SYLVIA PANKHURST and Clara Zetkin were firm friends. They met in the early 20th century through the international Women’s Socialist Organisation. 

Clara Zetkin

Campaigning together for peace during the first world war, their working alliance became a close friendship. Zetkin dedicated some of her feminist writings to Sylvia. 

As is well known, Zetkin, who was international secretary of the world’s largest socialist women’s organisation, proposed International Women’s Day at the second International Conference of Working Women in 1910 in response to mass strikes and protests by women workers in the US.

The close links between radical feminists in the US, Britain and Europe stretch back into the early 19th century. Leaders of the US abolitionist movement actively supported the British women’s suffrage campaign and vice versa.  

Sylvia met some of them as a child, when her parents hosted abolitionist leaders and international feminists in their family home when they visited Britain.

Sylvia’s feminist internationalism developed from her childhood roots growing up in cosmopolitan Manchester and in the heart of late Victorian radical London. 

From her earliest years Sylvia met Indian nationalists, US feminists and internationalist socialists in her family home. 

In her early years as an art student and militant suffragette, Sylvia lived in “long-haired” arty bohemian middle-class Chelsea and amid the elite enclaves of leafy libertarian west London. 

As is well known, in 1912 Sylvia moved to east London and established the East London Federation of the WSPU, which in 1914 broke away entirely and became an independent working women’s organisation.  

Sylvia’s elder sister Christabel, WSPU leader, claimed that the women’s suffrage campaign was not a class movement.  

She did not want the WSPU mixed up with the Labour Party, leftist trade unions or socialism, “a working women’s movement was of no value: working women were the weakest portion of the sex: how could it be otherwise? Their lives were too hard, their education too meagre to equip them for the contest.”  

Sylvia disagreed. Her voluntary migration from west to east London — from the sheltered sunny uplands of bourgeois life to the East End docklands — was an internal migration that forever after consolidated and expanded her political commitment to feminist internationalism. 

In the mighty London docklands congregated peoples from all over the world. They were economic, political and social migrants from all over the British empire and refugees from political persecution and racist anti-semitism in many other countries.  

Together they lived and worked side by side in close communities, building Britain’s economic wealth but dispossessed from the profits generated by their endless labour.

In 1914 Christabel and Emmeline Pankhurst, on behalf of the WSPU, came out in support of the war. They renamed their votes for women newspaper Britannia in support of the war and retreated into xenophobic nationalism, support for conscription and virulent opposition to the women’s peace movement that was led by their socialist sisters in Britain, Europe and beyond.

Between 1914 and 1918 the women’s socialist international persisted in its attempts to bring an end to the war and peace without punitive retribution.  

At every turn they were blocked. Not only by their warmongering governments and reactionary nationalist feminists, but by the male leadership of the socialist international and workers’ movement who failed so abysmally to uphold the commitments to international worker solidarity and the pursuit of peace against the degradations of war economy profiteering.

Between the wars Sylvia fought tirelessly against the rising tide of fascism. She was one of the very first voices in Britain to raise the alert on Mussolini. When Il Duce’s fascist forces invaded Ethiopia, Sylvia dedicated herself to the resistance. 

Throughout her adult life Sylvia had based herself in London. In 1956, aged 74, she emigrated to Addis Ababa, joined by her son Richard and daughter-in-law Rita. 

Richard had an Italian father. Rita grew up in Iasi, Romania. As Hitler rose to power her father saw the forthcoming danger for Jews in Europe and moved his family to Britain. Sylvia’s was a typically multicultural British family.

Addis Ababa in the 1950s was the continental hub of the global pan-Africanist movement. Moving to Ethiopia, Sylvia joined friends and comrades from all over the world, driving the unstoppable momentum of the African liberationist movements for decolonisation. 

Many of these friends — such as Jomo Kenyatta — she knew from London, when they had been students or activists in exile from British colonial repression in their occupied homelands.  

Sylvia died in 1960 in Addis Ababa. At the instruction of Emperor Haile Selassie she was buried with a state funeral in the hallowed ground of the Coptic Holy Trinity Cathedral in the heart of the city.  

Between her British birth in western Europe and her death as an honorary Ethiopian in the horn of Africa, Sylvia Pankhurst’s lifelong socialist feminist quest took her on vast political journeys: around the US, the countries of western, central, southern and eastern Europe, Scandanavia and Bolshevik Russia. 

In each and every one of these places she connected on the ground with working women’s campaigns, socialist trade unions, feminist organisations and individual radical women leaders, thinkers, social and medical pioneers.  

In nazi Germany and Iron Guard Bucharest she argued fiercely with elite middle-class feminists who supported the rise of the right and defended its racist and xenophobic ideologies. 

In 1934, Sylvia was a guest at a women’s dinner in Bucharest hosted by the leader of the Romanian women’s suffrage movement, who supported the Iron Guard, asserting that “a corporate state … would get things done” and claiming that corporativism did not necessarily mean a curtailment of liberty. 

Sylvia responded: “Whether you realise it or not … you are working to bring in a fascist dictatorship which will destroy all that the women’s movement has gained!”

Throughout her adult life, both in the personal, social sphere and on the wider platforms of her global political world, Sylvia lived in a diverse British culture that in the language of the time was plural by “race, class, colour and creed.” She believed in a world without borders and the right of free movement, both physically and in the life of the mind.

Britain, as a concept, existed in and because of its colonial empire. This was the everyday living reality of the great east London docklands, and the Clydeside, Cardiff, Bristol and Liverpool where Sylvia worked also. 

British identity and its national wealth was built by the international workers of its empire who flowed through and organised both in its subject colonies abroad and its industrial heartlands and home. 

Clara Zetkin’s International Women’s Day, founded in central Europe by the socialist women’s international to support women workers in the US, reminds us of our feminist history, built on democratic and internationalist principles committed to social and economic justice for women and their children, everywhere. 

We now face the bared teeth of profoundly un-British fascism feeding on current political uncertainty, austerity-driven economic deprivation and the most extreme and urgent refugee crisis of modern history. 

International Women’s Day is an opportunity for all of us to reaffirm our essentially British diversity and shared global humanity with all working women and their children, everywhere. Proudly British and a patriot who promoted what was the very best about Britain and its diverse people, Sylvia Pankhurst wished to be remembered as a citizen of the world. As she put it: “Wherever there is a need, there is my country.”

Rachel Holmes is author of Eleanor Marx: A Life (Bloomsbury). Her forthcoming book is Sylvia Pankhurst: Natural Born Rebel (Bloomsbury, 2020).