FROM PACIFIST TO ANTI-FASCIST?
SYLVIA PANKHURST AND THE FIGHT AGAINST WAR AND FASCISM
Erika Marie Huckestein
A thesis submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial
fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in the Department of History.
Chapel Hill
2014
Approved By:
Susan Pennybacker
Emily Burrill
Susan Thorne
© 2014
Erika Huckestein
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
ii
ABSTRACT
Erika Marie Huckestein: From Pacifist to Anti-Fascist? Sylvia Pankhurst and the Fight Against
War and Fascism
(Under the direction of Susan Pennybacker)
Historians of women’s involvement in the interwar peace movement, and biographers of
Sylvia Pankhurst have noted her seemingly contradictory positions in the face of two world wars:
she vocally opposed the First World War and supported the Allies from the outbreak of the
Second World War. These scholars view Pankhurst’s transition from pacifism to anti-fascism as
a reversal or subordination of her earlier pacifism. This thesis argues that Pankhurst’s anti-fascist
activism and support for the British war effort should not be viewed as a departure from her
earlier suffrage and anti-war activism. The story of Sylvia Pankhurst’s political activism was not
one of stubborn commitment to, or rejection of, a static succession of ideas, but one of an active
engagement with changing politics, and confrontation with the new ideology of fascism, in a
society still struggling to recover from the Great War.
iii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAPTER I: INTRODUCTION ....................................................................................................1
CHAPTER II: OPPOSITION TO THE GREAT WAR .................................................................8
CHAPTER III: THE MENACE OF FASCISM ...........................................................................19
CHAPTER IV: PEACE THROUGH VICTORY .........................................................................34
CHAPTER V: CONCLUSION .....................................................................................................45
REFERENCES .............................................................................................................................48
iv
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
Sylvia Pankhurst highlighted the continuity in her politics and reflected on her life-long
commitment to political activism in 1939, twenty-one years after women won the right to vote in
Great Britain. She wrote that she had “been a campaigner for international peace and justice
before, during and since the Great War,” thus alluding to her opposition to the South African
Boer War, her advocacy for universal suffrage, and opposition to British involvement in World
War One.1 Yet by the close of that year, Pankhurst criticized those pacifists who were “working
definitively against the war” for “aiding a super-military autocracy, maintained by the sword at
home and abroad.”2 Pankhurst’s self-proclaimed dedication to peace activism appears to
contradict her subsequent statement criticizing pacifists who opposed the British war effort
during the Second World War. Though she was hesitant to apply labels to her political beliefs,
only occasionally referring to herself as a socialist, communist, feminist, or pacifist throughout
her writings, a question still remains.3 How can we reconcile and understand Pankhurst’s
seemingly contradictory statements, in support of peace and international justice as well as war?
1
“The Citizenship of Women: Looking Back on the Struggle for it after Twenty-One Years”, 1939, Estelle Sylvia
ESPP, Internationaal Instituut Voor Sociale Geschiedenis, Amsterdam (hereafter cited as ESPP).
2
3
“The Profound Issue of the War,” New Times and Ethiopia News, October 28, 1939.
Pankhurst provided her own definition of a pacifist in an April 8, 1916 article titled “What is a Pacifist?” In the
article she argued that “the true pacifist is a rebel against the present organisation of society, and only as we prefer
defeat to wrong-doing and despise the gain of privilege and oppression shall our feet be guided in the way of peace.”
Pankhurst, “What Is A Pacifist?” Woman’s Dreadnought, April 8, 1916.To complicate this matter further, the word
pacifist has been employed to describe a variety of beliefs, particularly during the first half of the twentieth century.
Martin Ceadel argues that while the division within the peace movement remained unclear until confronted with the
Historians of women’s involvement in the interwar peace movement and biographers of
Pankhurst have noted her seemingly contradictory positions: she vocally opposed the First World
War and supported the Allies from the outbreak of the Second World War. These scholars view
Pankhurst’s transition from pacifism to anti-fascism as a reversal or subordination of her earlier
pacifism.4 Scholars have concluded their analysis of Pankhurst’s pacifism there, however,
choosing to see Pankhurst’s support for multiple causes as either too wide-ranging to be
conceptually reconciled or focusing only on the particular aspects of Pankhurst’s activism that
can be more easily connected.5 Pankhurst’s activism was indeed broad-ranging. She was an
active participant in the suffrage movement, campaigned against the Great War, supported the
international crises of 1936, those who referred to themselves as pacifists form two distinct groups. In order to
differentiate between the beliefs held by the two groups Ceadel labels one pacifist and the other pacificist.
According to Ceadel, pacifists held the belief that war was always wrong “whatever the consequences of abstaining
from fighting”, while pacificists acknowledged that war was occasionally necessary though it was “always an
irrational and inhumane way to solve disputes.” Martin Ceadel, Pacifism in Britain, 1914-1945: The Defining of a
Faith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 3. It was not until the 1930s however that these distinctions reached a
newfound importance as these two groups could no longer advocate the same policies in the wake of the
Manchurian and Abyssinian crises. See also Martin Ceadel, Semi-Detached Idealists: The British Peace Movement
and International Relations, 1854-1945 (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).
4
Richard Pankhurst, Sylvia Pankhurst: Counsel for Ethiopia (Tsehai Publishers, 2003), 86; Patricia Romero, E.
Sylvia Pankhurst: Portrait of a Radical (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 201; Josephine Eglin, “Women
Pacifists in Inter-War Britain,” in Challenge to Mars: Essays on Pacifism from 1918 to 1945, ed. Peter Brock and
Thomas Paul Socknat (Toronto and London: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 150–151.
5
For the first book-length study of Sylvia Pankhurst see Richard Pankhurst, Sylvia Pankhurst, Artist and Crusader:
An Intimate Portrait (New York: Paddington Press: distributed by Grosset & Dunlap, 1979). Written by her son in
order to call attention to his mother’s life as an artist, its primary focus is on Pankhurst’s artistic education and her
contributions to British art and the visual culture of the suffrage movement. Patricia Romero, E. Sylvia Pankhurst:
Portrait of a Radical (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987). Romero is highly unsympathetic to her subject and
has been criticized by subsequent biographers for her argument that Pankhurst's wide-ranging activism can be
explained by her continual search for a father figure. For more sympathetic biographies of Pankhurst see Ian Bullock
and Richard Pankhurst, eds., Sylvia Pankhurst: From Artist to Anti-fascist (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992);
Barbara Winslow, Sylvia Pankhurst: Sexual Politics and Political Activism (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996)
which draws connections between Pankhurst’s involvement in the suffrage campaign, the labor movement, and
Communism; Mary Davis, Sylvia Pankhurst: A Life in Radical Politics (London; Sterling, Va.: Pluto Press, 1999)
which focuses on the links between the labor and women’s movements; and Shirley Harrison, Sylvia Pankhurst: a
Crusading Life 1882-1960 (London: Aurum, 2003) which, as of its publication, was the only biography authorized
by Pankhurst's family. For a biographical study focusing exclusively on Pankhurst's Ethiopian activism see Richard
Pankhurst, Sylvia Pankhurst: Counsel for Ethiopia (Tsehai Publishers, 2003). For the most recent biography of
Pankhurst, which ties together Pankhurst's diverse activism within a broad framework of Pankhurst as a life-long
campaigner for democracy and self-determination, see Katherine Connelly, Sylvia Pankhurst Suffragette, Socialist,
and Scourge of Empire (London: Pluto Press, 2013).
2
Russian Revolution and Communism, advocated for maternal welfare, opposed fascism and
imperialism and was a dedicated advocate of Ethiopia until her death in 1960. Patricia Romero,
the first and arguably most influential biographer of Pankhurst, is very critical of Pankhurst’s
dedication to such a large variety of causes. She cites Pankhurst’s support of the Russian
Revolution, which occurred before women in Britain had won the right to vote, as just one
“example of how quickly Sylvia could change causes” and argues that such a shift “raises the
question of how committed she was to feminist issues like votes for women.”6 Romero also
dismisses her transition between these different causes as motivated by Pankhurst’s search for a
strong male father figure.7 This kind of explanation is not only dismissive; it fails to give
legitimacy to Pankhurst’s politics and ideas.
Pankhurst’s anti-fascist activism and support for the British war effort should not,
however, be viewed as a departure from her earlier suffrage and anti-war activism. Her personal
conception of pacifism was derived from a core set of beliefs that she maintained throughout her
life and was integral to her subsequent opposition to fascism. Furthermore, Pankhurst’s political
commitments during the era of fascism continued to be influenced by her earlier experiences of
war and ongoing concern with the status of women and women’s particular contribution to
society. Pankhurst consistently argued that women should play a central role in politics and
international governance even after women in Britain achieved the right to vote on the same
terms as men in 1928. She never fully relinquished the legacy of the suffrage movement or the
belief that women as a group could contribute something that would otherwise be lacking in a
6
Romero, E. Sylvia Pankhurst, 124.
7
Ibid., 20, 34, 210.
3
male dominated society.8 Just as Pankhurst often recontextualized her feminism to suit her
changing worldview in the midst of two World Wars and the rise of fascism, she also reframed
her commitment to peace to accommodate her eventual advocacy of war. The story of Sylvia
Pankhurst’s political activism was not one of stubborn commitment to or rejection of a static
succession of ideas but one of an active engagement with changing politics and confrontation
with the new ideology of fascism in a society still struggling to recover from the Great War.9
As Pankhurst was involved in so many types of political activism, her life also provides a
very useful frame for exploring the connections between seemingly disparate movements.
Through a systematic study of her interwar journalism I will demonstrate how Pankhurst, rather
than abandoning the suffrage movement, continued to invoke the legacy and goals of the
8
The legacy of the suffrage movement was highly contested in the interwar period. For more on the different
movements that claimed to be inheritors of its legacy see Adrian Bingham, “Enfranchisement, Feminism and the
Modern Woman: Debates in the British Popular Press, 1918-1939,” in The Aftermath of Suffrage: Women, Gender,
and Politics in Britain, 1918-1945, ed. Julie V. Gottlieb and Richard Toye (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire;
New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 91–94; Julie V. Gottlieb and Richard Toye, eds., The Aftermath of Suffrage:
Women, Gender, and Politics in Britain, 1918-1945 (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire; New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2013), 11; Julie Gottlieb, “Suffragette Experience Through the Filter of Fascism,” in A Suffrage Reader:
Charting Directions in British Suffrage History, ed. Claire Eustance, Joan Ryan, and Laura Ugolini (New York:
Leicester University Press, 2000), 118–120; Julie Gottlieb, Feminine Fascism: Women in Britain’s Fascist
Movement, 1923-1945 (London: I.B. Tauris, 2000), 160–168.
9
Historians of fascism still debate the exact definition of the term and whether or not particular movements and
regimes should be considered fascist. When Pankhurst first expressed her opposition to fascism her interpretation
closely aligned with the official Communist theory of fascism. Those who subscribed to this conception of fascism
understood it as an agent of capitalism and the bourgeoisie. This interpretation of fascism (including German
National Socialism) was formally adopted by the Third International in 1924. For an analysis of this interpretation of
fascism see Stanley Payne, A History of Fascism, 1914-1945 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), 443–
444. As Pankhurst distanced herself from Communism, and fascism continued to develop, her conception of fascism
became more complex. She applied the label of fascism broadly and thus would have been in agreement with
scholars who advocate for a notion of a “generic fascism” or “synthetic fascism” in order to analyze the culture and
ideology of the fascist movement, see Roger Eatwell, “Towards a New Model of Generic Fascism,” Journal of
Theoretical Politics 4, no. 2 (April 1, 1992): 161–194, doi:10.1177/0951692892004002003; Roger Griffin, The
Nature of Fascism (London; New York: Routledge, 1993). As will be described in more detail later in the paper, she
identified certain characteristics of fascism that roughly correspond with most aspects of Robert Paxton’s definition
of fascism as “a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation,
or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed
nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic
liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and
external expansion.” Robert Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism, 1st ed. (New York: Knopf, 2004), 218.
