Sylvia Pankhurst’s transatlantic lecture tours, from 5 January to 12 April 1911 and again from 11 January to 3 April 1912, were the most sustained, high-profile campaigning that she had yet been involved in. Lecturing on the militant suffragette campaign in which she was an active participant, Pankhurst travelled extensively, speaking ‘once, twice or thrice a day’, often to audiences of thousands, across nineteen American states, Washington, DC and parts of Canada.¹

The tours traversed a dramatic change in her approach to the dominant militant suffrage organization, the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), led primarily by her mother and older sister Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst and, up to the autumn of 1912, Emmeline and Frederick Pethick-Lawrence. Whereas previously Sylvia Pankhurst had striven to maintain a degree of independence from the organization, after her return from her 1912 tour she threw herself wholeheartedly into its work in an attempt to redirect it towards collective, working-class activism. From the autumn of 1912, Pankhurst began establishing WSPU branches composed of working women in East London; within months, she led a federation of six branches that defied the WSPU leadership by establishing close relationships with the labour movement.²

In January 1914, shortly after Pankhurst appeared on a platform alongside the socialist trade unionist James Connolly in solidarity with locked-out workers in Dublin, the WSPU leaders decisively rejected the independent and socialistic approach of the East London groups, and instructed them to form a separate organization. In its subsequent existence as the East London Federation of Suffragettes (ELFS), this organization developed innovative campaigning tactics and further differentiated itself from the WSPU by opposing British involvement in the First World War and advocating adult suffrage. Later, accompanied by a variety of name changes, it became a tributary of the international communist movement. Pankhurst’s actions in 1912, then, set in train a series of developments that impacted profoundly on Britain’s feminist and socialist movements.

It was in the midst of her campaigning efforts in East London that Pankhurst wrote eight chapters of a book that she did not complete about America.³ This chapter explores that manuscript alongside some of Pankhurst’s previously uncited journalism from this period, her correspondence and American archives connected to her tours, to show that Pankhurst’s transatlantic experiences provided formative and enduring influences upon the character of the ELFS. In particular, this chapter contends that Pankhurst was inspired by a network of female social reformers around the New York and Chicago branches of the Women’s Trade Union League (hereafter NYWTUL and CWTUL), and in the female-run settlement houses at Henry Street in New York and Hull House in Chicago. Settlement houses and the WTUL were ventures that originated in Britain. It was, however, in their reformulation by radical American women that Pankhurst drew inspiration, modifying them to fit her own campaigning needs. While Pankhurst’s creation of the ELFS has been seen primarily as the result of a schism in the British suffragette movement, the contextualization offered in this chapter shows that it was also part of a wider transatlantic dialogue about social change in which reformers shared and adapted ideas and models of organization.

The extent of these influences have not previously been recognized, hindered by the lack of a comprehensive account of Pankhurst’s transatlantic tours that was only recently provided with the publication of my edition of her American manuscript.⁴ This chapter therefore marks a departure from the historiography of the suffragette movement that has tended to regard Pankhurst’s actions in 1912 as the inevitable result of longstanding disagreements with the WSPU leadership, thereby emphasizing Pankhurst’s role at the expense of other activists.⁵ While biographical studies posited connections between Pankhurst’s American experiences and the foundation of the ELFS, speculating that the tours enhanced her self-confidence and prompted a deeper engagement with socialist ideas, they similarly situated her 1912 shift towards collective, working-class suffrage activism in a framework that foregrounded Pankhurst’s individual intellectual development.⁶ Thus, biographical studies by Barbara Winslow and Les Garner both identified that Pankhurst’s American manuscript asserted the importance of independent representation for working-class women and men, particularly in her response to the Milwaukee socialist administration’s top-down approach to reform. In Garner’s formulation, Pankhurst’s critique ‘reflected her growing belief in socialism from below … a belief she was soon to develop in the East End’.⁷ Valuable as these insights are, and to which my own work is indebted, they nevertheless insufficiently explain how an increased self-confidence and socialist analysis resulted in Pankhurst’s commitment to working more intensely inside the suffrage movement, nor can they account for the practical decisions she subsequently took.

