought battles to shape the future. Sylvia was deeply struck by the disparity between what was possible and the reality in modern America. She explored this contrast in her speeches: ‘As I have gone through your country, I have been filled with admiration for its ingenuity and its wonderful progress and enterprise. But everywhere I see such poverty, such overcrowding of cities, such wretchedness of many.’
Sylvia contrasted the ‘endless possibilities of new growth’ in America with its ‘cruel waste of precious human energy’. The disregard for human life that accompanied the growth of modern capitalism was starkly realised on 25 March 1911 when a fire broke out in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York City and 146 workers, mostly women from immigrant backgrounds, were killed. Sylvia Pankhurst arrived in America in 1911 in the midst of this huge wave of working-class militancy that was led by working women. The movement had emerged in November 1909 from strikes of garment workers, most of whom were women from immigrant backgrounds, in two shirtwaist factories in New York City. Frustrated with the passive response from the trade union leadership, they called for a general strike of the city’s garment workers which captured the mood in the sweatshops and fundamentally changed the pace of the struggle: the ‘uprising of the 20,000’, as it became known, had begun. The uprising inspired a new movement, as low-paid women in city after city voted to strike, downed tools and picketed their sweatshops.
The strike wave erupted in the garment factories of Chicago on 23 September 1910, four months before Sylvia arrived in the city, at the Hart, Schaffner and Marx clothing factory after a cut in women workers’ piece rates was enforced. It was clear this was a final hardship that caused mounting tension to snap – the women objected to the way they were treated every day in the factory, from ‘the petty tyranny’ of the foreman who was paid extra if he could drive his workforce to produce over a certain amount; the ‘abusive and insulting language … frequently used by those in authority in the shops’, and the punitive system of fines, for such misdemeanours as a ‘liberal use of soap in washing hands’, which reduced their paltry wages still further. The strikers turned for help to the United Garment Workers Union but found this union uninterested in organising low-paid, immigrant women workers and pessimistic about their prospects of success, and so the women approached and won the support of the Chicago Federation of Labour and the Chicago Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL). By the time Sylvia arrived in Chicago, the strike was in its last, bitter stages. The United Garment Workers Union had negotiated over the heads of the strikers themselves for the workers at the Hart, Schaffner and Marx factory to return to work on 14 January, as arbitration had commenced. This, however, left 30,000 garment workers from other shops who had joined the strike and were still picketing. (Two weeks later, the United Garment Workers’ leader suddenly called off the strike, leaving these workers without an agreement and subject to victimisation by furious employers.)
On 21 January 1911, Zelie Emerson and Olive Sullivan, two women from the Chicago WTUL, took Pankhurst to visit the Harrison Street Gaol and police courts to convey just how difficult the garment workers’ struggle had been. Upton Sinclair’s sensational novel The Jungle, published five years earlier, had exposed the collusion in Chicago between police, politicians, employers and organised crime, which enabled an elite few to make huge profits out of sweating immigrant labourers. Any resistance to that was met with vicious and organised brutality, as the garment workers soon discovered. Male and female strikers were attacked and beaten on the picket lines by thugs hired by the employers as well as by the police. Pickets were arrested and imprisoned, and two strikers were shot dead by the police in the course of the strike. Harrison Street left Pankhurst with an enduring sense of horror. After seeing where the pickets had been incarcerated, Pankhurst wrote an impassioned denunciation of the Harrison Street cells, which was published in the Chicago Sunday Tribune:
I heard of some of the women and girls who had been picketing in the garment workers’ strike, as I am told in a perfectly legal way, who had been arrested and thrust either into these police court cells or into the annex, in both of which the risk of contamination at all times is exceedingly great. Happily, their trade union organizations have been able to come to their aid and bail them out within a short time, but it must be remembered that the people being on strike were practically penniless and had no money of their own, and therefore had others not come to their assistance they would have been obliged to continue suffering this terrible form of confinement.
This article was considered significant enough for the Chicago WTUL’s official report into the strike to include thanks to Sylvia because her ‘telling description of the Harrison Police Station, where many of the young girl strikers were sent when arrested for picketing, was a challenge to the social conscience, as well as an indictment of the industrial conditions of Chicago.’
Sylvia’s article acknowledged the support that the striking garment workers received and Zelie Emerson was well-placed to describe the scale of the solidarity efforts. A member of the Chicago WTUL, Emerson had been in charge of a restaurant to feed strikers and their families on Noble Street, she was the ‘Chairman’ of the Rent Committee and, with another woman, the director of the relief work. As Colette A. Hyman’s work has shown, the Relief and Rent Committees were crucial in maintaining the strike and women’s participation within it, as families were fed and landlords persuaded to wait for rent. The scale of the task was daunting; at its height there were around 40,000 previously unorganised workers on strike, and the WTUL estimated that the number of strikers and their dependents who would need assistance over the bitterly cold winter months amounted to 100,000 individuals. Four months into the strike, the WTUL reported the ‘tramp of thousands of weary feet’ in their headquarters, the ‘stream of stories of hardship and privation’, and ‘more than 7,000 tiny toddlers wailing for milk’ – 1,250 babies were born during the strike. There was also the challenge of helping the strikers overcome linguistic and cultural barriers to organise together – between them the strikers spoke nine different languages. Instead of dismissing working-class women as weak, or speaking for them, Sylvia and some progressive middle-class women in Chicago, like Emerson, were striving to amplify working women’s experience so that they could effect change. It is easy to see why Sylvia and Emerson struck up a friendship; Emerson, originally from Michigan, was from a wealthy background, but was said to have ‘abandoned “society” for sociological investigation’, and took jobs as a hotel kitchen worker, scrub woman and salesgirl in a department store to study working conditions.
Sylvia never forgot the experiences of the American tours and the stances that she took. In the 1940s and 1950s, Sylvia’s campaigning in solidarity with Ethiopia led to her correspondence with the American W.E.B. Du Bois, a leading Pan-Africanist intellectual, and staunch supporter of women’s suffrage. In a letter from 1946, discussing means of facilitating African American support for Ethiopia, Sylvia recalled challenging racism in Tennessee over thirty years before: ‘I have always had sympathy for the American Negro and had some lively experiences when I was in the United States on that account.’ For Sylvia, her American experi- ences were not a cause for nostalgia. Instead, her experiences, changing ideas and friendships forged in those intense months in 1911 and 1912 inspired her lifelong campaigning efforts against oppression and for democracy.