4
suffrage movement even after she was no longer a member of any suffrage organization. This
study will also contribute to the growing body of scholarship that challenges the notion that
women’s involvement in peace movements, or other international organizations and causes,
marked a shift away from their previously held feminist beliefs.10 A new conception of
Pankhurst’s political activism is needed, one that recognizes the complex interactions between
these different strands of activism in the interwar period.
The daughter of Richard Pankhurst, a radical Liberal barrister, and Emmeline, the
founder of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), Sylvia Pankhurst was wellpositioned for an entry into political activism. Pankhurst followed the example set by her parents
and became a member of the Independent Labour Party (ILP) as a young woman. She also joined
her mother in the suffrage movement after Emmeline founded the WSPU. As a socialist feminist
who remained loyal to the ILP, she gradually became disenchanted with the organization headed
by her mother, which catered to middle-class women, and thus created her own suffrage
organization in London’s East End. There she fulfilled her desire to advocate for both women’s
and workers’ rights. After the outbreak of the First World War, Pankhurst again voiced an
opinion that was unpopular among many fellow suffragists, as she declined to support the war
effort and instead advocated for a negotiated settlement to end the war. At the war’s close
Pankhurst became a founding member of the Communist Party in Britain, though she was
10
Jo Vellacott calls for a more nuanced understanding of women’s participation in the pacifist movement during and
after the First World War arguing that a new form of feminism emerged as a result of the First World War. See Jo
Vellacott, “A Place for Pacifism and Transnationalism in Feminist Theory: The Early Work of the Women’s
International League for Peace and Freedom,” Women’s History Review 2, no. 1 (1993): 23–56,
doi:10.1080/09612029300200021. Carol Miller also argues that viewing women’s participation in international
organizations as symbolic of the decline of feminism discounts the feminist dimension of women’s international
work, see Carol Miller, “‘Geneva – the Key to Equality’: Inter-War Feminists and the League of Nations,” Women’s
History Review 3, no. 2 (1994): 219–45, doi:10.1080/09612029400200051.
5
expelled a few years later.11 In the 1920s and 1930s she was committed to raising the alarm
about the dangers of fascism. This period of Pankhurst’s life was also punctuated by the
publication of her writings on India, maternal welfare, the Great War and the suffrage
movement.12 Her engagement in anti-fascist activism was linked to her advocacy for Ethiopia, a
cause she supported until her death in Addis Ababa in 1960.
In order to further her activism, as well as introduce the public and government officials
to her ideas, Pankhurst relied heavily on the periodical press. She often submitted articles to
newspapers such as the Manchester Guardian, the News Chronicle, and the Daily Herald, and
Picture Post. She began her first periodical, The Woman’s Dreadnought, in 1914 and it served as
the organ of the East London Federation of Suffragettes, a splinter organization founded by
Pankhurst after her break from the WSPU. As Pankhurst turned towards socialism, and later
Communism, she changed the name of this paper to the Workers’ Dreadnought and its
circulation reached around 10,000.13 From 1917 to May 1918 the Dreadnought was published by
the Workers’ Suffrage Federation, from May 1918 to June 1920 it was published by the
Workers’ Socialist Federation, and after a brief period in which it served as an official organ of
the Communist Party, Pankhurst edited the paper independently from 1921 to 1924, until it
11
Shortly after her expulsion from the CPGB Pankhurst published an article in order to explain that her departure
from the party was not due to “any tendency to compromise with capitalism”, but instead was a result of her
commitment to “freedom of propaganda for the Left Wing Communists, who oppose all compromise and seek to
hasten faster and more directly onward to Communism.” The CPGB executive asked Pankhurst turn over her
newspaper, the Workers’ Dreadnought, to Party control and Pankhurst refused. Pankhurst, “Freedom of
Discussion,” Workers’ Dreadnought, September 17, 1921.
12
E. Sylvia Pankhurst, India and the Earthly Paradise (Bombay: Sunshine Publishing House, 1926); E. Sylvia
Pankhurst, Save the Mothers; a Plea for Measures to Prevent the Annual Loss of about 3000 Child-Bearing Mothers
and 20,000 Infant Lives in England and Wales, and a Similar Grievous Wastage in Other Countries (London: A.A.
Knopf, 1930); E. Sylvia Pankhurst, The Suffragette Movement: An Intimate Account of Persons and Ideals
(Longmans, Green and co., 1931); E. Sylvia Pankhurst, The Home Front: A Mirror to Life in England during the
World War (Hutchinson & Co. Ltd., 1932).
13
Davis, Sylvia Pankhurst, 55.
6
ceased publication. Pankhurst served as a leader of all three organizations. As she became
increasingly concerned with the looming threat of fascism, Pankhurst established a newspaper
dedicated to the cause of Ethiopian independence, the New Times & Ethiopia News. The paper
was first issued in 1936 and Pankhurst continued to publish the paper until she moved to
Ethiopia in 1956. During its first year 10,000 copies were printed per week and at its peak
circulation of the paper reached 40,000.14 Taken together, these sources allow us to trace the
development of Pankhurst’s conception of peace, fascism and women’s roles in society and
politics. Pankhurst’s editorials offered solutions for politicians and citizens who sought to create
a better society, an ideal that was constantly in flux. In order to understand how Pankhurst’s
ideas evolved from one world war to the next, we must first examine Pankhurst’s opposition to
the Great War.
14
Metasebia Woldemariam, “Sylvia Pankhurst: Against Imperialist Occupation of Ethiopia,” in African Agency and
European Colonialism: Latitudes of Negotiation and Containment: Essays in Honor of A.S. Kanya-Forstner, ed.
Kwabena Opare Akurang-Parry and Femi J. Kolapo (Lanham (MD); Plymouth: University Press of America, 2007),
147; June Purvis, “Sylvia Pankhurst (1882-1960), Suffragette, Political Activist, Artist and Writer,” Gender &
Education 20, no. 1 (2008): 84.
7
CHAPTER II
OPPOSITION TO THE GREAT WAR
In reflecting upon the articles she wrote during the First World War, Sylvia Pankhurst
was conscious of the fact that she was expressing an oppositional point of view, one which
countered the government’s narrative of the war. In a letter written a little over a decade after the
war’s end she discussed the duty she felt to convey her pacifist message to the public. “I felt
sorrow in having to tell parents, whose sons were at the front,” she wrote, “that the war was
wrong and its ideals fake, and that all the belligerent governments were to blame.”15 In the
process of fulfilling what she saw as her duty, Pankhurst expended a great deal of energy writing
and editing a newspaper that expressed her views and lost many friends who did not agree with
her anti-war stance.16 Pankhurst was not alone in her opposition, however. The First World War
created a deep fracture in the suffrage movement between those who worked to support the war
and those who devoted themselves to protesting it.17 Pankhurst’s personal pacifism did not
necessarily align with all suffragists who opposed the war. Her objections to the war were
15
E. Sylvia Pankhurst to unknown, 10 December 1930, ESPP.
16
Ibid.
17
Claire Eustance, Joan Ryan, and Laura Ugolini, “Introduction: Writing Suffrage Histories – the ‘British’
Experience,” in A Suffrage Reader: Charting Directions in British Suffrage History, ed. Claire Eustance, Joan Ryan,
and Laura Ugolini (New York: Leicester University Press, 2000), 14; Lucy Noakes, “War and Peace,” in Women in
Twentieth-Century Britain, ed. Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska (Harlow: Longman, 2001), 316; Susan Pedersen,
Eleanor Rathbone and the Politics of Conscience (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 193; Harold Smith,
The British Women’s Suffrage Campaign, 1866-1928, 2nd ed. (Harlow, England; New York: Pearson/Longman,
2007), 73–79; Anne Wiltsher, Most Dangerous Women: Feminist Peace Campaigners of the Great War (London;
Boston: Pandora Press, 1985).
8
influenced by her socialist politics, her dedication to working-class women’s rights, and her
continued promotion of women’s political activism. This is not to say that Pankhurst’s views
were representative of all feminists or socialists, but rather that her identification of the causes of
war as the foreign policy of Great Powers, capitalism, and women’s exclusion from politics,
were derived from her socialist feminism. In tracing the development of Pankhurst’s pacifism as
well as her continued advocacy for the equality and inclusion of women in politics and
governance, we can see how her opposition to the First World War led to her eventual
condemnation of fascism.
In her weekly editorials and articles in the pages of her newspaper The Woman’s
Dreadnought, Pankhurst declared that the war was caused by capitalism and Great Power
rivalries. Prime Minister Herbert Asquith, in contrast, announced to Parliament that Britain had
entered the war in order “to fulfill a solemn international obligation” and “to vindicate the
principle that small nationalities are not to be crushed, in defiance of international good faith, by
the arbitrary will of a strong and overmastering Power.”18 For Pankhurst, however, these words
rang hollow. Though the government’s justification for going to war was couched in the “most
altruistic and disinterested motives that can be found or invented,” she argued that wars were
fought for commercial gain and this war was no different.19 Capitalists would profit from the
scarcity brought on by the war and exploit the opportunity to increase their wealth and profits.20
In addition to market competition, rivalries between Great Powers over territory also added fuel
18
Herbert Asquith, “Prime Minister of Britain, His Address to Parliament Announcing the War on August 6, 1914,”
Charles Horne and Walter F. Austin, eds., Source Records of the Great War, vol. 1, 7 vols. (New York: National
Alumni, 1923).
19
E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Going to War: What Women Can Do,” Woman’s Dreadnought, August 8, 1914; Pankhurst,
“The War Cure,” Woman’s Dreadnought, October 3, 1914; Pankhurst, “Peace and War,” Woman’s Dreadnought,
June 3, 1916.
20
E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Important,” Woman’s Dreadnought, August 7, 1915.
9
to the fire of war, according to Pankhurst. She claimed that competition for control of Eastern
and African territories amounted to no more than “an ignoble and mercenary battle of thieves.”21
Rather than a protective action to defend small nationalities, Pankhurst contended that the war
was rooted in domination and exploitation, both of workers and colonial territories. Pankhurst’s
opposition to the war prefigured the beliefs of the small socialist contingent, largely represented
by members of the ILP, within the peace movement, which held that capitalism and imperialism
were the inexorable causes of war.22 Pankhurst also used the war to highlight another kind of
inequality that her socialist organization, the Workers’ Suffrage Federation, hoped to end.
From the onset of the Great War, Pankhurst also viewed the war as a by-product of the
male-dominated political system. She articulated her continuing demands for women’s
enfranchisement in these terms. In her August 8, 1914 article and editorial in the Woman’s
Dreadnought Pankhurst contended that women needed the vote in order to influence
international policy. She cited the current state of affairs, and the decision to go to war, as
evidence for this. Basing her claim on the overwhelming support for peace at the Women’s
Meeting of the Labour Party in London’s Trafalgar Square, Pankhurst argued that if women had
been incorporated into the electorate at the start of the war, and thus comprised an important part
of public opinion, war could have perhaps been avoided.23 This was a fairly optimistic view of
women’s opposition to war as the large majority of the women who were politically involved in
either the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, headed by Millicent Fawcett, and
21
E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Mistaken Ideals,” Woman’s Dreadnought, December 29, 1917.
22
Ceadel, Pacifism in Britain, 1914-1945, 5.
23
E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “For Peace,” Woman’s Dreadnought, August 8, 1914.