Winslow’s conclusion, that Pankhurst necessarily envisaged an alternative to top-down models of reform as ‘her vision of women’s emancipation came from the power of working women themselves, organizing and rebuilding their workplaces, homes and communities on their own terms’, provides the starting point for this chapter.⁸ First, it shows that Pankhurst’s writings identified emancipatory potential in practical examples of ‘female institution building’ in America.⁹ The following sections demonstrate how these institutions and the women involved in them influenced Pankhurst’s efforts to build her female institution in East London. The second section shows that the ELFS directly emulated women’s community organizing in the Chicago labour movement. The third section demonstrates that the ELFS was modelled on, and in part financed by women connected to, New York’s Henry Street Settlement. In so doing, this chapter examines Pankhurst’s reliance on what historian Blanche Wiesen Cook has identified as the long-overlooked female networks of love, support and friendship that sustained the social work and activism of many reformers, including many of those Pankhurst met in the settlement houses and WTUL.¹⁰ It therefore argues that the ELFS was far from being a lone endeavour, solely attributable to Pankhurst’s enduring or strengthened convictions. Not only were the tactics and culture of the ELFS developed in reaction to what Pankhurst judged to be flawed, top-down models of social change; they were also positively inspired by women’s networks of solidarity in the American labour movement and drew upon their practical experience to implement change in the British suffragette movement. The internationalism of Pankhurst’s organization, so apparent after the outbreak of the First World War and in its approach to the Russian Revolution, had been an essential component from the beginning.

Organizational models: the WTUL and settlement houses

In the first edition of the ELFS’s newspaper, Sylvia Pankhurst alluded to the WSPU leadership when she wrote ‘[s]‌ome people tell us that it is neither specially important that working-women should agitate for the Vote, nor specially important that they should have it’.¹¹ Pankhurst had grown increasingly uneasy at the WSPU leadership’s redefining of militancy as acts of sacrifice undergone by wealthy women on behalf of poorer women; on one of her transatlantic tours Emmeline Pankhurst boasted that ‘the privileged women, the honoured women are doing the hardest and most unpleasant work’ in the militant movement.¹² Sylvia Pankhurst’s insinuation that the WSPU also disregarded the importance of the working women’s franchise referred to the abandonment of its longstanding insistence on women’s enfranchisement ‘on the same terms as it is or may be granted to men’ to extend pragmatic support to the 1910 Conciliation Bill, which proposed to enfranchise around a million propertied women.

Before 1912, Pankhurst felt that state repression of the suffragettes inhibited her from publicly voicing her disagreements: ‘I would rather have died at the stake than say one word against the actions of those who were in the throes of the fight.’¹³ That changed after her return from her second transatlantic lecture tour in 1912. Within a month of her return, she argued that winning working-class women’s inclusion in the franchise ‘can only be rendered at all secure by a great working class women’s suffrage movement’ – something she endeavoured to create later that year in East London.¹⁴ Her change of approach, however, was not prompted by any lessening of state repression, rather by its intensification. In March 1912, the WSPU launched a mass window-smashing campaign in response to the government’s effective sabotage of the Conciliation Bill; Emmeline Pankhurst and the Pethick-Lawrences were charged with conspiracy and Christabel Pankhurst fled into exile. Sylvia Pankhurst later explained that these developments convinced her to dedicate herself to advancing an alternative strategy for the WSPU: ‘I determined that on my return home I would give all my time as a voluntary worker in the active movement, doing whatever I saw required to be done which would not be attempted without my intervention.’¹⁵ What occasioned Pankhurst’s more interventionist approach in 1912 were her American lecturing fees, which allowed her to volunteer her time, and her conviction that she had distinctive, practical ideas to impart that allowed her to avoid simply negative criticism of her fellow activists.¹⁶ Like the funds, some of Pankhurst’s practical ideas can be traced to America.

