FROM PACIFIST TO ANTI-FASCIST?

SYLVIA PANKHURST AND THE FIGHT AGAINST WAR AND FASCISM

Erika Marie Huckestein

A thesis submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial

fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in the Department of History.

Chapel Hill

2014

Approved By:

Susan Pennybacker

Emily Burrill

Susan Thorne

brought to you by COREView metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk

provided by Carolina Digital Repository

ii

© 2014

Erika Huckestein

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

iii

ABSTRACT

Erika Marie Huckestein: From Pacifist to Anti-Fascist? Sylvia Pankhurst and the Fight Against

War and Fascism

(Under the direction of Susan Pennybacker)

Historians of women’s involvement in the interwar peace movement, and biographers of

Sylvia Pankhurst have noted her seemingly contradictory positions in the face of two world wars:

she vocally opposed the First World War and supported the Allies from the outbreak of the

Second World War. These scholars view Pankhurst’s transition from pacifism to anti-fascism as

a reversal or subordination of her earlier pacifism. This thesis argues that Pankhurst’s anti-fascist

activism and support for the British war effort should not be viewed as a departure from her

earlier suffrage and anti-war activism. The story of Sylvia Pankhurst’s political activism was not

one of stubborn commitment to, or rejection of, a static succession of ideas, but one of an active

engagement with changing politics, and confrontation with the new ideology of fascism, in a

society still struggling to recover from the Great War.

iv

TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER I: INTRODUCTION ....................................................................................................1

CHAPTER II: OPPOSITION TO THE GREAT WAR .................................................................8

CHAPTER III: THE MENACE OF FASCISM ...........................................................................19

CHAPTER IV: PEACE THROUGH VICTORY .........................................................................34

CHAPTER V: CONCLUSION .....................................................................................................45

REFERENCES .............................................................................................................................48

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

Sylvia Pankhurst highlighted the continuity in her politics and reflected on her life-long

commitment to political activism in 1939, twenty-one years after women won the right to vote in

Great Britain. She wrote that she had “been a campaigner for international peace and justice

before, during and since the Great War,” thus alluding to her opposition to the South African

Boer War, her advocacy for universal suffrage, and opposition to British involvement in World

War One.1 Yet by the close of that year, Pankhurst criticized those pacifists who were “working

definitively against the war” for “aiding a super-military autocracy, maintained by the sword at

home and abroad.”2 Pankhurst’s self-proclaimed dedication to peace activism appears to

contradict her subsequent statement criticizing pacifists who opposed the British war effort

during the Second World War. Though she was hesitant to apply labels to her political beliefs,

only occasionally referring to herself as a socialist, communist, feminist, or pacifist throughout

her writings, a question still remains.3 How can we reconcile and understand Pankhurst’s

seemingly contradictory statements, in support of peace and international justice as well as war?

1 “The Citizenship of Women: Looking Back on the Struggle for it after Twenty-One Years”, 1939, Estelle Sylvia

ESPP, Internationaal Instituut Voor Sociale Geschiedenis, Amsterdam (hereafter cited as ESPP).

2 “The Profound Issue of the War,” New Times and Ethiopia News, October 28, 1939.

3 Pankhurst provided her own definition of a pacifist in an April 8, 1916 article titled “What is a Pacifist?” In the

article she argued that “the true pacifist is a rebel against the present organisation of society, and only as we prefer

defeat to wrong-doing and despise the gain of privilege and oppression shall our feet be guided in the way of peace.”

Pankhurst, “What Is A Pacifist?” Woman’s Dreadnought, April 8, 1916.To complicate this matter further, the word

pacifist has been employed to describe a variety of beliefs, particularly during the first half of the twentieth century.