10
Emmeline Pankhurst’s Women’s Social and Political Union, supported the war effort.24 The
members of women’s organizations affiliated with the labor and co-operative movements, on the
other hand, articulated similar arguments to Sylvia Pankhurst about the benefits of including
women’s perspectives in political decision making.25 Pankhurst commended the policies of such
women’s organizations which called for peace and stood in opposition to the “men-made
Governments of Europe” which rushed “heedless on to war.”26 Women’s enfranchisement was a
vital issue for Pankhurst, not only because she supported universal suffrage regardless of class or
sex, but because she believed that women’s inclusion in the political system would have resulted
in the war’s end or at least lessened its impact.27
Not only was the war a symptom of women’s political exclusion, stressed Pankhurst, but
women in particular were harmed by war. After witnessing the departure of Dublin reservists,
she described the weeping women who as mothers, sisters and wives had to “bear the harder part
of suffering without the excitement and adventure” that allowed male soldiers to continue
fighting.28 In 1915 feminist activists also considered peace and war to be important concerns for
women and thus convened an International Congress of Women at The Hague. It was at this
24
Smith, The British Women’s Suffrage Campaign, 1866-1928, 76–78.
25
Andrew Flinn, “‘Mothers for Peace’, Co-Operation, Feminism and Peace: The Women’s Co-Operative Guild and
the Anti-War Movement between the Wars,” in Consumerism and the Co-Operative Movement in Modern British
History: Taking Stock, ed. Nicole Robertson and Lawrence Black (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009),
144.
26
E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Going to War: What Women Can Do,” Woman’s Dreadnought, August 8, 1914.
27
As a suffrage campaigner Pankhurst advocated for universal suffrage regardless of sex or class as there were still
restrictions that prevented some men from voting. In 1918 suffrage for most men over the age of 18 and limited
suffrage for women based on age and property was established. For more on electoral reform and how it affected
electoral politics and notions of citizenship see Laura Mayhall, The Militant Suffrage Movement: Citizenship and
Resistance in Britain, 1860-1930 (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); Martin Pugh, Electoral
Reform in War and Peace, 1906-18 (London; Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978); Duncan Tanner, Political
Change and the Labour Party, 1900-1918 (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
28
Ibid.
11
Congress that the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom was established. 29
Though the British government refused to grant passports and permits to the proposed British
delegation, Pankhurst ensured that the resolutions of the Congress reached British women
through the pages of her paper. The first resolution was an echo of Pankhurst’s own views about
the war. It stated that women could not be protected under the conditions of modern warfare and
it protested vehemently “against the odious wrongs of which women are the victims in the time
of war, and especially against the horrible violation of women which attends all war.”30 In
subsequent articles in the Woman’s Dreadnought, Pankhurst underscored the violation of women
due to war, publishing stories that described the suffering of individual British women married to
military men. Women married to aliens, particularly Germans, had their houses ransacked and
their families seized and placed in internment camps.31 The government’s lack of financial
support during the war forced women to seek charity in order to feed their children. Pankhurst
was outraged by this lack of support and compared enlistment in the army to slavery which
bound the entire family of enlisted men.32 Highlighting the suffering of women as noncombatants and wartime workers, Pankhurst contended that women suffered as much if not more
than the men fighting on the front lines of the conflict.
29
Vellacott, “A Place for Pacifism and Transnationalism in Feminist Theory,” 29.
30
“A Call to the Women of All Nations”, Workers’ Dreadnought, April 24, 1915; E. Sylvia Pankhurst,
“International Congress of Women”, Woman’s Dreadnought, May 8, 1915.
31
E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Let Us Not Be Cowards,” Woman’s Dreadnought, May 8, 1915; E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “The
Shame of War!,” Woman’s Dreadnought, December 30, 1916.
32
E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Slavery,” Woman’s Dreadnought, September 23, 1916; E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “The Shame of
War!” Woman’s Dreadnought, December 30, 1916; E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Justice,” Woman’s Dreadnought,
September 23, 1916.
12
While she opposed the war because of its causes as well as its effects on women,
Pankhurst’s protest of the war also embodied broader ideas about the purpose of pacifism.
Recalling her anti-war stance over a decade after World War One had ended, she described her
beliefs as foregone. She claimed that when the war came she was “inevitably…a pacifist,” and
thus she started work almost immediately to improve the quality of women’s and children’s lives
on the home front and publicly demand an end to the war.33 While Pankhurst labeled herself a
pacifist during and after the war, she questioned the pacifist identity of others. Those who called
themselves pacifists because they believed in an equal peace at end of the war, but maintained
that the war must be fought until Britain won, were not pacifists according to Pankhurst. In her
April 8, 1916 article “What is a Pacifist?” she identified the “true pacifist” as one who, like her,
was a “rebel against the present organisation of society.”34 According to Pankhurst and some
fellow socialists the restructuring of the international system, and the abolition of imperialism
and capitalism in particular, were necessary in order to foster a peaceful future.35 The Russian
Revolution only added to her belief in transformative change brought about through the
“solidarity of the common people.” Pankhurst argued that the Revolution “demonstrated that the
workers can win complete emancipation by the universal strike” while “the War has shown that
modern warfare is so costly and also so slow and cumbrous and hideously dehumanising that the
strike is the only revolutionary weapon which the workers can use successfully.”36 This kind of
33
E. Sylvia Pankhurst to unknown, 10 December 1930, ESPP.
34
E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “What Is A Pacifist?” Woman’s Dreadnought, April 8, 1916.
35
Ceadel, Pacifism in Britain, 1914-1945, 5.
36
E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “A Separate Peace?” Woman’s Dreadnought, June 23, 1917. She maintained this belief
despite the violent nature of the Russian Revolution. Pankhurst was influenced by Leon Trotsky’s pamphlet “War or
Revolution” in which he argued for an end to the European wide “work of mutual annihilation” in order to preserve
the revolutionary energy of socialists. See E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Empire and Nationality” Workerss Dreadnought,
13
political pacifism gained currency more broadly during the Great War as pacifism was no longer
solely expressed in the religious terms that had previously dominated the movement.37 Pankhurst
conceived of more than an ideal world system that would facilitate peace. She also positioned
women who were still fighting against a system of inequality as the ideal fighters in this battle
against oppression.
Women’s duty was twofold according to Pankhurst. Women had a responsibility to
protest the war as well as work toward an alternate system of settling disputes among the
international community without resorting to war. A woman’s sense of maternal devotion was
needed to further the pacifist mission and enable the success of the peace movement. In
addressing her fellow women pacifists, Pankhurst argued that “we Pacifists must be still more
constant, still more zealous in our propaganda, devoting every available moment to spreading the
Peace ideal.”38 At the first Council meeting of the British section of the Women’s International
League for Peace and Freedom, Pankhurst was elected to the executive committee along with
other influential members of the women’s suffrage movement such as Kathleen Courtney,
Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence and Helena Swanwick.39 The manifesto written at meeting opened
June 1, 1918. Pankhurst also viewed the violence of the Revolution largely as a product of “anti-Bolshevik
Russians” engaged in a “reactionary fight” to regain control of the government. See E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “League of
Nations” Workers’ Dreadnought, January 1, 1919.
37
Ceadel, Pacifism in Britain, 1914-1945, 17, 34.
38
E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “We All Want Peace,” Woman’s Dreadnought, January 13, 1917.
39
Kathleen Courtney (1878-1974) was a member of the non-militant suffrage movement and was an active peace
campaigner, who was, for instance, very involved in the British Women’s Peace Crusade after 1916. Courtney was
awarded the United Nations Peace Medal in 1972. Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence (1867-1954) served as treasurer of
the Women’s Social and Political Union, the militant suffrage organization, and was very influential in the
organization until Emmeline and her husband Frederick Pethick-Lawrence were ousted from the organization in
1912. Pethick-Lawrence continued to work for feminist and international organizations through the interwar period.
She served as the treasurer of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, an international feminist
and anti-war organization, from 1915 to 1922 and president of the Women’s Freedom League from 1926-1935.
Helena Swanwick (1864-1939) joined a suffrage society affiliated with the non-militant National Union of Women’s
14
with the line: “Upon women as non-combatants, lies a special responsibility at the present time
for giving expression to the revolt of the modern mind of humanity against war.”40 Though the
government and politicians called on women to take on war service, Pankhurst and the
organization that she led, the Workers’ Suffrage Federation, considered it to be their wartime
duty “to work for peace and to endeavor to minimize…the havoc wrought by war.”41 She also
urged women to abandon their work producing munitions and instead become advocates for
peace, calling for an end to the bombings and other wartime uses of the weapons they were
working to produce.42
Additionally, Pankhurst stressed that it was not enough for women simply to oppose war.
Women needed to contribute to the creation of a new system of settling international disputes
without military conflict. In keeping with this, the International Congress of Women at The
Hague did not discuss conventions of warfare. The primary goals of the convention were to “find
some means other than war of settling disputes” and ensure that women had an “equal part with
men on a democratic basis in settling international affairs.”43 Pankhurst’s conception of women’s
Suffrage Societies in 1905 but split from the organization over the NUWSS’s pro-war stance after the outbreak of
WWI. Throughout WWI and the interwar period Swanwick was very involved in the peace movement and served on
the executive of the Union of Democratic Control and was a chairman of the Women’s International League for
Peace and Freedom.
40
E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “The Women’s International League,” Woman’s Dreadnought, October 9, 1915.
41
E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “The Woman’s Cause is Man’s,” Woman’s Dreadnought, July 22, 1916.
42
E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Swashbuckling!” Woman’s Dreadnought, December 23, 1916; E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “A
Separate Peace?” Woman’s Dreadnought, June 23, 1917. For more on women munitions workers in Britain during
WWI see Deborah Thom, Nice Girls and Rude Girls: Women Workers in World War I (London; New York: St.
Martin’s Press, 1998).
43
E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “The War Cure,” Woman’s Dreadnought, October 3, 1914; E. Sylvia Pankhurst,
“International Congress of Women,” Woman’s Dreadnought, May 8, 1915.
15
duties during and after the war – to oppose war and foster the creation of a new international
system – was echoed in the aims of the Congress despite her absence.
As the war progressed, Pankhurst continued to advocate for its speedy resolution. As the
revolutionary Russian government sought to negotiate a separate peace with Germany, Pankhurst
demonstrated her support for the proposed Russian peace terms of no annexations and no
indemnities.44 Even after Russia reached a peace agreement with the Central Powers at BrestLitovsk on March 3, 1918, Pankhurst continued to support Russian peace terms. She voiced her
support despite the fact that the Bolshevik separate peace would undermine a united Allied
victory and hinder the British peace movement as it allowed Germany the opportunity to launch
a western offensive which effectively put an end to hopes that an immediate peace was imminent
for Britain and it allies.45 Pankhurst renewed her support for the terms of no annexations and no
indemnities as the Allies began to discuss the sort of peace terms that would be imposed on
Germany and the other Central Powers. Believing that the German people should have the right
to determine their own government in the wake of the First World War, she argued that in
addition to her previously stated peace terms the “rights of peoples to decide their own
destinies,” the creation of an “international Federation of Socialist Republics,” and an
international meeting of workers, should also be guaranteed.46 Pankhurst criticized the Paris
Peace Conference proposals for falling fall short of her recommended terms and for continuing a
legacy of secret diplomacy that ultimately benefitted the Great Powers. She believed that Jan
44
E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “A Separate Peace?” Woman’s Dreadnought, June 23, 1917; E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “How to
Secure Peace,” Workers’ Dreadnought, January 5, 1918.
45
Ceadel, Semi-Detached Idealists, 233.
46
E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Peace!” October 12, 1918; E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Peace Coming? Where is the Labour
Party?” Workers’ Dreadnought, November 2, 1918.