In its first meeting after its expulsion from the WSPU, the ELFS stated that the difference between the two organizations was ‘that they [the WSPU] were working from the top down & we from the bottom up’.¹⁷ As noted earlier, Pankhurst’s adoption of a more confrontational approach to the ‘top-down’ WSPU was preceded by her critique of top-down attitudes to social reform she observed in America. Pankhurst’s criticisms were developed in dialogue with sympathetic socialists. Her complaint in the fifth chapter of her American manuscript that Milwaukee’s socialist administration emphasized efficiency instead of improving workers’ material conditions was first contained in a letter to Keir Hardie, the former Labour Party leader and Labour MP with whom Pankhurst was romantically involved.¹⁸ This letter also formed the basis for Pankhurst’s second chapter, about a laundry in Milwaukee that was run according to the supposedly progressive principles of Taylorism but which Pankhurst judged inhuman: ‘the workers were absolutely silent – they seemed just a part of the machinery’.¹⁹ The sixth chapter, concerning the treatment of young Native Americans at Haskell College, first appeared as an article for Hardie’s socialist newspaper the Pioneer under the pseudonym ‘S’ (perhaps to conceal her authorship from the WSPU).²⁰ Pankhurst was similarly critical of this ostensibly enlightened institution’s inhuman treatment of those subject to its regulations. She observed that Haskell aimed to annihilate its students’ cultural heritage, with its harmony with the natural world, training them instead to serve the needs of contemporary capitalist production.²¹ Drawing on the Arts and Crafts-influenced socialist critique of modern industry, Pankhurst wrote that she regretted seeing students’ work that was ‘embroidered with floral patterns, exactly like those which are designed, in the least possible time, by the jaded sweated factory wage slaves, who cannot pause to observe real flowers’.²²

Although Pankhurst’s socialist critiques of top-down notions of progress have been the focus of discussions of her American writings, they did not necessarily point towards new openings in her political practice. These discussions have overlooked the way Pankhurst contrasted critical observations with examples of institutions that she judged more positively, such as the WTUL branches she encountered in New York and Chicago. If Pankhurst’s American writings were in part working through the problems she identified in the WSPU, then these positive examples suggested alternative approaches to reform that she might emulate.

The WTUL, an organization that helped to unionize women workers, originated in Britain with Emma Paterson’s creation of its forerunner the Women’s Protective and Provident League in 1874. Pankhurst, however, expressed her particular admiration for branches of the American organization. In America, Pankhurst was able to collaborate with WTUL activists who were not divided from the women’s suffrage movement in the way that labour activists in Britain were by the existence of the property qualification, a factor that predisposed them to support adult suffrage as opposed to women’s suffrage.

Pankhurst’s transatlantic tours coincided with a wave of industrial unrest that began in late 1909 in the sweatshops of New York City, primarily led by and composed of immigrant women, and spread across American cities up until 1915. Pankhurst made significant contact with this movement and witnessed the WTUL’s contribution to it in New York and Chicago. In January 1911, Pankhurst arrived in Chicago towards the end of a four-month-long strike of around 40,000 garment workers that had been met with a level of violence characteristic of the reaction elsewhere; pickets were arrested, imprisoned and beaten by thugs hired by their employers; two strikers were shot dead by the police.²³ On 21 January, two CWTUL members, Zelie Emerson – who was later to play an important role in the ELFS – and Olive Sullivan, took Pankhurst to view the cells in which arrested garment workers had been held.²⁴ Later that day, Pankhurst wrote to the Chicago Tribune denouncing the conditions in the cells, drawing parallels with the treatment of British suffragettes and paying tribute to the CWTUL.

Similarly, after speaking with striking laundry workers in New York in January 1912, Pankhurst praised, in another pseudonymous Pioneer article, the ‘energetic members’ of the NYWTUL and its president Mary Dreier for organizing this majority-female workforce.²⁶ Pankhurst reproduced this article as the first chapter in her American book, immediately preceding the chapter on the Milwaukee laundry. Whereas the workers in Milwaukee seemed atomized and dehumanized, Pankhurst signalled the emancipatory potential of workers’ collective organization in New York by noting that the strike had overcome the racial and sexual divisions fostered by the laundry bosses through unequal pay. She described a meeting at which a white, American-born woman and a Black man, both recently released from prison for picketing, spoke alongside an Italian immigrant. The Italian worker drew a parallel between their experiences and those of the suffragettes: ‘as a stimulus and encouragement to all present, [he] called upon them to remember the hundreds of British women who have suffered violence and imprisonment in the cause of their Enfranchisement’.²⁷ Pankhurst’s writing on Chicago and New York praised examples of woman-led activism, in which middle-class women such as Emerson and Dreier are presented as contributing to a predominantly female workforce discovering its humanity and undertaking acts of militancy comparable to the suffragettes’ experiences of police violence and imprisonment. In so doing, Pankhurst highlighted the CWTUL and NYWTUL as positive examples of ways that middle-class women could support, rather than substitute for, a working-class women’s militant movement – something she sought to implement in Britain in 1912.²⁸