Martin Ceadel argues that while the division within the peace movement remained unclear until confronted with the

2

Historians of women’s involvement in the interwar peace movement and biographers of

Pankhurst have noted her seemingly contradictory positions: she vocally opposed the First World

War and supported the Allies from the outbreak of the Second World War. These scholars view

Pankhurst’s transition from pacifism to anti-fascism as a reversal or subordination of her earlier

pacifism.4 Scholars have concluded their analysis of Pankhurst’s pacifism there, however,

choosing to see Pankhurst’s support for multiple causes as either too wide-ranging to be

conceptually reconciled or focusing only on the particular aspects of Pankhurst’s activism that

can be more easily connected.5 Pankhurst’s activism was indeed broad-ranging. She was an

active participant in the suffrage movement, campaigned against the Great War, supported the

international crises of 1936, those who referred to themselves as pacifists form two distinct groups. In order to

differentiate between the beliefs held by the two groups Ceadel labels one pacifist and the other pacificist.

According to Ceadel, pacifists held the belief that war was always wrong “whatever the consequences of abstaining

from fighting”, while pacificists acknowledged that war was occasionally necessary though it was “always an

irrational and inhumane way to solve disputes.” Martin Ceadel, Pacifism in Britain, 1914-1945: The Defining of a

Faith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 3. It was not until the 1930s however that these distinctions reached a

newfound importance as these two groups could no longer advocate the same policies in the wake of the

Manchurian and Abyssinian crises. See also Martin Ceadel, Semi-Detached Idealists: The British Peace Movement

and International Relations, 1854-1945 (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).

4 Richard Pankhurst, Sylvia Pankhurst: Counsel for Ethiopia (Tsehai Publishers, 2003), 86; Patricia Romero, E.

Sylvia Pankhurst: Portrait of a Radical (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 201; Josephine Eglin, “Women

Pacifists in Inter-War Britain,” in Challenge to Mars: Essays on Pacifism from 1918 to 1945, ed. Peter Brock and

Thomas Paul Socknat (Toronto and London: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 150–151.

5 For the first book-length study of Sylvia Pankhurst see Richard Pankhurst, Sylvia Pankhurst, Artist and Crusader:

An Intimate Portrait (New York: Paddington Press: distributed by Grosset & Dunlap, 1979). Written by her son in

order to call attention to his mother’s life as an artist, its primary focus is on Pankhurst’s artistic education and her

contributions to British art and the visual culture of the suffrage movement. Patricia Romero, E. Sylvia Pankhurst:

Portrait of a Radical (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987). Romero is highly unsympathetic to her subject and

has been criticized by subsequent biographers for her argument that Pankhurst's wide-ranging activism can be

explained by her continual search for a father figure. For more sympathetic biographies of Pankhurst see Ian Bullock

and Richard Pankhurst, eds., Sylvia Pankhurst: From Artist to Anti-fascist (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992);

Barbara Winslow, Sylvia Pankhurst: Sexual Politics and Political Activism (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996)

which draws connections between Pankhurst’s involvement in the suffrage campaign, the labor movement, and

Communism; Mary Davis, Sylvia Pankhurst: A Life in Radical Politics (London; Sterling, Va.: Pluto Press, 1999)

which focuses on the links between the labor and women’s movements; and Shirley Harrison, Sylvia Pankhurst: a

Crusading Life 1882-1960 (London: Aurum, 2003) which, as of its publication, was the only biography authorized

by Pankhurst's family. For a biographical study focusing exclusively on Pankhurst's Ethiopian activism see Richard

Pankhurst, Sylvia Pankhurst: Counsel for Ethiopia (Tsehai Publishers, 2003). For the most recent biography of

Pankhurst, which ties together Pankhurst's diverse activism within a broad framework of Pankhurst as a life-long

campaigner for democracy and self-determination, see Katherine Connelly, Sylvia Pankhurst Suffragette, Socialist,

and Scourge of Empire (London: Pluto Press, 2013).

3

Russian Revolution and Communism, advocated for maternal welfare, opposed fascism and

imperialism and was a dedicated advocate of Ethiopia until her death in 1960. Patricia Romero,

the first and arguably most influential biographer of Pankhurst, is very critical of Pankhurst’s

dedication to such a large variety of causes. She cites Pankhurst’s support of the Russian

Revolution, which occurred before women in Britain had won the right to vote, as just one

“example of how quickly Sylvia could change causes” and argues that such a shift “raises the

question of how committed she was to feminist issues like votes for women.”6 Romero also

dismisses her transition between these different causes as motivated by Pankhurst’s search for a

strong male father figure.7 This kind of explanation is not only dismissive; it fails to give

legitimacy to Pankhurst’s politics and ideas.