16
Smuts’s proposal of enforcement through commercial boycott and military action against the
aggressor nation would lead to another war.47 Pankhurst also criticized the League of Nations,
which she termed “the Capitalist League of Nations,” because she contended that it was “a
League of powerful Governments to control the world as they please.” She disagreed with the
establishment of the mandate system as well, reasoning that the powerful nations would hinder
the development of socialism in their mandatory territories.48 Not only did the peace terms
ensure a capitalist supremacy, claimed Pankhurst, they ensured that foreign policy would
continue to be determined by “the self same clique” which brought Britain into the war.49
Though a new international system was established in the form of the League of Nations, this
was not enough for Pankhurst, whose pacifism was rooted in the belief that the entire system of
power needed to be overthrown, preferably through a socialist revolution.50
Pankhurst continually advocated for women’s presence in politics and often used the war
to justify this inclusion. Without women, she argued, the international system would remain
unchanged, and it would only be a matter of time before another war was fought over material
47
E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “The League of Nations,” Workers’ Dreadnought, January 18, 1919. For more on Smuts’s
proposal for a League of Nations see George Curry, “Woodrow Wilson, Jan Smuts, and the Versailles Settlement,”
The American Historical Review 66, no. 4 (July 1, 1961): 968–86, doi:10.2307/1845866; Erez Manela, The
Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (Oxford; New
York: Oxford University Press, 2007); Mark Mazower, No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the
Ideological Origins of the United Nations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 40–42.
48
E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “The League of Capitalism,” Workers’ Dreadnought, February 22, 1919. For more on
mandates and specifically women’s involvement in the mandate system see Susan Pedersen, “The Meaning of the
Mandates System: An Argument,” Geschichte Und Gesellschaft 32, no. 4 (October 1, 2006): 560–82; Susan
Pedersen, “Metaphors of the Schoolroom: Women Working the Mandates System of the League of Nations,”
History Workshop Journal 66, no. 1 (2008): 188–207.
49
E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “A Robbers’ Peace, Attempt to Enslave German Workers,” Workers’ Dreadnought, May 17,
1919.
50
Not all of those on the Left shared the same opinion of the League, however. For an analysis of how the League of
Nations was viewed by various parties and political organizations in Britain see Helen McCarthy, The British People
and the League of Nations: Democracy, Citizenship and Internationalism C. 1918-45 (Manchester; New York:
Distributed in the U.S. exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 46–70.
17
gain and Great Power politics. Her opposition to the war and her work to draw attention to how
war negatively affected members of society outside of the trenches extended to her critique of
the peace settlement. The terms negotiated at the Paris Peace Conference failed to challenge the
system that, according to Pankhurst, initially brought Europe into the Great War. Pankhurst was
disappointed in the terms of the peace settlement and in women’s wartime peace activism. In her
editorial “We Did Not Stop It” she described a profound guilt for not preventing or ending the
war. Pankhurst was particularly taken by the accusations Andreas Latzko made against women in
his book Men In War.51 Latzko recalled his experiences in the war and criticized women for not
doing more to end the war. He pointed to the militancy and level of activism of women in the
suffrage movement and questioned whether such activism could have been employed by women
either to prevent or stop the war far sooner than it was. Responding to his assessment Pankhurst
agreed that women could have done more in the campaign for peace, and commented on the
unpopularity of the movement stating that, “yes, women endured torture for the franchise; but,
then, votes for women were the fashion.”52 Pankhurst concurred with his criticism, further
conceding that “women, who were to make all wars impossible; women, self-advertised as the
beings who would save mankind by bringing the spirit of tender motherhood into politics” had
failed to achieve any of these goals.53 Throughout the war, Pankhurst attached her hopes to the
possibilities and power of women’s peace activism, but at the war’s end she made it clear that
her high expectations remained unmet.
51
Andreas Latzko (1867-1943) was an Austro-Hungarian writer, playwright and journalist who served in WWI as
an officer in the Austrian army. His book Men In War was reviewed in major publications such as the New York
Times, the New York Sun, the Chicago Daily Tribune, shortly after it was translated into English in 1918. Andreas
Latzko, Men in War, trans. Adele Szold Seltzer (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1918).
52
Pankhurst, “We Did Not Stop It,” Workers’ Dreadnought, December 7, 1918.
53
Ibid.
18
The modern British peace movement began with the Great War, but it was not united by
a clear doctrine. Instead, pacifism remained individually conceived along religious, political, or
humanitarian lines.54 Pankhurst’s commitment to a socialist inspired pacifism, which
incorporated women as the ideal agents of peace, is one example of this. In keeping with socialist
critiques of the war, Pankhurst viewed capitalism and imperialism, and the Great Power rivalries
they created, as the primary causes of the war. Pankhurst also maintained that women’s
exclusion from the political system contributed to the outbreak of war, and she saw women’s
political participation as the logical solution not only to putting an end to the current war but as a
means of preventing any future wars. Women’s activism and socialism now bore Pankhurst’s
hopes for a peaceful future, and in the aftermath of the Great War, the growing threat to
socialism and women’s rights was fascism.
54
Ceadel, Pacifism in Britain, 1914-1945, 17, 31.
19
CHAPTER III
THE MENACE OF FASCISM
In the immediate aftermath of WWI, Pankhurst focused on socialism. From 1918 until
1924 when it ceased publication, her paper the Workers’ Dreadnought was filled with articles
supporting the Bolshevik revolution, communism, and socialism even though she was expelled
from the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1921 after she refused to turn over the Workers’
Dreadnought to Party control. Benito Mussolini’s March on Rome in 1922 marked the beginning
of the rise of fascist governments in Europe. Pankhurst’s disillusionment with organized
Communism and the Communist revolution in Russia was furthered by Mussolini’s recognition
of the Soviet Government.55 Pankhurst’s opposition to fascism first appeared in the Workers’
Dreadnought in the same year that witnessed Mussolini’s ascent to power and was expressed in
communist terms.56 Her critique of fascism became broader and more severe, however, when
confronted with the rise of Hitler, the Italian invasion of Abyssinia, and the outbreak of the
Spanish Civil War.
While many people, including British politicians, demonstrated ambivalence in regard to
fascism in the interwar period, Pankhurst’s views of fascism were consistently negative. In the
first years of her opposition, Pankhurst conceptualized fascism as a product of capitalism. “Let
55
E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Our View,” Workers’ Dreadnought, February 9, 1923.
56
Those who subscribed to this conception of fascism understood it as an agent of capitalism and the bourgeoisie.
This interpretation of fascism (including German National Socialism) was formally adopted by the Third
International in 1924. For an analysis of this interpretation of fascism see Payne, A History of Fascism, 1914-1945,
443–444. Pankhurst’s opposition to fascism was also influenced by Silvio Corio, her Italian partner and father to her
son Richard, who routinely published articles about Italian fascism in the New Times and Ethiopia News. Pankhurst,
Sylvia Pankhurst, Artist and Crusader, 185.
20
there be no mistake,” she declared in 1922, “Fascism is an international menace…the White
Terror of modern Capitalism.” She went on to explain that fascist organizing was “based on the
conditions of modern industrial society.”57 Pankhurst reflected on the rise of Italian fascism in
the wake of the March on Rome calling Mussolini “the renegade ex-socialist who deserted the
Party to join the Jingoes in the war…supplied with funds by the great industrial employers of
Italy.”58 This idea of fascism as linked to industrialism, and more importantly capitalism, was a
common feature of Pankhurst’s articles about fascism in the Workers’ Dreadnought.
Refusing to accept the Daily Herald’s stance that fascism presented no threat to the
international community, Pankhurst urged people to recognize the dangers of fascism. As the
Italian fascist government began enacting new laws, Pankhurst repeatedly tried to convince her
readers that fascism spelled destruction for socialism and workers’ rights in Italy. She opposed
the idea put forth by the Daily Herald’s editor Hamilton Fyfe that fascism was a mild form of
socialism, arguing that the position of fascism was clear. It stood for “aggressive and oppressive
industrial Capitalism.”59 After the Italian government lowered wages and increased the working
hours of railway workers, Pankhurst highlighted this new policy as just one more way in which
fascism fostered the oppression of workers.60 Pankhurst also contended that the rise of fascism
was linked to socialism, specifically to its failure. In a 1923 editorial she argued that “the
Socialists, having failed to make good their promise to create a new society,” opened the way
57
E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “The Fascisti Menace,” Workers’ Dreadnought, November 11, 1922.
58
E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “The Truth About the Fascisti,” Workers’ Dreadnought, November 4, 1922.
59
E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Our Views,” Workers’ Dreadnought, June 28, 1923.
60
E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Our View,” Workers’ Dreadnought, March 10, 1923.
21
“for Fascism to rebuild the old.”61 As the fascist government worked to secure its power in Italy,
Pankhurst became less concerned with socialists’ culpability in its rise and instead demonstrated
a concern that she was the only journalist in Britain aware of the dangers of fascism.
Pankhurst had strong opinions about the ills of fascism, but was concerned that neither
the government nor her old allies shared them. Pankhurst was particularly skeptical of Prime
Minister Bonar Law’s willingness to continue diplomatic relations with Italy after the fascist
seizure of power.62 She criticized Law for having “entered into cordial relations with the Fascisti
Government, without any hint of refusal to recognise it as constitutional.”63 For Pankhurst, this
represented a sharp departure from the attitude of the British government when faced with
another revolution, in Russia. After posing the question why was there such a different reception
in Britain to the Russian Revolution and the revolution of Mussolini in Italy, she answered that
“the Russian Revolution was a menace to Capitalism,” while the fascist revolution was a
“support to it and a ruthless attack upon the working class.”64 Once again Pankhurst emphasized
British acceptance of fascism, despite its status as a foreign ideology.
Pankhurst was disappointed not only in the British government’s acceptance of fascism
but also in the support of suffragists, specifically the International Women’s Suffrage Alliance,
for fascist leadership.65 She underscored her disapproval of the decision of the IWSA to contact
61
E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Our View,” Workers’ Dreadnought, November 3, 1923.
62
As Prime Minister Bonar Law met with Benito Mussolini,, Raymond Poincaré, and Georges Theunis in London in
December of 1922 in an attempt to resolve the problem of French aggression as a response to Germany’s default on
its war reparations. See R. J. Q. Adams, Bonar Law (London: John Murray, 1999), 384; Andrew Taylor, Bonar Law
(London: Haus, 2006), 121–122, 158.
63
E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “The Fascisti Menace,” Workers’ Dreadnought, November 11, 1922.
64
E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “The Outlook,” Workers’ Dreadnought, November 11, 1922.
65
The IWSA was founded in Berlin in 1904, though for most of its existence it was headquartered in London. The
first president of the organization was Carrie Chapman Catt, the head of the National American Woman Suffrage
22
Mussolini during its annual congress in Rome. Describing this decision in the Workers’
Dreadnought Pankhurst denounced the organization for disgracing itself “by asking the brigand
Mussolini to receive a deputation of its members.”66 Pankhurst leveled criticism at the IWSA
after the conference took place. As a preface to her main critique she stated that IWSA “has long
been representative of the more backward elements in the feminist movement” and was
becoming obsolete because it still focused on Parliamentarism while the “most forward
movements” tended to “reach out towards the Soviets.”67 This, however, was not the most
grievous error of the IWSA. The organization appointed Mussolini president of its annual
congress in Rome thereby achieving “a dishonourable notoriety” according to Pankhurst. Not
surprisingly, Pankhurst added, “in addressing the Conference, the dictator showed
himself…opposed to everything for which the pioneers of the women’s movement stood.”68
Once again Pankhurst found herself expressing an opinion in direct opposition to her former
suffrage colleagues, but just as with her opposition to the First World War, this did not alter her
views or her willingness to express them.
Pankhurst’s willingness to voice dissent perhaps contributed to her severe criticism of the
fascist government’s suppression of opposition in Italy. In particular, Pankhurst highlighted the
government’s targeted intimidation of communists and socialists, including those who still held
political office. These opposition groups were often the victims of violent crimes and arrested
Association, who served until 1923. From 1923 to 1946 Margery Corbett Ashby of Britain served as president.
Other British members included Millicent Fawcett, president of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies,
Virginia Crawford, Mary Sheepshanks, and Ethel Snowden.