Pankhurst also endorsed the women-led settlement houses in Chicago and New York to which the WTULs were closely connected. As with the WTUL, Pankhurst had already encountered settlement houses in England where they originated; in her childhood, she visited Manchester’s Ancoats Brotherhood.²⁹ The first settlement house, Toynbee Hall, was established in 1884 in East London, less than three miles from Pankhurst’s first East London headquarters. However, it was with two American settlement houses that Pankhurst and her organization forged connections. The socially radical qualities that Pankhurst praised in them were far less apparent in English settlements. These latter were established on the principle that the educated elite could elevate the lives of the urban poor through settling in their communities and providing a superior cultural example, while women’s settlements tended to be organizationally separate and deprived of the professional status of their male counterparts.³⁰ By contrast, women played a more central role in the American settlement movement, where its houses were more likely to be mixed-sex.³¹ Pankhurst was a guest at Hull House and Henry Street, both of which were founded and run by women: Jane Addams and Lillian D. Wald, respectively. The expertise their residents gained through their implantation in working-class communities served as a platform to both provide and demand social services for their neighbourhoods, including sanitary reform, factory inspections, medical assistance, playgrounds, clubs, lectures and classes. Pankhurst valued the way in which American settlements connected direct knowledge of working people’s lives to the reforms they championed; in her critique of the Milwaukee socialist administration’s much-vaunted Bureau of Efficiency and Economy, Pankhurst noted that the only member with ‘any knowledge of working lives’ was from the Milwaukee University settlement.³² Moreover, at female-dominated institutions like Hull House and Henry Street, the residents’ understanding of social problems and the evidence-based solutions they proposed ensured that they functioned as a powerful argument for women’s enfranchisement.³³ Speaking in Lima, Ohio in 1912, Pankhurst challenged her audience: ‘Can you not see that a woman with the mind of Jane Addams could have great weight in legislative matters?’³⁴

Pankhurst also admired the cultural work of Henry Street Settlement. In its visitors’ book, which was only rediscovered in 2019, she invoked their shared cultural values: ‘I believe that to make and to do beautiful things will bring us the greatest joy that we can win. Let us strive to give all that opportunity.’³⁵ This was likely, at least in part, a reference to the emergent Neighbourhood Playhouse, a cultural project run by Alice and Irene Lewisohn initially from the gymnasium of Henry Street Settlement for children living in the local tenements. Pankhurst, who was the Lewisohns’ guest when she stayed in New York in 1912, was profoundly affected by their work.

The Lewisohns recognized rich, cultural traditions in the immigrant communities of New York’s Lower East Side and helped working-class children to rediscover this heritage. In Alice Lewisohn’s words: ‘Although the children of the neighborhood had inherited an old culture from their ancestors, in the city practically no contact remained with its source – nature.’³⁷ The Lewisohns, who, like Pankhurst, were influenced by the ideals of the Arts and Crafts movement, thus began devising performances around the change of the seasons that drew on the stories and rituals of the local immigrant communities as well as from other international folk cultures.³⁸

It was almost certainly the Lewisohns’ production of Sleeping Beauty: A Midwinter Myth that Pankhurst recalled in the third chapter of her American manuscript.³⁹ Pankhurst described ‘a band of little figures, short skirted and with flowery garlands round their waists … playing on reedy pipes and set to dancing, … their firm bare legs and sandaled feet prancing most vigorously’.⁴⁰ Here, then, was the antithesis of the destruction of indigenous culture, replaced by artificial flowers, at Haskell. Pankhurst’s appreciation of Sleeping Beauty, like her appraisal of the WTUL, lay in its direct involvement of working-class people in a project that contrasted with the inhuman, machine-like character of contemporary capitalism and unleashed instead expressions of natural, shared humanity.

Pankhurst’s writings on the WTULs and settlements celebrated their foregrounding of working-class experience and activity in the struggle for reform. These positive examples suggested models that Pankhurst might emulate in her endeavour to create a militant working-class campaign. That she did so is underlined by the connections between the organization that she founded and those she admired in America.

