PANKHURST, ESTELLE SYLVIA

Estelle Sylvia Pankhurst (1882-September 27, 1960) was a British suffragette (militant advocate of women’s suffrage) who became involved in Ethiopian affairs after the invasion of Ethiopia by the Italian Fascist government in 1935.

PHOTO CAPTION: Estelle Sylvia Pankhurst. SOURCE: londonmuseum.org.uk

She was the daughter of Richard Marsden Pankhurst, a socialist lawyer of Manchester who drafted the first women’s suffrage bill in 1869, and of Emeline Pankhurst, a pioneer suffragette. After her father died in 1898, she joined her mother and her sister Christabel in founding the Women’s Social and Political Union, which within a few years launched the militant suffragette movement.

Inheriting her father’s socialist beliefs, which were abandoned by her mother and sister. Sylvia established the East London Federation of the Suffragettes in London’s East End, the poorest quarter of the city, where she organised a mass movement of working women. Here, in 1914, she founded and edited the movement’s newspaper, the Women’s Dreadnaught, later renamed the Worker’s Dreadnaught.

Arrested on several occasions for suffragette political agitation, she carried out hunger, thirst, and (later in the campaign) sleep strikes, after the last of which, in 1914, she was carried on a stretcher to the British House of Commons, where the prime minister, Herbert Asquith (term of office 1908-16) agreed to receive a deputation of working women, She thus played a major role in persuading the Liberal government of the day to grant votes for women.

On the subsequent outbreak of World War 1 (1914-18), which she opposed on socialist-pacifist grounds, she became honorary secretary of the League of Rights for Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Wives and Relatives and set up clinics and cost-price restaurants. She welcomed the Russian Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, protested the Allied intervention against it, and formed a People’s Russian Information Bureau. She travelled to Moscow in 1920, where she met the revolutionary leader Nikolai Lenin (1870-1924), and attended a Congress of the Third Socialist International, but refused to join the Communist Party.

Having earlier studied art in Venice and Florence, Italy, in 1902, she had developed a sustained interest in Italian affairs. After the rise to power of the Italian Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini (in office 1922-43), she became one of the founders of several anti-Fascist societies in Britain, among them the Society of Friends of Italian Freedom, and the Women’s International Matteotti Committee, called after Giacomo Matteotti, an Italian socialist murdered on Mussolini’s orders in 1924.

Convinced that the Italian dictator’s policies would lead to war, she wrote many letters to the press in support of Ethiopia at the time of the Wal Wal incident of 1934, and was a founding member of the Abyssinia Association which was established in Britain to defend the Ethiopian cause.

Further to publicise the latter, she founded a weekly newspaper, New Times and Ethiopian News, in 1936, which she was to edit for the next 20 years. At the outset, the publication gave news of Ethiopian Patriot resistance to the invaders and also launched appeals to the world not to forget the Ethiopian cause. She was personally denounced by Mussolini, and was placed on a list of persons to be arrested by the German Nazi administration in the event of their occupation of England.

After Mussolini’s entry in World War II in 1940, she campaigned against British officialdom and colonial interests for Ethiopia to be granted the status of an ally, and, after the collapse of the Italian Fascist armies in East Africa in 1941, for the restoration of full Ethiopian sovereignty.

PHOTO CAPTION: Estelle Sylvia Pankhurst. SOURCE: EA Library

She vigorously opposed proposals that widely advocated for the restoration of Italian colonial rule in Africa and was a protagonist of the union of the former Italian colony of Eritrea with Ethiopia, as well as of African political emancipation in general. She also founded and served as honorary secretary, of a committee in London which sought to raise funds to establish a hospital in Addis Ababa in memory of the daughter of Emperor Haile Selassie, Princess Tsehay, had served as a nurse in London hospitals during World War II.

Sylvia Pankhurst settled in Ethiopia in 1956, where she founded a monthly magazine, the Ethiopia Observer. She died in Addis Ababa in 1960, and was buried, together with Ethiopian Patriots, in the capital’s Trinity Cathedral, where as Sylvia was not a name recognised by the Ethiopian Church, she was given the designation of Walata Krestos, or “Daughter of Christ.”

RICHARD PANKHURST