66
E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Our View,” Workers’ Dreadnought, March 3, 1923.
67
E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Our View,” Workers’ Dreadnought, May 26, 1923.
68
Ibid.
23
while Italian Fascisti were pardoned after committing those very crimes.69 In an editorial
Pankhurst also detailed how Italian Socialist MPs were subjected to physical abuse and police
raids, despite the fact that they had been democratically elected.70 Italian Fascisti also threatened
a freedom close to Pankhurst’s heart. In an attempt to further stifle opposition, the government’s
fascist squads destroyed the printing presses of their rivals and government officials were given
final approval of the appointment of newspaper editors, which enabled them to censor
dissenters.71 Pankhurst’s critique of fascism went beyond unsavory election tactics such as the
intimidation of voters at the ballot box in order to ensure a fascist victory. She was emphatic that
violence was integral to fascism.72 After witnessing Hitler’s rise to power in Germany over ten
years after the Fascist party took power in Italy, Pankhurst contended that “every impartial
person who has studied Fascist and Nazi history and doctrine knows that its main feature is the
violent elimination of opposition and the literal extermination of opponents who refuse to be
silenced.”73 Violent suppression of opponents was therefore not unique to Germany or Italy but
would occur wherever fascism took hold, according to Pankhurst, and therefore it could not be
tolerated.
69
E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Our View,” Workers’ Dreadnought, December 9, 1922.
70
E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Our View,” Workers’ Dreadnought, February 17, 1923.
71
E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “The Truth About the Fascisti,” Workers’ Dreadnought, November 4, 1922; E. Sylvia
Pankhurst, “Our View,” Workers’ Dreadnought, July 21, 1923; E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Our View,” Workers’
Dreadnought, December 22, 1923. For more on Italian Fascism see Alexander De Grand, Italian Fascism : Its
Origins & Development, 3rd ed. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000).
72
“Fascist Election Methods,” Workers’ Dreadnought, May 3, 1924.
73
E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Ras Imru In Chains,” New Times and Ethiopia News, February 6, 1937. For more on how
violence was inherent in fascist governments see E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Our View,” Workers’ Dreadnought,
November 3, 1923. For two influential accounts of the rise of the Nazis see Anthony Nicholls, Weimar and the Rise
of Hitler, 4th ed. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000); Conan Fischer, The Rise of the Nazis, 2nd ed.
(Manchester ;New York: Distributed exclusively in the USA by Palgrave, 2002). For an influential work on the
Nazis in power see Ian Kershaw, The Nazi Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation, 4th ed.
(London: Arnold, 2000).
24
Pankhurst continued to dedicate herself to exposing the truth behind male-dominated
bellicose regimes and called attention to the harmful effects that war had on women by applying
these same critiques to militaristic fascist regimes. Even before Italy and Germany threatened the
peace of Europe, Pankhurst’s opposition to their fascist governments was linked to the pacifist
beliefs that she expressed during the Great War. Once again her opposition was influenced by
her political viewpoint and concern about the status of women. While the terms of her
commitment to peace were modified as Pankhurst reevaluated her politics when confronted with
a changing political landscape, certain core beliefs remained.
In October of 1935, after months marked by border skirmishes and Ethiopian appeals for
League of Nations intervention, fascist Italy invaded Ethiopia.74 Pankhurst immediately opposed
the Italian invasion and from the publication of the first issue of her newspaper the New Times
and Ethiopia News in London in May 1936, she worked to publicize the Ethiopian cause and win
over British public support. She viewed the Italian invasion as a violation of the principles the
League of Nations established in order to prevent another war and allow nations to determine
their own government. In the first years after the Italian invasion Pankhurst continued to pressure
the British public and the British government to take steps in support of Ethiopia. In addition to
seeing the League as the best hope for providing an international solution to the fascist advance
in Ethiopia, through the idea of collective security and the economic sanctions enshrined within
the League Covenant, Pankhurst argued that the British government also had an important role to
74
For more on this period of Ethiopian history see Saheed Adejumobi, The History of Ethiopia (Westport, Conn.:
Greenwood Press, 2007); Alberto Sbacchi, Legacy of Bitterness: Ethiopia and Fascist Italy, 1935-1941
(Lawrenceville, NJ: Red Sea Press, 1997); Bahru Zewde, A History of Modern Ethiopia, 1855-1991, 2nd ed.
(Oxford: Addis Ababa University Press, 2001).
25
play.75 Under no circumstances, according to Pankhurst, should the British government
recognize the Italian seizure of Ethiopia. She commended those countries that first declared they
would not recognize the Italian conquest writing that “these honourable Powers may spur the
Great Powers to save the League from destruction and humanity from a Fascist world war.”76
Pankhurst continually reminded her readers that the fight was not over, that despite lack of
interest shown by the rest of the British press and the government in the years after the conquest
began, Ethiopians continued to fight for the independence of their country.77 For Pankhurst the
decision to support Ethiopians in their continued struggle against Italian fascist invaders was
based on her support of the League Covenant as well as the maintenance of an international
peace. She felt that such a stance should be readily adopted by the British people and the
international community. In an article in the New Times and Ethiopia News she wrote that the
“duty of all honest people” was clear because the “violations of Fascism—the arch-promoter of
dissension, violence and civil war” occurred before the invasion of Ethiopia and would continue
to mount until fascism was defeated.78 The injustice and violations caused by fascism would not
be limited to Ethiopia as Pankhurst saw this crisis as larger than Ethiopia.
75
E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Our Policy,” New Times and Ethiopia News, May 5, 1936; E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Call for
Justice,” New Times and Ethiopia News, June 13, 1936; E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “The Great Powers Betrayed Us,” New
Times and Ethiopia News, July 11, 1936; E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “The Fight for Justice,” New Times and Ethiopia
News, July 4, 1936. For a historiographical review of scholarship on the League see Susan Pedersen, “Back to the
League of Nations,” The American Historical Review 112, no. 4 (October 1, 2007): 1091–1117,
doi:10.2307/40008445.
76
E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Italy’s Aggression Must Be Defeated,” New Times and Ethiopia News, May 16, 1936. See
also E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “This Betrayal Must Not Stand,” New Times and Ethiopia News, June 27, 1936.
77
For example see E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Italy’s Aggression Must Be Defeated,” New Times and Ethiopia News,
May 16, 1936; E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Plain Truth,” New Times and Ethiopia News, October 24, 1936; E. Sylvia
Pankhurst, “Guns Against Gibraltar,” New Times and Ethiopia News, July 24, 1937; E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Britain –
Whither?” New Times and Ethiopia News, March 19, 1938; E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “An Urgent Plea For a Change of
Policy,” New Times and Ethiopia News, December 10, 1939.
78
E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Not for C3 Men,” New Times and Ethiopia News, September 5, 1936.
26
A central argument as to why governments and people should act to stop fascism,
reasoned Pankhurst, was that it was an insidious and dangerous disease that threatened world
democracy. Not only did she link Italian fascism to Hitler’s rise to power and the Nazi
movement, but she also linked the Italian invasion of Ethiopia to the Spanish Civil War.79 Not
only had Ethiopia and Spain been “sacrificed to the god of war,” that sacrifice was in vain.80
Pankhurst lamented that “the horrors which are suffered in Ethiopia and Spain to-day may at any
time break upon any and every other country, for the peace of the world is broken, and none can
tell how fast or how far the breach will spread.”81 Fascism was not just threatening because it
was spreading throughout Europe and Africa, Pankhurst warned that fascism would plunge the
world into another global war.
From the first issue of the New Times and Ethiopia News published May 5, 1936, the
motto of the paper was “Remember: Everywhere, Always, Fascism Means War.”82 Pankhurst
emphatically and repeatedly stated that the recognition of the conquest of Ethiopia would not
lead to a lasting world peace. She called attention to statements made by Mussolini which
highlighted the futility of this policy, citing a speech he made in Milan in which he
“categorically denounced” what he called “‘the three great illusions of post-war Europe’ –
disarmament, collective security, and indivisible peace.” She beseeched her readers to “recognise
clearly that the Fascist Dictatorships ever since they rose to power have striven ceaselessly to
79
“Fascists Versus Nazis,” ESPP.
80
E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Not Universal,” New Times and Ethiopia News, October 10, 1936; E. Sylvia Pankhurst,
“Fascism As It Is,” New Times and Ethiopia News, December 19, 1936.
81
E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “The Grave International Situation,” New Times and Ethiopia News, November 28, 1936.
82
Though the paper was printed with the publication day of May 9, 1936 the first issue of the paper was published
on May 5, 1936. Richard Pankhurst, “Sylvia and New Times and Ethiopia News,” in Sylvia Pankhurst: From Artist
to Anti-Fascist, ed. Richard Pankhurst and Ian Bullock, 1992, 155.
27
frustrate these ideals.”83 Labeling fascism “the great war menace” Pankhurst drew a sharp
distinction between the contemporary international situation and the period before the First
World War.84 This time, however, it was clear that war was on the horizon. While she herself
worked to maintain peace in hopes of avoiding another war she contended that:
our desire that Europe shall be spared the horror of another great war must not blind us to
the fact that forces over which we have no control are rapidly making for war. Many of
those mainly responsible for the conduct of New Times and Ethiopia News already more
than a long decade ago held and exposed the view that Fascism would lead to war. The
contention, alas, has proved correct.85
In the wake of the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, Pankhurst argued, no one could deny that fascism
was putting the world on the path of war.
The memory of the Great War and its devastating effects resonated in Pankhurst’s
writing. Echoing arguments that she had made about women’s suffering during the Great War,
Pankhurst proclaimed that “war is the inferno of women, and under Fascism the State is
perpetually at civil war!”86 She highlighted the role of Ethiopian women as combatants in the
face of fascism arguing that the “resistance of the people is so desperate that even the women
have taken up arms to repel the invaders.”87 It was not, however, as combatants that Ethiopian
women suffered most during Italian occupation. Women were the victims of poison gas attacks,
bombings, and sexual assaults.88 According to Pankhurst, there were widespread reports of
83
E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Britain, Fascism and the League,” New Times and Ethiopia News, November 7, 1936. See
also E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Ethiopia and the World: The Next Steps,” New Times and Ethiopia News, July 25, 1936.
84
“Fascism Today,” ca. 1935, ESPP.
85
E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “The Urgent Duty of Democracy,” New Times and Ethiopia News, June 13, 1936.
86
E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Fascism As It Is,” New Times and Ethiopia News, November 28, 1936.
87
E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “International Law,” New Times and Ethiopia News, August 24, 1936.
88
E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Urgently We Ask Your Assistance,” New Times and Ethiopia News, August 15, 1936; E.
Sylvia Pankhurst, “Ethiopia Wins Her Seat,” New Times and Ethiopia News, October 3, 1936.
28
Ethiopian women being forced into prostitution for the benefit of Italian troops.89 She wrote that
the Italian fascist government had committed crimes against the people of Ethiopia, “above all
against the women, whom, from the poorest labourers’ wives and daughters to the most sheltered
ladies in the land…[were] requisitioned like cattle for the use of [Italy’s] Blackshirt troops.”90 In
the November 21, 1936, issue of the New Times and Ethiopia News Pankhurst published an
account of Italian abuses of Ethiopian women as reported to the Ethiopian Legation in London
by a woman who had recently fled Ethiopia. The woman recounted how Italian treatment of
Ethiopian women had grown progressively worse after the Italians gained control of the capital
Addis Ababa. She stated that “ten or twelve Italian soldiers would get hold of any Ethiopian
woman and abuse her in turn in such a way that many maidens and young women have died as
the result.”91 Pankhurst urged her readers to bring these facts to the attention of all women’s
organizations in order to pressure the British government and the League to take action,
demanding an end to “these atrocities, and especially the hideous maltreatment of women,
through whose most cruel and grievous sufferings two races are brought to shame and sorrow.”