Pankhurst’s anti-fascist activism and support for the British war effort should not,

however, be viewed as a departure from her earlier suffrage and anti-war activism. Her personal

conception of pacifism was derived from a core set of beliefs that she maintained throughout her

life and was integral to her subsequent opposition to fascism. Furthermore, Pankhurst’s political

commitments during the era of fascism continued to be influenced by her earlier experiences of

war and ongoing concern with the status of women and women’s particular contribution to

society. Pankhurst consistently argued that women should play a central role in politics and

international governance even after women in Britain achieved the right to vote on the same

terms as men in 1928. She never fully relinquished the legacy of the suffrage movement or the

belief that women as a group could contribute something that would otherwise be lacking in a

6 Romero, E. Sylvia Pankhurst, 124.

7 Ibid., 20, 34, 210.

4

male dominated society.8 Just as Pankhurst often recontextualized her feminism to suit her

changing worldview in the midst of two World Wars and the rise of fascism, she also reframed

her commitment to peace to accommodate her eventual advocacy of war. The story of Sylvia

Pankhurst’s political activism was not one of stubborn commitment to or rejection of a static

succession of ideas but one of an active engagement with changing politics and confrontation

with the new ideology of fascism in a society still struggling to recover from the Great War.9

As Pankhurst was involved in so many types of political activism, her life also provides a

very useful frame for exploring the connections between seemingly disparate movements.

Through a systematic study of her interwar journalism I will demonstrate how Pankhurst, rather

than abandoning the suffrage movement, continued to invoke the legacy and goals of the

8 The legacy of the suffrage movement was highly contested in the interwar period. For more on the different

movements that claimed to be inheritors of its legacy see Adrian Bingham, “Enfranchisement, Feminism and the

Modern Woman: Debates in the British Popular Press, 1918-1939,” in The Aftermath of Suffrage: Women, Gender,

and Politics in Britain, 1918-1945, ed. Julie V. Gottlieb and Richard Toye (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire;

New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 91–94; Julie V. Gottlieb and Richard Toye, eds., The Aftermath of Suffrage:

Women, Gender, and Politics in Britain, 1918-1945 (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire; New York: Palgrave

Macmillan, 2013), 11; Julie Gottlieb, “Suffragette Experience Through the Filter of Fascism,” in A Suffrage Reader:

Charting Directions in British Suffrage History, ed. Claire Eustance, Joan Ryan, and Laura Ugolini (New York:

Leicester University Press, 2000), 118–120; Julie Gottlieb, Feminine Fascism: Women in Britain’s Fascist

Movement, 1923-1945 (London: I.B. Tauris, 2000), 160–168.

9 Historians of fascism still debate the exact definition of the term and whether or not particular movements and

regimes should be considered fascist. When Pankhurst first expressed her opposition to fascism her interpretation

closely aligned with the official Communist theory of fascism. Those who subscribed to this conception of fascism

understood it as an agent of capitalism and the bourgeoisie. This interpretation of fascism (including German

National Socialism) was formally adopted by the Third International in 1924. For an analysis of this interpretation of

fascism see Stanley Payne, A History of Fascism, 1914-1945 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), 443–

444. As Pankhurst distanced herself from Communism, and fascism continued to develop, her conception of fascism

became more complex. She applied the label of fascism broadly and thus would have been in agreement with

scholars who advocate for a notion of a “generic fascism” or “synthetic fascism” in order to analyze the culture and

ideology of the fascist movement, see Roger Eatwell, “Towards a New Model of Generic Fascism,” Journal of

Theoretical Politics 4, no. 2 (April 1, 1992): 161–194, doi:10.1177/0951692892004002003; Roger Griffin, The

Nature of Fascism (London; New York: Routledge, 1993). As will be described in more detail later in the paper, she

identified certain characteristics of fascism that roughly correspond with most aspects of Robert Paxton’s definition

of fascism as “a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation,

or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed

nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic

liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and

external expansion.” Robert Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism, 1st ed. (New York: Knopf, 2004), 218.