Emerson and the CWTUL

The Chicago labour organizer Zelie Emerson embodies the most direct link between Pankhurst’s transatlantic tours and the ELFS. A year after meeting Pankhurst in Chicago, with whom she formed a friendship and later possibly a romantic relationship, Emerson travelled to London to assist her efforts inside, and subsequently outside, the WSPU.⁴² Assessments of Emerson have been shaped by Pankhurst’s memoirs, written in the knowledge that Emerson’s life had been put at severe risk by her participation in the suffragette struggle. Emerson tried to take her own life after weeks of forcible feeding in 1913; the following year Pankhurst persuaded her to leave for America after police fractured her skull. Exuding guilt ‘for being the cause’ of Emerson’s suffering, Pankhurst’s memoirs poignantly recalled Emerson on arrival as ‘that merry little American, whose youthful desire for adventure had brought her across the Atlantic to join the movement’.⁴³ However, a close reading of Pankhurst’s references to Emerson and examination of Emerson’s activism prior to the suffragette movement reveal the extent to which the ELFS benefited from her organizing experience from its inception.

The ‘youthful’ Emerson was born in 1883 (only a year after Pankhurst) to an extremely wealthy family in Jackson, Michigan.⁴⁴ Interested in social reform, in July 1910, Emerson became a resident at Chicago’s Northwestern University settlement and joined the CWTUL. In the Chicago garment workers’ strike, the CWTUL identified particular pressures on women, as food providers and rent payers, and mobilized in the community to ensure that these pressures would not undermine the industrial struggle. One history of the CWTUL has shown that the work of its Rent and Relief Committees ‘most directly represents the WTUL’s concern with community issues’.⁴⁵ Emerson was centrally involved in both. She was the ‘chairman’ of the Rent Committee, which effectively coordinated a rent strike for the duration of the industrial action.⁴⁶ She was also a co-director of the relief effort that included supplying daily milk for thousands of babies, medical services, clothes and coal, and a series of commissary stores that secured donations and bulk purchases of food for families who bought tickets.⁴⁷ Additionally, Emerson ran a lunchroom for single workers: ‘where a cup of coffee and two cheese or ham sandwiches were given at cost to 200 single men and girls’.⁴⁸ After the strike, Emerson and three other CWTUL members went to Muscatine, Iowa ‘to plan the restaurant arrangements on a sound basis’ for striking button workers.⁴⁹ Emerson later co-authored a paper on the Chicago relief efforts, which she termed ‘co-operative philanthropy’, thereby distinguishing them from charity. The commissary stores, she asserted, represented ‘a permanent addition to organized labour’s equipment’ – a way for women’s organizations to support industrial action by working women.⁵⁰

At some point, probably in March 1912, Emerson decided to assist the British suffragettes. In March 1913, in an interview apparently given from prison, Emerson explained that her connection with the suffragettes began when ‘I heard Sylvia Pankhurst speak in Detroit two years ago and she and I became fast friends’.⁵¹ Pankhurst had spoken in Detroit, Michigan in March 1911, two months after she and Emerson first met in Chicago. The following year, Pankhurst returned to Detroit and on 28 February lectured nearby in Jackson, Emerson’s home city. It seems likely that Emerson was involved in this arrangement. Moreover, Emerson’s mother, a prominent suffragist in Jackson, would certainly have known about her daughter’s friend’s lecture.⁵² Pankhurst was in Detroit at the beginning of March when she received news of the WSPU’s window-smashing campaign, which provoked outrage and the cancellation of some lectures.⁵³ It is therefore noticeable that CWTUL activists were among the few who pledged greater support for Pankhurst at this time. Miles Franklin, co-editor of the WTUL’s Chicago-based Life and Labour publication, recalled:

Franklin and her CWTUL colleague Mary Anderson personally demonstrated their support by joining the WSPU.⁵⁵ Thus, at the very moment of intensified state repression in Britain, which Pankhurst attributed to her resolution to dedicate herself to transforming the WSPU, Pankhurst was in dialogue with women in the Chicago labour movement.⁵⁶ Perhaps Emerson, her future collaborator, was among them – certainly, her close acquaintances were.⁵⁷