She continued her condemnation of Italian atrocities against women, arguing that using “their
very womanhood as a means of punishment and pain is the deepest indignity which can be
89
E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “The Infamous Anniversary: October 3, 1936,” New Times and Ethiopia News, October 3,
1936; E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Facts – Not Fiction,” New Times and Ethiopia News, February 13, 1937; E. Sylvia
Pankhurst, “The ‘Unjust Betrayal of Abyssinia’, A Conway Hall Meeting,” New Times and Ethiopia News, February
20, 1937. Ethiopian women were exploited by Italian soldiers and bureaucrats even though sexual relations were
prohibited between citizens and subjects; see Charles Burdett, “Journeys to Italian East Africa 1936–1941:
Narratives of Settlement,” Journal of Modern Italian Studies 5, no. 2 (2000): 222,
doi:10.1080/13545710050084359.
90
E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Ethiopia and the League,” New Times and Ethiopia News, September 19, 1936.
91
“An Ethiopian Woman Tells of the Italian Occupation,” New Times and Ethiopia News, November 21, 1936.
29
heaped on the mothers of men.”92 Once again Pankhurst cited the suffering and devastation
experienced by women during war in order to urge the British people and government to put an
end to the war, though now war was taking place in Africa.
In addition to arguing that fascist war harmed women, Pankhurst also highlighted the
dangers inherent in fascism for women in Italy and Germany as well as in war-torn countries
such as Spain and Ethiopia. Fascism, for Pankhurst, threatened the legacy of the women’s
movement in which she had been an active participant. She was deeply concerned that the
achievements of the women’s movement were “menaced on every hand” as women in Italy and
Germany were being forced out of public and professional life which she viewed as “an attempt
to put back the clock so far as women are concerned, and to reduce them to a position of even
greater subjection than that against which Mary Wollestonecraft [sic] issued her historic
‘Vindication of the Rights of Women’ in 1792.”93 Pankhurst took the Italian Fascist Government
further to task, contending that the government only valued women as reproducers of militant
men who would serve and fight for the fascist cause. She also decried women’s lack of
autonomy in the realm of fascist politics and women’s forcible removal from employment as
teachers and other professional positions. At the end of an article Pankhurst published in the New
Times and Ethiopia News, she exclaimed, “alas, poor woman; hers is a wretched position in the
Fascist State!”94 Furthermore, Pankhurst criticized the Italian penal codes enacted by the Fascist
Government in 1929, which she viewed as placing “women in a position of extreme legal
92
E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Grave News from Abyssinia,” New Times and Ethiopia News, November 21, 1936.
93
“What the Suffragettes Should Do,” ESPP. Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) was an advocate of women’s rights
and an author who was considered to be one of the leading heroines of the feminist movement by Pankhurst and her
contemporaries.
94
E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Fascism As It Is,” New Times & Ethiopia News, November 21, 1936.
30
inferiority towards men in every relationship affected by the law.”95 For Pankhurst then, Nazism
and fascism presented a threat to all of the achievements of the women’s movement and she felt
that women should work against them. Under fascist regimes women were once again subjugated
and therefore, urged Pankhurst, they “must again raise the cry which we heard in the Suffragette
Movement: ‘It’s women for women now,’” and do everything in their power to “save these
sisters of ours.”96 The male-dominated fascist regimes, like the bellicose Great Power
governments of the First World War, were extremely detrimental to the well-being and status of
women.
Pankhurst evoked women’s experiences of war, both in Ethiopia and in Britain, as well as
the denial of women’s rights under fascism in order to persuade women to act. As was the case
when confronted with the outbreak of the Great War, she viewed women’s absence from
international politics as one of the reasons that international peace had been violated and would
continue to be threatened.97 Pankhurst wrote, “In view of this danger, I utter the strongest appeal
I can to women: ROUSE YOURSELVES AGAINST FASCISM…it certainly means war.”98 She
also invoked the legacy of the suffrage movement to inspire women to act to prevent war.
Pankhurst argued that opposing fascism and maintaining peace was a cause “worthy of all the
95
E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Fascism As It Is,” New Times & Ethiopia News, November 28, 1936. In this article
Pankhurst discusses both the terms of the Lateran Accords between the Vatican and Italy as well as changes enacted
in the Italian penal codes, though many were put into effect not in 1929 but in 1931. For more on how this treaty and
penal codes effected Italian women see Victoria De Grazia, How Fascism Ruled Women: Italy, 1922-1945
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 55, 58, 88–91, 137; Perry Willson, The Clockwork Factory:
Women and Work in Fascist Italy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 4; Alexander De Grand, “Women under Italian
Fascism,” The Historical Journal 19, no. 4 (December 1, 1976): 956–959.
96
“The Last Fifty Years,” ESPP. Not all feminists shared Pankhurst’s assessment of fascism. Some even looked to
fascist organizations and their militancy as a continuation of the legacy of the suffrage movement. For more on
British women, and feminists’ involvement with fascism see Gottlieb, Feminine Fascism.
97
Ibid.
98
“What the Suffragettes Should Do,” ESPP.
31
fire and more which the Suffragettes expended in their struggle for the vote.”99 Furthermore, she
felt that women were better suited to be pacifist activists than men because “the most untutored
woman knows in the depths of her heart that war is war, whether the people who are massacred
live in Europe or Africa.”100 In order to end this war in Africa, women needed to “act nationally
and internationally…and take a leaf out of the book of the suffragette, by making themselves felt
in a public way.”101 In particular Pankhurst called on international women’s organizations to take
action to mobilize international opinion by calling attention to “atrocities perpetuated upon these
sisters of ours in Ethiopia.”102 Additionally, she reasoned that women’s organizations should not
be concerned about becoming involved in controversial issues, because there were long-standing
precedents for this. Just as American leaders of the women’s movement such as Lucy Stone and
Lucretia Mott worked to end slavery so, urged Pankhurst, “we of to-day…must recognise our
clamant duty to support the women of Ethiopia against this outrage.”103 Fascism threatened
women’s rights and the legacy of the suffrage movement. For these reasons, as well as because
she saw women as particularly suited to pacifist activism, Pankhurst conceived of women as
ideal agents of anti-fascism.
99
Ibid.
100
E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Women Can Stop War—and Must!” Daily Mirror, October 11, 1935.
101
Ibid.
102
E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “The Certainty of Hope,” New Times and Ethiopia News, January 30, 1937.
103
Ibid. Pankhurst was not the only one to call attention to slavery, historic or otherwise, in order to support her
case. Some members of the Anti-Slavery Society supported Italian rule in Ethiopia. They reasoned that the
outlawing of slavery by the Italians in order to put an end to the practice of slavery that continued under the rule of
Emperor Haile Selassie was ample justification for supporting Italian colonial rule. For more on the debates about
slavery in Ethiopia see, Suzanne Miers, Slavery in the Twentieth Century: The Evolution of a Global Pattern
(Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2003); Susan Pennybacker, From Scottsboro to Munich: Race and Political
Culture in 1930s Britain (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2009).
32
After almost two years of Italian occupation in Ethiopia, the cause Pankhurst worked so
hard to promote was fading from the headlines of British newspapers and agendas of government
ministers and diplomats.104 Increasingly the matter was considered settled. It was during this
period that Pankhurst continued to push for the enforcement of the League of Nations Covenant
in order to prevent war, but also acknowledged that violent resistance was one of the only
options remaining for Ethiopians. In March of 1937, she described the armed resistance of
Ethiopians as “unwilling violence performed with amazing courage.”105 Pankhurst continued: “to
us it is sorrow, deep and abiding, to write thus of war and to confess, with grief, that Ethiopia in
the sad present can look for the preservation of her existence only to her own fortitude.”106 While
she disapproved of military intervention and the use of force by the international community,
Pankhurst began to realize that those living under fascist dictatorship or under fascist occupation
were running out of options.
As the twin challenges of fascism and war confronted the world community, Pankhurst
persisted in her advocacy for peace and women’s rights. Viewing fascism as intrinsically warlike
she rearticulated her pacifist beliefs in order to incorporate her anti-fascism, allowing for violent
104
This lack of interest was pervasive despite the impassioned speeches the Emperor of Ethiopia, Haile Selassie,
delivered to the League of Nations as the representative of a member state. The most prominent speech made by
Selassie was delivered to the League in June of 1936, after which he was named Time magazine’s Man of the Year.
See Adejumobi, The History of Ethiopia, 53–92. The Emperor also spent his exile (1936-1941) in Bath, England.
Upon his arrival in London he was met by a crowd of supporters who included Sylvia Pankhurst. However, though
Pankhurst’s enthusiasm for his cause remained steadfast, his presence failed to sustain the interest and support of
British politicians and their constituents. See Richard Pankhurst, “Emperor Haile Sellassie’s Arrival in Britain: An
Alternative Autobiographical Draft by Percy Arnold,” Northeast African Studies 9, no. 2 (2002): 1–46. There was
sustained interest on the part of Pan-Africanist activists working in London who collaborated with Pankhurst. For
more on Pankhurst’s activism on issues of race see Pennybacker, From Scottsboro to Munich, 81, 88, 90, 103, 152,
200–201. After the war Pankhurst continued her friendship with Emperor Selassie and in 1956 accepted his
invitation to move to Ethiopia where she died in 1960.
105
E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “The Shame and Pity of It All,” New Times and Ethiopia News, March 13, 1937.
106
Ibid.
33
resistance to fascist regimes. Once again, Pankhurst continued her encouragement of women’s
activism by calling on women to oppose fascism, as she saw it threatening the legacy of the
suffrage movement and the gains women achieved as a result of it.107 In doing so she continued
to carve out a space in the peace movement for women activists, which paralleled the role she
saw for women in the context of the First World War. Pankhurst based this prescribed role for
women on the idea that women were natural advocates for peace and as such should work to
secure a lasting peace through international cooperation and involvement in the political system.
The early years of Pankhurst’s opposition to fascism were thus clearly linked to, and a part of,
the individualized pacifism that she developed in the context of the First World War. Her antifascism began to challenge her commitment to mainstream pacifism, however, as Britain headed
down a road that she was convinced would lead to war.
107
For more on women and Italian Fascism and Nazism see De Grazia, How Fascism Ruled Women; Jill
Stephenson, Women in Nazi Society (Routledge, 2013); Jill Stephenson, Women in Nazi Germany (Harlow, England;
New York: Longman, 2001); Claudia Koonz, Mothers in the Fatherland : Women, the Family, and Nazi Politics, 1st
ed. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987).
34
CHAPTER IV
PEACE THROUGH VICTORY
The next phase of Pankhurst’s anti-fascist activism was focused primarily on one aspect
of fascism; the endless war that it would cause. Her socialist critique of fascism became muted
and the pacifist component of her activism became more pronounced. It is during this period that
we see the strength of Pankhurst’s pacifism before she ultimately decided to support the Allies in
the Second World War. Her shift away from the peace movement stemmed from her belief that
wars would continue to occur if fascism continued to exist, rather than an abandonment of her
core values. This shift coincided with the pacifist movement’s loss of most of its members, and
the new commitment of those who stayed to a personal-witness pacifism rather than open antiwar campaigning.108 It was Pankhurst’s desire for peace, however paradoxically, that led to her
support of the war. Pankhurst argued that not only would the fascist governments lead the world
into war, but that in order to create a lasting peace, fascism would have to be overthrown. While
initially she felt this objective could be achieved without the use of force, through the League of
Nations Covenant and the imposition of economic sanctions, when war was declared on
Germany on September 3, 1939, Pankhurst supported the British government’s decision. From
this point on, she conceived of war as both the problem of fascism and the solution to it.