5

suffrage movement even after she was no longer a member of any suffrage organization. This

study will also contribute to the growing body of scholarship that challenges the notion that

women’s involvement in peace movements, or other international organizations and causes,

marked a shift away from their previously held feminist beliefs.10

A new conception of

Pankhurst’s political activism is needed, one that recognizes the complex interactions between

these different strands of activism in the interwar period.

The daughter of Richard Pankhurst, a radical Liberal barrister, and Emmeline, the

founder of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), Sylvia Pankhurst was well-

positioned for an entry into political activism. Pankhurst followed the example set by her parents

and became a member of the Independent Labour Party (ILP) as a young woman. She also joined

her mother in the suffrage movement after Emmeline founded the WSPU. As a socialist feminist

who remained loyal to the ILP, she gradually became disenchanted with the organization headed

by her mother, which catered to middle-class women, and thus created her own suffrage

organization in London’s East End. There she fulfilled her desire to advocate for both women’s

and workers’ rights. After the outbreak of the First World War, Pankhurst again voiced an

opinion that was unpopular among many fellow suffragists, as she declined to support the war

effort and instead advocated for a negotiated settlement to end the war. At the war’s close

Pankhurst became a founding member of the Communist Party in Britain, though she was

10

Jo Vellacott calls for a more nuanced understanding of women’s participation in the pacifist movement during and

after the First World War arguing that a new form of feminism emerged as a result of the First World War. See Jo

Vellacott, “A Place for Pacifism and Transnationalism in Feminist Theory: The Early Work of the Women’s

International League for Peace and Freedom,” Women’s History Review 2, no. 1 (1993): 23–56,

doi:10.1080/09612029300200021. Carol Miller also argues that viewing women’s participation in international

organizations as symbolic of the decline of feminism discounts the feminist dimension of women’s international

work, see Carol Miller, “‘Geneva – the Key to Equality’: Inter-War Feminists and the League of Nations,” Women’s

History Review 3, no. 2 (1994): 219–45, doi:10.1080/09612029400200051.

6

expelled a few years later.11

In the 1920s and 1930s she was committed to raising the alarm

about the dangers of fascism. This period of Pankhurst’s life was also punctuated by the

publication of her writings on India, maternal welfare, the Great War and the suffrage

movement.12

Her engagement in anti-fascist activism was linked to her advocacy for Ethiopia, a

cause she supported until her death in Addis Ababa in 1960.

In order to further her activism, as well as introduce the public and government officials

to her ideas, Pankhurst relied heavily on the periodical press. She often submitted articles to

newspapers such as the Manchester Guardian, the News Chronicle, and the Daily Herald, and

Picture Post. She began her first periodical, The Woman’s Dreadnought, in 1914 and it served as

the organ of the East London Federation of Suffragettes, a splinter organization founded by

Pankhurst after her break from the WSPU. As Pankhurst turned towards socialism, and later

Communism, she changed the name of this paper to the Workers’ Dreadnought and its

circulation reached around 10,000.13

From 1917 to May 1918 the Dreadnought was published by

the Workers’ Suffrage Federation, from May 1918 to June 1920 it was published by the

Workers’ Socialist Federation, and after a brief period in which it served as an official organ of

the Communist Party, Pankhurst edited the paper independently from 1921 to 1924, until it

11

Shortly after her expulsion from the CPGB Pankhurst published an article in order to explain that her departure

from the party was not due to “any tendency to compromise with capitalism”, but instead was a result of her

commitment to “freedom of propaganda for the Left Wing Communists, who oppose all compromise and seek to

hasten faster and more directly onward to Communism.” The CPGB executive asked Pankhurst turn over her

newspaper, the Workers’ Dreadnought, to Party control and Pankhurst refused. Pankhurst, “Freedom of

Discussion,” Workers’ Dreadnought, September 17, 1921.