If Emerson was among those in contact with Pankhurst at this time, it would explain why a few months later she travelled to Britain to campaign with the WSPU. She appears to have primarily worked with Pankhurst in her efforts to redirect the WSPU towards collective action accessible to working-class people. When Pankhurst organized a demonstration in Hyde Park on 14 July 1912, Emerson was among those who worked alongside her all night producing banners.⁵⁸ Further, after Pankhurst effectively took control of the Crewe and Nantwich by-election campaign away from the WSPU organizer, she gave Emerson responsibility for Nantwich. The campaign Pankhurst and Emerson organized included a demonstration and emphasized the issue of women’s sweated labour in the textile industry.⁵⁹

After a brief return to America to campaign for women’s suffrage in the referendum in Michigan, Emerson arrived back in Britain to help Pankhurst found the East London branches of the WSPU in the autumn of 1912; according to Pankhurst, Emerson helped her choose a site for its first headquarters on the Bow Road.⁶⁰ Emerson was appointed honorary organizer in East London, ‘to keep all the others going’, and, after the WSPU terminated the East London campaign’s funding in early 1913, she suggested the location for their new premises, telling Pankhurst: ‘Come to the Roman Road; all the people go there!’⁶¹ Although very new to the area, this comment testifies to Emerson’s confidence and experience of organizing in a working-class community.

In 1913, the East London suffragettes began agitating for a rent strike to increase pressure on the government to grant women’s suffrage. Although rent strikes were hardly exclusive to the American labour movement, and had recently accompanied industrial action in East London’s Limehouse during the 1911 dock strike, it was Chicago that the ELFS cited as its prototype.

The rent strike appeared to counter the WSPU leadership’s strategy by enabling working-class women to seize the initiative through protest that relied upon collective, community-based solidarity. The WSPU leaders evidently identified the rent strike as a tactic that was the preserve of working-class communities. After the East London suffragettes’ expulsion, the ELFS’s minute book noted that the WSPU

One of the tactical innovations, then, that distinguished the East London suffragettes from the WSPU, and contributed to their forming an independent organization, had been inspired by Pankhurst’s contact with, and Emerson’s involvement in, the American labour movement.

The outbreak of war, which brought acute social distress to East London, forced the ELFS to abandon plans for the rent strike. In its subsequent turn towards welfare provision, the ELFS was not dissimilar to other suffragist groups which also established relief schemes around the same time.⁶⁴ While Pankhurst had a diverse range of examples to draw inspiration from, the combination and character of the ELFS’s welfare services bear resemblance to those Emerson oversaw in Chicago three years earlier. Thus, the ELFS established daily milk distribution for babies, medical services and what it termed cost-price restaurants: ‘[T]‌he name should be a slogan against profiteering, and would carry no stigma of charity.’⁶⁵ Food, bought in bulk or donated, was distributed to those who purchased meal tickets (and discreetly provided free to the very poorest). It might be said that in her desire to avoid charity and preference for collective solidarity, Pankhurst turned to the methods of ‘co-operative philanthropy’ pioneered by her collaborator. Moreover, Emerson, who had evidently followed the progress of these schemes from America, returned shortly after the outbreak of the war to help expand the ELFS’s relief efforts, which suggests that, though having been persuaded to desist from suffrage campaigning, she nevertheless felt she could be of assistance in these kinds of endeavours. Pankhurst remembered that Emerson ‘was stirring me up to do something for our old Bow Road district. Presently she was ladling out soup in Tryphena Place, Bow Common Lane, an unsavoury neighbourhood’.⁶⁶ Emerson also organized a clinic and milk centre in Bethnal Green. Emerson was, therefore, directly involved in shaping the ELFS’s relief efforts, which so closely resembled those she had directed in the Chicago garment workers’ strike.

When Emerson’s political experience is accounted for, it changes the reading of her impact on the ELFS from the thrill-seeking adventurer that Pankhurst remembered to one confident of imparting practical advice. From establishing organizing centres, to the idea of a rent strike and relief distribution, Emerson’s experience helped Pankhurst to envisage and establish a community-based campaign that assisted working-class women’s agitation for political change.