108
Martin Ceadel, “A Legitimate Peace Movement: The Case of Inter-War Britain, 1918-1945,” in Challenge to
Mars: Essays on Pacifism from 1918 to 1945, ed. Peter Brock and Thomas Paul Socknat (Toronto and London:
University of Toronto Press, 1999), 141; Jill Liddington, The Road to Greenham Common: Feminism and AntiMilitarism in Britain since 1820, Syracuse University Press ed. (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1991),
158–161; Andrew Rigby, “The Peace Pledge Union: From Peace to War, 1936-1945,” in Challenge to Mars: Essays
on Pacifism from 1918 to 1945, ed. Peter Brock and Thomas Paul Socknat (Toronto and London: University of
Toronto Press, 1999), 176–177.
35
In the years following Neville Chamberlain’s appointment as Prime Minister, the League
of Nations and the governments of Europe continued to be confronted with the growing
territorial ambitions of Italy, Germany, and Japan. While Chamberlain and his government
attempted to avoid another world war by relying on the policy of appeasement, or granting of
concessions to the would-be belligerent nations, Pankhurst condemned this approach.109 She
argued that the policy would never succeed because it failed to recognize fundamental aspects of
the nature of fascism. For instance, Pankhurst advised that appeasement would not work because
fascist governments could not be trusted. She went so far as to say that “no agreement with
Fascism is worth the paper it is written upon.”110 Pankhurst also contended that an alliance with
one fascist power would not secure peace. After Chamberlain reached an agreement with
Mussolini to recognize the Italian conquest of Ethiopia, Pankhurst wrote scathingly that the
agreement was “a gross betrayal of International Justice and our national honour.” Furthermore,
she announced that it was “a cruel and utterly unjustified blow at Ethiopia who trusted the word
of England.” 111 After highlighting the lack of popular support in Britain for such an agreement,
she returned to the idea that fascist governments could not be trusted, insisting that British
diplomats failed to “realise that Fascism neither keeps engagements nor believes in them.”112
109
For an analysis of the British policies headed by Chamberlain in the lead up to the Second World War and a
definition of appeasement see Williamson Murray, “Britain,” in The Origins of World War Two: The Debate
Continues, ed. Joseph Maiolo and Robert Boyce (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 273–85; Zara Steiner,
The Triumph of the Dark: European International History, 1933-1939 (Oxford; New York: Oxford University
Press, 2011), 329, 604–609, 647–648.
110
E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “The Fight for Justice,” New Times and Ethiopia News, July 4, 1936; see also E. Sylvia
Pankhurst, “Justice Will Triumph Yet,” New Times and Ethiopia News, August 8, 1936.
111
E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Down With the Chamberlain Treaty,” New Times and Ethiopia News, April 23, 1938.
112
Ibid.
36
Pankhurst was also critical of appeasement because she argued that no agreements or
recognition of fascist aggression would prevent fascism from further military action in the future.
According to Pankhurst, the fascist governments were just exploiting Britain’s opposition to war
by “blackmailing us with the threat to make a war in which we ourselves will be involved, unless
we permit them to strangle without interference victim after victim.”113 Furthermore, the idea
that “peace can repose on injustice” was “wholly false” and thus the sacrifice of vulnerable
nations in an attempt to secure a lasting peace would never succeed, counseled Pankhurst. 114
Finally, Pankhurst pointed out the fallacy behind the policy of appeasement, arguing that it
would never prevent war. She argued that there was a fundamental misunderstanding of the term
“peace” in this context, particularly in the wake of the Czechoslovakia crisis.115 Pankhurst urged
the government to recognize that what was being discussed was “‘our British peace,’ for the
peace of the world is not being preserved. It was broken long ago, and now to the three victim
nations, Ethiopia, Spain and China, must be added a fourth–Czechoslovakia.”116 Appeasement,
in other words, had never led, and would never lead to peace.
Pankhurst continually challenged the notion that appeasement was the only means to
avoid war and secure peace, and she offered a range of alternatives to this policy. She maintained
that the question to be debated was not whether Britain should go to war, but rather “whether we
113
E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Pernicious Dictators,” New Times and Ethiopia News, July 17, 1937.
114
E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Shall By-gones Be By-gones?” New Times and Ethiopia News, July 31, 1937.
115
In 1938 Hitler’s territorial ambitions turned to Czechoslovakia. Amid growing demonstrations and pressures
from Germans living in the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia the threat of a German military attack grew and
became a major concern of the governments of Great Britain, France and Czechoslovakia. Under Chamberlain’s
policy of appeasement, Great Britain decided to negotiate with Hitler. The subsequent Munich Agreement was
reached on September 30, 1938 and gave Germany the right to annex certain territories in Czechoslovakia. See
Steiner, The Triumph of the Dark, 552–670.
116
E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Another Sacrifice of the Innocents,” New Times and Ethiopia News, September 24, 1938.
37
shall give our moral and financial support” to those countries threatened by fascism.117
Furthermore, Pankhurst maintained that inaction on Britain’s part had the same result as
intervention on the side of the fascists. She contended that “the abandonment of Ethiopia to the
aggressor [was] as disastrous to Europe as to her.” If not for the policy of appeasement she
continued, “the aggression of Italian Fascism could have been curbed, in the first day of
invasion, by a strong diplomatic ‘No’, even without the firing of a single gun.”118 Fascism had to
be brought down by both internal and external pressure, according to Pankhurst. She asserted
that external pressure in the form of economic and political boycotts of the aggressor nations of
Italy and Germany was the true policy of pacifists.119 If democratic nations refused to engage the
fascist governments diplomatically, Pankhurst reasoned, the fascist powers would be subject to
such severe pressure from its citizens that “in a tremendous crisis Fascism will go crashing to its
doom.”120 Pankhurst returned to this idea repeatedly, arguing that “revolt against the immoral
cruelty of Fascism is inevitable.”121 She also called on women to participate in this revolt against
fascism, urging “the leaders of our women’s organisations to broadcast to the mothers of those
countries one message: Pull your war-making Dictators down, so that we women may reach out
our hand of friendship to the world around.”122 Adhering to her pacifist principles, Pankhurst
advocated policies which would cause the demise of fascism rather than appease its leaders.
117
E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Honourable Men,” New Times and Ethiopia News, March 5, 1938.
118
E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “No Friends Must Falter,” New Times and Ethiopia News, January 29, 1938.
119
E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Lest We Forget,” New Times and Ethiopia News, February 19, 1938.
120
E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “The Work in Front of Us,” New Times and Ethiopia News, July 24, 1937.
121
E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Not Dead But Fighting On,” New Times and Ethiopia News, August 28, 1937.
122
E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “What the League of Nations Set-Back Means to Mothers,” New Times and Ethiopia News,
July 22, 1939. For studies of Italian women’s resistance to fascism see Jane Slaughter, Women and the Italian
Resistance, 1943-1945 (Denver, CO: Arden Press, 1997); Perry Willson, “Saints and Heroines: Re-Writing the
38
Pankhurst also criticized those who supported the policy of appeasement by arguing that
the policy was true to the pacifist viewpoint. Ethiopia and Spain in particular, she argued, were
victims of this policy of non-intervention legitimized by an inauthentic pacifism. In regard to the
lack of formal response or aid on the part of the British government in the Spanish Civil War,
Pankhurst warned that “misguided Pacifism, almost equally distant on this occasion from
Humanity and Charity as war-mongers are, abets this policy.”123 Additionally, this appeasement
policy had necessitated military action, or the preparation for it, in countries such as Ethiopia
which were on the path to progress socially and politically. Pankhurst took issue with those who
supported the build-up of armaments, contending that “from progressive disarmament we have
passed to the armaments drive, urged on by even people who have been life-long pacifists and
who staunchly maintained their plea for peace by negotiation, even throughout the terrible Great
War, 1914-1918, when the pacifist convictions of many suffered eclipse.”124 While she still
supported a peaceful resolution to the growing rise and aggression of fascism, she questioned
those who blindly maintained their pacifist beliefs without taking into consideration the current
international situation. Highlighting the particularities of the British context she counseled that
History of Italian Women in the Resistance,” in Opposing Fascism: Community, Authority and Resistance in
Europe, ed. Tim Kirk and Anthony McElligott (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Rosetta D’Angelo
and Barbara Maria Zaczek, eds., Resisting Bodies: Narratives of Italian Partisan Women (Chapel Hill, NC: Annali
D’Italianistica, 2008).
123
E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “And the World Looks On,” New Times and Ethiopia News, August 28, 1937. For general
works on the Spanish Civil War see Helen Graham, The Spanish Republic at War, 1936-1939 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2002); Stanley Payne, The Spanish Civil War, the Soviet Union, and Communism
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004); Paul Preston, The Spanish Civil War: Reaction, Revolution and Revenge
(New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2007); Stanley Payne, The Spanish Civil War (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2012). For more on British involvement in the Spanish Civil War see Tom Buchanan, Britain and the Spanish
Civil War (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Tom Buchanan, The Impact of the Spanish
Civil War on Britain: War, Loss and Memory (Portland, Or.: Sussex Academic Press, 2007); Hugo García, Truth
about Spain!: Mobilizing British Public Opinion, 1936-1939 (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2010).
124
E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Anglo-Italian Pact Thrice Violated,” New Times and Ethiopia News, June 10, 1939.
39
“we are pacifists in Britain; we are peace lovers, but let us not be slavish; let us not consort with
thieves and murderers to our own undoing, and to the sacrifice of our children’s birthright of
honor and freedom.”125 In other words, though appeasement might appear to be in line with
pacifist goals, in reality it was costing pacifists the ideals they sought to protect.
Once again, Pankhurst called on women to become involved in international governance
as a way of opposing fascism and maintaining international peace. She highlighted the pacifist
activism of women during and after the First World War and argued that the international
community was beginning to recognize the important contributions made by women’s peace
activism. Pankhurst attributed the League’s decision to establish a commission for the study of
the status of women to “the strenuous work of women for peace.”126Additionally, women were
valued in the international organization because in every country women’s organizations
provided “the most faithful support, the most constant work, for the League of Nations and for
peace itself.” 127 As was the case in the context of the First World War, Pankhurst maintained
that women were the important force behind the movement for peace. Additionally, Pankhurst
challenged mothers who were “long excluded from public affairs,” but were now full citizens in
Britain and many other countries, to continue to work for the continuation of the peace that was
threatened by fascism. She declared that the challenge to “lawless violence…must come from
women as well as men.”128 Without women’s support lasting peace could not be attained.
125
Ibid.
126
E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “The League and the Work and Status of Women,” New Times and Ethiopia News, October
2, 1937.
127
Ibid.
128
E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Challenge of the Dictators to the Peaceable World,” New Times and Ethiopia News,
December 11, 1937.
40
Pankhurst, however, valued women for more than their role as advocates for peace. She
also highlighted women’s participation in military endeavors, though in this case she judged
them by the cause they were fighting for. She used the fact that women were taking up arms
against fascism to demonstrate the severity of the situation. Pankhurst described how Spanish
and Ethiopian women were “going as volunteers to the front to defend their country from
invasion – killed by Fascism.”129 In addition to demonstrating the loss of life due to fascism,
Pankhurst used women’s participation in armed conflict to show how the violations of fascism
were so severe that women were forced to this extreme out of courage and a desire for justice.130
Pankhurst also argued that these women took up arms to “to avenge the death and torture of their
men and the outrages cruelly perpetuated on their sex.” Ethiopian women did not take this task
lightly, Pankhurst stressed that it was “no more affair of parades and uniforms, but of war at the
sternest and most ruthless in which…brave women are bearing a man’s part.”131 This exaltation
of Ethiopian and Spanish women who fought for their countries is a stark contrast to Pankhurst’s
discussion of women fighting for fascist Italy.
Unlike the women in countries fighting against fascism, Pankhurst claimed, Italian
women were being conscripted into military service despite the fact that they lacked full
citizenship rights.132 Firmly opposing the supposed military service of these women, Pankhurst
129
E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Our Illustrations,” New Times and Ethiopia News, July 17, 1937. For more on British
women volunteers in the Spanish Civil War see Angela Jackson, British Women and the Spanish Civil War
(London; New York: Routledge, 2002).