12

E. Sylvia Pankhurst, India and the Earthly Paradise (Bombay: Sunshine Publishing House, 1926); E. Sylvia

Pankhurst, Save the Mothers; a Plea for Measures to Prevent the Annual Loss of about 3000 Child-Bearing Mothers

and 20,000 Infant Lives in England and Wales, and a Similar Grievous Wastage in Other Countries (London: A.A.

Knopf, 1930); E. Sylvia Pankhurst, The Suffragette Movement: An Intimate Account of Persons and Ideals

(Longmans, Green and co., 1931); E. Sylvia Pankhurst, The Home Front: A Mirror to Life in England during the

World War (Hutchinson & Co. Ltd., 1932).

13

Davis, Sylvia Pankhurst, 55.

7

ceased publication. Pankhurst served as a leader of all three organizations. As she became

increasingly concerned with the looming threat of fascism, Pankhurst established a newspaper

dedicated to the cause of Ethiopian independence, the New Times & Ethiopia News. The paper

was first issued in 1936 and Pankhurst continued to publish the paper until she moved to

Ethiopia in 1956. During its first year 10,000 copies were printed per week and at its peak

circulation of the paper reached 40,000.14

Taken together, these sources allow us to trace the

development of Pankhurst’s conception of peace, fascism and women’s roles in society and

politics. Pankhurst’s editorials offered solutions for politicians and citizens who sought to create

a better society, an ideal that was constantly in flux. In order to understand how Pankhurst’s

ideas evolved from one world war to the next, we must first examine Pankhurst’s opposition to

the Great War.

14

Metasebia Woldemariam, “Sylvia Pankhurst: Against Imperialist Occupation of Ethiopia,” in African Agency and

European Colonialism: Latitudes of Negotiation and Containment: Essays in Honor of A.S. Kanya-Forstner, ed.

Kwabena Opare Akurang-Parry and Femi J. Kolapo (Lanham (MD); Plymouth: University Press of America, 2007),

147; June Purvis, “Sylvia Pankhurst (1882-1960), Suffragette, Political Activist, Artist and Writer,” Gender &

Education 20, no. 1 (2008): 84.

8

CHAPTER II

OPPOSITION TO THE GREAT WAR

In reflecting upon the articles she wrote during the First World War, Sylvia Pankhurst

was conscious of the fact that she was expressing an oppositional point of view, one which

countered the government’s narrative of the war. In a letter written a little over a decade after the

war’s end she discussed the duty she felt to convey her pacifist message to the public. “I felt

sorrow in having to tell parents, whose sons were at the front,” she wrote, “that the war was

wrong and its ideals fake, and that all the belligerent governments were to blame.”15

In the

process of fulfilling what she saw as her duty, Pankhurst expended a great deal of energy writing

and editing a newspaper that expressed her views and lost many friends who did not agree with

her anti-war stance.16

Pankhurst was not alone in her opposition, however. The First World War

created a deep fracture in the suffrage movement between those who worked to support the war

and those who devoted themselves to protesting it.17

Pankhurst’s personal pacifism did not

necessarily align with all suffragists who opposed the war. Her objections to the war were

15

E. Sylvia Pankhurst to unknown, 10 December 1930, ESPP.

16

Ibid.

17

Claire Eustance, Joan Ryan, and Laura Ugolini, “Introduction: Writing Suffrage Histories – the ‘British’

Experience,” in A Suffrage Reader: Charting Directions in British Suffrage History, ed. Claire Eustance, Joan Ryan,

and Laura Ugolini (New York: Leicester University Press, 2000), 14; Lucy Noakes, “War and Peace,” in Women in

Twentieth-Century Britain, ed. Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska (Harlow: Longman, 2001), 316; Susan Pedersen,

Eleanor Rathbone and the Politics of Conscience (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 193; Harold Smith,

The British Women’s Suffrage Campaign, 1866-1928, 2nd ed. (Harlow, England; New York: Pearson/Longman,

2007), 73–79; Anne Wiltsher, Most Dangerous Women: Feminist Peace Campaigners of the Great War (London;

Boston: Pandora Press, 1985).