The Lewisohns and Henry Street Settlement

The ELFS was politically and structurally distinct from the WSPU and more closely resembled the settlement houses that Pankhurst admired at Hull House and Henry Street. These female-run settlements eschewed the traditional domestic family structure; instead, they fused public and private realms by establishing communal households among their residents, who were also the settlements’ workers. The ELFS, with its combined living quarters and headquarters embedded in a working-class neighbourhood, can be seen to emulate a similar kind of household. Politically, Hull House and Henry Street were involved in a wide range of democratic and progressive campaigns. Addams and Wald were founding members of the WTUL and were involved in the women’s peace movement during the First World War. Addams was president of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, while Pankhurst, representing the ELFS, was elected to the British section’s executive of the Women’s International League. By this point, then, Pankhurst was evidently politically closer to Henry Street and Hull House, institutions that supported labour organizations and were aligned with the peace movement, than she was to the WSPU, which was urging women’s participation in a more vigorous prosecution of the war. Testimony from one Henry Street resident and the long-term, substantial financial support the ELFS received from the Lewisohn sisters, who were connected to Henry Street, suggest that this settlement house in particular functioned as a model for the nascent ELFS.

In some ways, the campaign Pankhurst initiated in the autumn of 1912 appeared to differ little from the WSPU’s strategy for organizing in a new district. She held street meetings and opened a suffrage shop to draw in members of the public.⁶⁷ In November 1912, the local MP George Lansbury resigned in order to contest his seat on the issue of women’s suffrage, propelling the area into a by-election, which was another of the established ways that the WSPU ‘worked up’ a district.⁶⁸ However, the character of the East London organization changed as the influence of the WSPU headquarters diminished. When the WSPU withdrew its financial support shortly after the by-election, Pankhurst signalled her independent commitment to a longer-term engagement with the area by leaving her Kensington home and moving in with Jessie and James Payne, two suffrage supporters living on Bow’s Old Ford Road. After its expulsion from the WSPU, the ELFS became increasingly structurally distinctive and began instead to resemble a settlement house.

In the spring of 1914, Pankhurst acquired a house attached to two halls (formerly a school and a factory), again on the Old Ford Road. Moving into the premises with the Paynes and her suffragette friend Norah Smyth, Pankhurst created a female-dominated household where the division of labour allowed her more time for activism.⁶⁹ Like a settlement house, the residents’ living space was politically and physically connected to their public role. The attached halls – the larger dubbed the ‘Women’s Hall’ – were used for a broader range of activities than a WSPU shop; even before the First World War, the ELFS had established a number of schemes that looked like a smaller-scale version of Hull House or Henry Street. There was a choir, a lending library, lectures on a variety of topics including sex education, concerts, a Christmas Savings Club and a Junior Suffragettes’ Club for girls aged fourteen to eighteen.⁷⁰ Pankhurst also envisaged ELFS nurseries, which would finally be established after the outbreak of war.⁷¹ In contrast with a shop, there was greater potential for the local community itself to determine the use of the Women’s Hall, which in turn strengthened their connections to the ELFS. The ‘place became a hive of activity and the first house of call for everyone in distress’, especially for workers taking industrial action.

Moreover, that the welfare schemes Pankhurst established during the war were prompted by people turning to the ELFS shows how intimately linked it had become to the local community.⁷³

Pankhurst informed at least one visitor that the ELFS was specifically influenced by Henry Street Settlement. Lavinia Dock was a longstanding Henry Street resident who met Pankhurst on the day she arrived in America in 1911.⁷⁴ In March 1914, Dock visited Pankhurst and Emerson in East London while they were making plans for the Women’s Hall. Dock identified similarities with Henry Street, describing Pankhurst’s venture to a friend through the New York topography of her own settlement house: ‘She is deeply and abidingly in love with these East Side Londoners’. Dock continued:

These comments indicate that Pankhurst anticipated the development of the ELFS into a settlement like Henry Street that integrated artistic projects within its community work. In particular, the influence of the Lewisohns, whose Neighbourhood Playhouse she admired, can be detected in the ELFS.