130
E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “No Recognition Uphold the Covenant,” New Times and Ethiopia News, September 11,
1937; E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Honourable Men,” New Times and Ethiopia News, March 5, 1938; E. Sylvia Pankhurst,
“The Struggle Against Fascism,” New Times and Ethiopia News, June 10, 1938.
131
E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Mussolini’s Women Soldiers for Abyssinia,” New Times and Ethiopia News, June 3, 1939.
132
Despite Pankhurst’s claim, Italian women were not enlisted into the Italian armed forces until Allied victory
appeared imminent. On April 14, 1944 women were called by the fascist government to enlist in the Auxiliary
41
contended that “now these Italian women, who have lost under Fascism every right and
protection afforded them by the vanquished democracy, are denied their very womanhood; they
are the first women in history to be mobilised as soldiers to fight in foreign lands.” She went on
to exclaim that “the thing is inhuman, an outrage!” Pankhurst argued that women could never
prosper under fascism because “where the sword rules woman in inevitably the loser.” She
warned, furthermore, that women’s “influence necessarily dwindles when force becomes the
arbiter of all things.”133 While in principle Pankhurst rejected the use of force, she understood the
decision of women to take up arms in countries whose independence was threatened. Women
who fought for fascism were not glorified as courageous fighters, but portrayed as martyrs of a
system of male domination.
Pankhurst maintained her commitment to peace until Britain declared war on Germany in
September of 1939. Even at this moment, however, she still had the makings of a pacifist.
Describing the editorial stance of the paper she wrote, “every fibre of our being is against
war.”134 In invoking her past advocacy for peace, she indicated her support for that position and
described her pacifism as forged through her direct confrontation with the effects of war among
the working class during the time she had spent working in the East End during the First World
War, rather than conceived of in “the bookish abstract.” 135 Nevertheless, despite her first-hand
knowledge of the destructiveness of war, she reluctantly admitted that because she knew the
Women’s Service, or SAF, though it is likely that only a couple thousand women served. De Grazia, How Fascism
Ruled Women, 282.
133
Ibid.
134
E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Our Position Restated and Some Retrospective Information,” New Times and Ethiopia
News, September 16, 1939.
135
Ibid.
42
facts about fascism and understood that fascist victory in Britain would strip British people of
their liberties, she stood “without reserve, for a fight to a finish against the forces of reaction and
violence.”136 In subsequent issues of the New Times and Ethiopia News, she elaborated further
on this complicated and reluctant pro-war stance. She framed the war in the ideological terms of
democracy opposing fascist aggression and dictatorship, and claiming that the war was justified
and that the only way to secure a lasting peace was through the military defeat of fascism; she
had confidence that it would be destroyed and “repulsed by the awakened conscience of
mankind.”137
Pankhurst did not maintain any sympathy for those pacifists who failed to shift their
understanding of what was necessary to achieve a lasting peace. She regarded the Peace Pledge
Union’s work to plan peace terms as admirable, but posed the question: who will be enacting
these terms? “So far as pacifists are concerned, Hitler and his Japanese allies will be masters of
the world, since their consciences admit no opposition to them.”138 From this point forward
Pankhurst viewed those who expressed opposition to the war or worked against it as “aiding a
super-military autocracy, maintained by the sword at home and abroad against a democracy
which has taken up arms very reluctantly with the object only of restoring peace.”139 In this
position, Pankhurst allowed no room for debate or opposition.
136
Ibid.
137
E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “The Case for Justice Restated,” New Times and Ethiopia News, April 27, 1940; E. Sylvia
Pankhurst, “Thoughts on the Festive Season,” New Times and Ethiopia News, December 18, 1937. See also E.
Sylvia Pankhurst, “Peace Through Victory Alone,” New Times and Ethiopia News, May 25, 1940; E. Sylvia
Pankhurst, “Keep Our War Aims Clear,” New Times and Ethiopia News, October 25, 1941; E. Sylvia Pankhurst,
“What is Fascism?” New Times and Ethiopia News, August 21, 1943.
138
E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Face the Facts,” New Times and Ethiopia News, September 23, 1939.
139
E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “The Profound Issue of the War,” New Times and Ethiopia News, October 28, 1939.
43
While she re-conceptualized both the goals and methods of pacifism in response to
fascism, Pankhurst continued to locate women in the struggle for justice and equality as she did
during the suffrage movement and the First World War. She spearheaded the founding of the
Women’s War Emergency Council which worked to alleviate the burdens of war on the home
front. The minutes of the opening meeting detailed Pankhurst’s motivation for starting this
organization. Appearing in the New Times and Ethiopia News, the minutes stated that the
“preliminary meeting had been called because it was believed that during the war many
questions of great importance to women would crop up rapidly and immediate action would be
required.”140 The subsequent meetings and topics of the meetings were described in the pages of
Pankhurst’s paper and demonstrate the organization’s focus on the welfare of women and
children in wartime, when their means of support was in jeopardy while their husbands and sons
fought fascism abroad.141 Once again Pankhurst was dedicated to calling attention to the
hardships that women suffered during war and to organizing women to combat these ills.
Pankhurst also regarded fellow British feminists as duty-bound to fight against fascism.
In a June 1, 1940 article she sharply criticized women’s position under the fascist government of
Nazi Germany, particularly in regard to the newly established “Three-Class Marriage” system,
which favored German women with “untainted” bloodlines.142 Pankhurst attempted to persuade
former suffragettes to join her in righting these fascist wrongs, arguing “we Suffragettes, who led
the world struggle for women’s citizenship, have a mission in the present crisis.” Suffragettes
had a duty, Pankhurst continued, to aid their “sisters in other lands to regain their lost freedom”
140
“Women’s War Emergency Council Formed,” New Times and Ethiopia News, October 14, 1939.
141
“Women’s War Emergency Council,” New Times and Ethiopia News, November 11, 1939; “Women’s War
Emergency Council,” New Times and Ethiopia News, December 23, 1939.
142
For a discussion of Nazi marriage policy see Stephenson, Women in Nazi Society, 37–56.
44
and defend their own.143 While throughout the First World War Pankhurst had attempted
through her publications, speeches and demonstrations to convince British women to refuse to
work in munitions factories, she pressured women to do the opposite during the Second World
War. She urged the government to speed up women’s training so that Britain would “not be short
of men and munitions because the women have not been allowed to help.”144 In both wars
women were the solution to problems created by war, though the terms of the problem had
changed.
While Pankhurst’s opposition to war, and its horrible consequences, appears to conflict
with her support of the Second World War, Pankhurst’s ideas were more complex and
connected. It was not that she abandoned her efforts to achieve lasting peace in the world, but
instead she believed that in order for a final peace to be realized the bellicose fascist dictatorships
had to be met with force. Her political commitment to pacifism was unable to survive the threat
that fascism presented to a democratic system in which women won the right to vote. This was
not uncommon, as those who remained pacifists during WWII often viewed their absolute
dedication to non-violence and opposition to the use of force as a faith rather than a political
commitment.145 For Pankhurst, who retained her concern for the status of women, and marked
out a space for their active participation in society and politics, her support of the war was a
reconfiguration of her commitment to peace and a logical continuation of her earlier activism.
143
“Suffragette’s Point of View, Women Must Fight Hitler,” New Times and Ethiopia News, June 1, 1940.
144
E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Standing Up To It,” New Times and Ethiopia News, September 21, 1940.
145
Ceadel, Pacifism in Britain, 1914-1945, 292, 313; Ceadel, “A Legitimate Peace Movement,” 141; Rigby, “The
Peace Pledge Union,” 179.
45
CHAPTER V
CONCLUSION
Sylvia Pankhurst’s activism from the beginning of the First World War until the end of
the Second was marked by a consistent dedication to an international system ruled by advocates
of peace instead of war. Her commitment to women’s rights and socialism was highly influential
in shaping her opposition to the Great War. Similarly, Pankhurst’s participation in the suffrage
and socialist movements also colored her critique of fascism in the 1920s. As fascist regimes
gained power in Europe, Pankhurst continued to protest against these governments. Central to
her objection to fascism was the fascist dictators’ conceptualization of the role of women in
society as subservient to men. But her concerns were broader than this. Not only was fascism
explicitly harmful to women, as she saw it, but it threatened the democratic system that had
enabled the suffragettes to express their opposition to the status quo. Pankhurst’s anti-fascism
was not in any way a departure from her feminist activism, but represented a continuing
commitment to her belief in women’s equality. Furthermore, because fascist states remained in a
continuing state of war, she believed that women living within them would continue to suffer
without a means of redress. The belligerent nature of fascism was the aspect that Pankhurst
objected to the most frequently and most strongly, and this emphasis was clearly connected to
her feminist and pacifist beliefs. Though she eventually saw war as the only way to defeat
fascism, she thought the sacrifice of pacifism was worth it. Without the downfall of fascist
regimes, she reasoned, a permanent international peace could never be established. Thus, even
her advocacy of war should be seen as rooted in her long-standing pacifism.
46
Though Pankhurst’s personal conception of pacifism does not cleanly fit into historians’
categorizations of conventional pacifist activism, understanding her opposition to war and
fascism in her own terms can enhance our understanding of the complex British peace movement
in the first half of the twentieth century.146 Historians of the interwar peace movement in Britain
have argued that those who identified as pacifists actually held beliefs that ranged from antimilitarism and pacificism to absolute pacifism.147 Pankhurst’s life and advocacy for peace
further illustrates that there were co-existing and competing definitions of pacifism in the
interwar period as people struggled politically and ethically over which international policies to
promote when confronted with the growing threat of fascism. In tracing Pankhurst’s changing
relationship to pacifism one discovers that while the peace movement included people with a
wide range of beliefs, the context of those beliefs changed over time. An individual could move
between absolute pacifism and anti-militarism without internal conflict. Furthermore, an analysis
of Pankhurst’s peace and anti-fascist activism demonstrates that these different conceptions of
pacifism were influenced not only by ethics and morality but by political realities such as the
growing support for appeasement and British women’s desire to further increase their
participation in politics in a post-suffrage era.
Finally, a consideration of Pankhurst’s interwar anti-fascist activism provides a glimpse
into the influential nature of the suffrage movement for those who participated in it, years after
146
Connelly, Sylvia Pankhurst Suffragette, Socialist, and Scourge of Empire, 130; Ceadel, “A Legitimate Peace
Movement,” 135; Eglin, “Women Pacifists in Inter-War Britain,” 150. Connelly does acknowledge that Pankhurst
has her own conception of 'peace' and 'war' but does not analyze them.
147
Martin Ceadel distinguishes between different anti-war viewpoints, identifying pacifism as “the belief that war is
always wrong and should never be resorted to, whatever the consequences of abstaining from fighting” while
pacificism was the “assumption that war, though sometimes necessary, is always an irrational and inhumane way to
solve disputes, and that its prevention should always be an over-riding political priority.” Ceadel, Pacifism in
Britain, 1914-1945, 3; Ceadel, Semi-Detached Idealists, 7.
47
women won the right to vote. Pankhurst continually embraced and exploited the themes, legacy
and network of the suffrage movement in order to garner support for her cause. As a
propagandist Pankhurst would have used an appeal to women that she felt would be the most
effective, and it is significant that she drew on the memory of the suffrage movement. This
highlights the continued prominence that the movement, and those who participated in it,
continued to have, at least among the newly enfranchised female population.148 The symbolic
suffrage legacy was claimed by parties and activists across the political spectrum, highlighting
how important the suffrage legacy had become. In the interwar era the legacy of the suffrage
movement helped to enable British women to continue to position themselves as important
global political actors in the face of new fascist ideologies that threatened the gains of that very
movement.
148
Gottlieb and Toye, eds., Introduction, The Aftermath of Suffrage, 11, 13.
48
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