Sylvia Pankhurst

Sylvia Pankhurst was born on 5th May 1882 in Manchester and died on 27th September 1960 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. She was among others an accomplished artist, a politically committed writer who wanted to experiment with literary form and a militant suffragette. Her mother was Emmeline Pankhurst, a suffragette and founder of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU). In 1925 Sylvia Pankhurst had a love relationship with Silvio Corio, who was of Italian origin. He had fled to England, because he was politically persecuted. Together they published the newspaper Dreadnought and in April 1923 Sylvio Corio published his newspaper the Germinal. When Dreadnought was folded, Sylvia worked on a new project. Like her mother and sister who ran a tearoom in the south of France, she started a weekend tearoom. Instead of alcohol, Sylvia, who did not drink offered a family- style service at her tearoom, the only drawback was that Sylvia could cook. However, she got help from friends and Corio who could cook. While running the tearoom at the weekends she started to write several books. In December 1927, Sylvia was forty-five; she gave birth to a son, and named him Richard, after her father. During her pregnancy Sylvia wrote a book Save the Mother: A plea for a National Maternity Service where she discussed the birth of her child and the problems surrounding motherhood. Sylvia and Sylvio never got married. She believed in free love and remembered unhappy marriages from her youth and had read on successful women who rejected marriage, like her heroine Mary Wollstonecraft. In September 1960, Sylvia died at the age of seventy-eight.

Sources Bullock, Ian: Sylvia Pankhurst. From Artist to Anti-Fascist. London: Macmillan, 1992. Dodd, Kathryn: A Sylvia Pankhurst reader. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1993. Romero, W. Patricia: E. Sylvia Pankhurst. Portrait of a Radical. London: YUP, 1987.