Sylvia Pankhurst – The Trafalgar Square Riot (1913)

1913

Sylvia Pankhurst (1882-1960) was a leading member of the suffragette movement in Britain, and daughter of the leader of the suffragette movement, Emmeline Pankhurst. She was educated at Manchester High School and attended the Royal College of Art in Kensington on a scholarship. Around the same time, she became closely involved with the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) and the Labour Party, later giving up her studies to spend more time with the WSPU. In 1906, she served her first sentence in prison for her political activities. She broke away from the WSPU when it began using arson as a political tool and, during the First World War, she formed the Women’s Peace Army to campaign for a peaceful resolution to the conflict.

In 1916, Pankhurst renamed the East London Federation of Suffragettes as the Workers’ Suffragette Foundation, and continued to espouse pacifist values. She was imprisoned again in 1917 for her pro-Communist activities, and was later involved with the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), but was eventually expelled from the party. Later in life, she was a champion of the anti-fascism and anti-colonialism movements, helping Jewish refugees to flee Germany and opposing the Italian occupation of Ethiopia, where she lived from the end of the Second World War until her death in 1960.

In this video footage of a suffragette procession in Trafalgar Square in 1913, Pankhurst can be seen being escorted away by police officers (at 53 seconds).