In January 1916, the ELFS organized a ‘Spring Pageant’ for 900 children, which bore considerable resemblance to the Sleeping Beauty that Pankhurst had witnessed in New York. Like that other wintertime performance heralding the spring, this pageant was performed by young people from the local working-class ‘East Side’ community and invoked the natural world of flowers and trees with similar use of dance, costumes and instruments. George Lansbury’s daughter Violet, bedecked in a garland of primroses, played the Spirit of Spring, there was a Rose, a Lily, a Sunflower and, to Pankhurst’s eye, ‘the central loveliness of it all’ was sixteen-year-old Junior Suffragette and factory worker Rose Pengelly as the Spirit of the Woods; ‘[p]‌laying upon Pan’s reeds, she danced with unimagined grace, artless, untaught – a vision of youth’s loveliness, the denizen of a slum!’⁷⁶ Like the New York Sleeping Beauty, spring represented advancing comradeship and equality; the children held banners proclaiming ‘Peace’ and ‘Plenty’.

For their part, the Lewisohns directly contributed to the ELFS’s cultural life when, during a visit to London, they performed a concert at the Women’s Hall on the evening of 31 July 1914.⁷⁷ They evidently identified with the ELFS as they extended it considerable support – something that has not previously been acknowledged. In November 1914, the ELFS’s newspaper, the Woman’s Dreadnought, listed ‘The Misses Lewisohn’ as contributing £40 – far more than any other donor (most of whom were only able to contribute in shillings). They were the largest donors in September 1916 and February 1919, donating £20 on each occasion; in 1922, two years before the Dreadnought folded, they contributed £5.⁷⁸ These were transformative sums of money; to put their £40 donation in 1914 into perspective, in that year women workers at Morton’s factory in East London were earning an average of 10 shillings a week, and went on strike when they were replaced by younger women paid 7 shillings.⁷⁹ Thus, the Lewisohns’ first donation was equivalent to nineteen months’ wages of some of the better-paid women in East London. Pankhurst’s connection to the Lewisohns, forged on her lecture tours, therefore proved vital to the ELFS’s existence.

Much like her encounter with the CWTUL, it was Henry Street’s resonance with Pankhurst’s pre-existing political (and artistic) sympathies that allowed it to function as a model for her efforts to reshape the suffragette movement. Henry Street, and the Lewisohns in particular, provided Pankhurst with longstanding inspirational and material support that helped ensure the existence of the ELFS and shaped its distinctive character.

Recontextualizing 1912

It is commonplace to describe Pankhurst as an internationalist and invoke her longstanding opposition to imperialism and support for self-determination.⁸⁰ This chapter has suggested that her internationalism extended to an identification of common interests across national boundaries, enabling detailed engagement with and willingness to import ideas from social movements abroad. A more well-known example is the ELFS’s People’s Army, which emulated James Connolly’s Citizen Army in Dublin, with which it had political affinity.⁸¹ Something similar took place in Pankhurst’s transatlantic tours. In America, her political convictions were not substantially altered; instead, she found them reinforced by women connected to the labour movement and drew practical conclusions.

Pankhurst admired the WTUL branches and settlement houses because they seemed to embody and assert the value of direct experience from below in social reform. In her American manuscript she reflected that the representation of working-class experience was the democratic antidote to top-down, paternalistic conceptions of reform as well as to unfettered capitalism.

Socialism from below? Perhaps, but the emphasis on representation ‘by those who will be able to speak for them’, even on the basis of a (vaguely defined) ‘direct knowledge’, hardly provides a cast-iron safeguard against accusations of misrepresentation and paternalism. Four years after writing this passage, Pankhurst would find practical resolution of the contradictions between her emphasis on first-hand experience and the separation implied by representative democracy in the direct democracy of the Russian soviets. Once again, the development of Pankhurst’s thought was occasioned by working-class action in an international context, which she applied to her theoretical and practical approach to social change.

Pankhurst sought to democratize the struggle for women’s suffrage by placing working-class women at its centre. This chapter suggests that we need to reappraise suffrage history in much the same way. The ELFS was profoundly shaped by Pankhurst’s encounters with the WTUL and two American settlement houses, which provided inspirational models of organizing that suited a women’s campaign based in a working-class community. The ELFS’s tactical innovations drew upon Emerson’s experience of labour organizing, while the Lewisohns, who likely inspired aspects of the ELFS’s cultural life, provided vital funding. If Pankhurst’s divergence from the WSPU is understood in this context, it reveals that it was a result of more than her own individually strengthened convictions or self-confidence. Rather, the ELFS is revealed as a product of the distilled and collected experiences of a group of women who organized together, supported and learnt from each other in their struggles for political and social change.