keeps the socialist faith of her father, the Cinderella daughter liberated by a
fairy godmother in the form of the socialist giant, Keir Hardie, while her mother
and Christabel are the ‘wicked’ people, the ‘separatist feminists’, ‘isolated man-
haters’, and celibate ‘unsexed viragoes’ who caused split after split within the
movement. Sylvia claims that her arrangement to get the anti-suffrage Prime
Minister, Asquith, to receive her East End delegation in June 1914 was the key
to winning the vote. Thus weak from hunger striking, she is driven to the
House of Commons where she is surrounded by socialist men – George
Lansbury, Henry Nevinson, Joseph Wedgwood and Keir Hardie. Sylvia
Pankhurst, Marcus continues, thus claims victory in the name of socialist femi-
nism, a victory less over the government as over ‘her real enemies, her mother
and sister ... who have become increasingly more aristocratic and concerned
with personal power ... She and her united charwomen have won the vote.’^14
What Marcus particularly misses in her informative reading of The suffragette
movementis Sylvia’s bitter portrayal of her hated sister, Christabel, as an evil
force upon their easily swayed mother, called ‘Mrs. Pankhurst’ throughout the
book. Christabel, the apple of their mother’s eye, becomes demonised as the
betrayer of socialist feminism, the sister who marginalises class and socialism by
recruiting into the WSPU middle-class women of all political persuasions and
who, in the later stages of the WSPU campaign, initiates a separatist feminist
sex war.^15 And, as a separatist feminist, Christabel is labelled a Tory – ‘I
detested her incipient Toryism.’^16 Not just an angry socialist but also a ‘rejected
daughter’, Sylvia takes her vengeance upon her mother by presenting her as
both a failed leader and a failed mother who neglected her less favoured chil-
dren, Sylvia, Adela and especially Harry.^17 What historians have rarely
commented upon in reiterating all too frequently this scenario is that in
drawing such a picture in The suffragette movement, Sylvia often contradicts
earlier claims made in her 1911 book, The suffragette, and in her biography of
her mother. For example, in The suffragette movementshe accuses her mother of
callousness when leaving the sick Harry for her planned USA trip but in her
biography of Emmeline she points out that her mother ‘steeled herself to perse-
vere with her journey’.^18 Such contradictory statements led Jill Craigie to
suggest that Sylvia Pankhurst was an ‘inveterate liar’.^19 Such a judgment is,
perhaps, too harsh. All of us write different versions of events at differing times
in our lives. Nevertheless, we cannot ignore the fact that Sylvia’s differing
versions of events often make her unreliable in print, especially since she cites
no footnotes whereby we could check the accuracy of her statements. The
researcher using the three main texts that Sylvia wrote on the suffrage move-
ment therefore faces a number of problems, especially if there are none or few
other accounts with which they may be compared.
Despite these inconsistencies, Sylvia Pankhurst’s The suffragette movement
became the authoritative reading of Emmeline Pankhurst, especially after
George Dangerfield, writing from a masculinist perspective, adopted and
adapted this script in The strange death of Liberal England, first published in 1935
INTRODUCTION