disagreed, especially in regard to the breaking of any association, at least at
central level, with the Labour movement. Eventually Sylvia, seeking to fuse her
socialism and feminism, formed a grouping amongst the working classes in the
East End of London called the East London Federation of the Suffragettes
which, although formally linked to the WSPU, followed its own independent
line in that it would not attack the Labour Party nor Labour parliamentary
candidates unsympathetic to women’s suffrage, advocated mass rather than indi-
vidual protest and included men as well as women members. The differences in
tactics and policy led Emmeline and Christabel to expel Sylvia and her
Federation from the WSPU in early 1914. The bitterness Sylvia felt towards her
mother deepened during the First World War when she found Emmeline’s patri-
otism a betrayal of the ideals in which the family had been reared, an affront to
the memory of her father, Dr. Richard Pankhurst, a radical lawyer who had died
in 1898; the screw turned further when, towards the end of her life, Emmeline
stood as a Conservative parliamentary candidate. Such differences of view influ-
enced the way Sylvia portrayed her mother in The life of Emmeline Pankhurst.
Emmeline, whose politics are seen as suspect, is presented as a weak leader, ‘a
follower in many things’, especially of Christabel’s policy.^9 A woman whose
‘impressionable nature’ was influenced by ‘a narrowly exclusive feminist school’
which refused ‘to admit that the welfare of the working woman, either as
mother or wage-earner, was in any degree involved in raising the status of the
working class as a whole’. Emmeline is also portrayed as a leader of a single-issue
campaign, the winning of the parliamentary vote for women, rather than a
radical pressing for a wider range of reforms.^10 Yet Sylvia cannot quite come to
terms with such a damning analysis and towards the end of her book attempts to
reconcile the differing political allegiances of herself and her mother by placing
Emmeline in a more favourable light, by reclaiming her for socialism – ‘[I]t is
certain that, however she may have termed it to herself, some sort of Socialism
was always at the back of her mind.’^11
However, The life of Emmeline Pankhurstwas not widely read and it was
Sylvia’s earlier autobiographical account of the votes for women campaign, The
suffragette movement, published in 1931, with its more hostile, unflattering
picture of the WSPU leader, that became influential.^12 In the preface to her
book, Sylvia states that it is largely made up of memories. Memories of her
disagreements with her mother and Christabel float throughout the text,
shaping her interpretation of historical events from a socialist feminist perspec-
tive that draws upon, according to Kathryn Dodd, a well-established ethical
political vocabulary of ‘popular struggle’, akin to religious evangelism.^13 It is fair
to say that The suffragette movement, as a history of a women’smovement, is in
many ways a curious read. The two key heroines, Emmeline and Christabel
Pankhurst, are continually criticised while two heroes, namely Sylvia’s father,
Richard Pankhurst, and her former lover, the socialist Keir Hardie, are brought
to the fore, as well as Sylvia herself. As Jane Marcus perceptively observes, in
Sylvia’s version of the women’s suffrage movement she is ‘the heroine’ who
INTRODUCTION