9

influenced by her socialist politics, her dedication to working-class women’s rights, and her

continued promotion of women’s political activism. This is not to say that Pankhurst’s views

were representative of all feminists or socialists, but rather that her identification of the causes of

war as the foreign policy of Great Powers, capitalism, and women’s exclusion from politics,

were derived from her socialist feminism. In tracing the development of Pankhurst’s pacifism as

well as her continued advocacy for the equality and inclusion of women in politics and

governance, we can see how her opposition to the First World War led to her eventual

condemnation of fascism.

In her weekly editorials and articles in the pages of her newspaper The Woman’s

Dreadnought, Pankhurst declared that the war was caused by capitalism and Great Power

rivalries. Prime Minister Herbert Asquith, in contrast, announced to Parliament that Britain had

entered the war in order “to fulfill a solemn international obligation” and “to vindicate the

principle that small nationalities are not to be crushed, in defiance of international good faith, by

the arbitrary will of a strong and overmastering Power.”18

For Pankhurst, however, these words

rang hollow. Though the government’s justification for going to war was couched in the “most

altruistic and disinterested motives that can be found or invented,” she argued that wars were

fought for commercial gain and this war was no different.19

Capitalists would profit from the

scarcity brought on by the war and exploit the opportunity to increase their wealth and profits.20

In addition to market competition, rivalries between Great Powers over territory also added fuel

18

Herbert Asquith, “Prime Minister of Britain, His Address to Parliament Announcing the War on August 6, 1914,”

Charles Horne and Walter F. Austin, eds., Source Records of the Great War, vol. 1, 7 vols. (New York: National

Alumni, 1923).

19

E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Going to War: What Women Can Do,” Woman’s Dreadnought, August 8, 1914; Pankhurst,

“The War Cure,” Woman’s Dreadnought, October 3, 1914; Pankhurst, “Peace and War,” Woman’s Dreadnought,

June 3, 1916.

20

E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Important,” Woman’s Dreadnought, August 7, 1915.

10

to the fire of war, according to Pankhurst. She claimed that competition for control of Eastern

and African territories amounted to no more than “an ignoble and mercenary battle of thieves.”21

Rather than a protective action to defend small nationalities, Pankhurst contended that the war

was rooted in domination and exploitation, both of workers and colonial territories. Pankhurst’s

opposition to the war prefigured the beliefs of the small socialist contingent, largely represented

by members of the ILP, within the peace movement, which held that capitalism and imperialism

were the inexorable causes of war.22

Pankhurst also used the war to highlight another kind of

inequality that her socialist organization, the Workers’ Suffrage Federation, hoped to end.

From the onset of the Great War, Pankhurst also viewed the war as a by-product of the

male-dominated political system. She articulated her continuing demands for women’s

enfranchisement in these terms. In her August 8, 1914 article and editorial in the Woman’s

Dreadnought Pankhurst contended that women needed the vote in order to influence

international policy. She cited the current state of affairs, and the decision to go to war, as

evidence for this. Basing her claim on the overwhelming support for peace at the Women’s

Meeting of the Labour Party in London’s Trafalgar Square, Pankhurst argued that if women had

been incorporated into the electorate at the start of the war, and thus comprised an important part

of public opinion, war could have perhaps been avoided.23

This was a fairly optimistic view of

women’s opposition to war as the large majority of the women who were politically involved in

either the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, headed by Millicent Fawcett, and

21

E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Mistaken Ideals,” Woman’s Dreadnought, December 29, 1917.

22

Ceadel, Pacifism in Britain, 1914-1945, 5.

23

E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “For Peace,” Woman’s Dreadnought, August 8, 1914.

11

Emmeline Pankhurst’s Women’s Social and Political Union, supported the war effort.24

The

members of women’s organizations affiliated with the labor and co-operative movements, on the

other hand, articulated similar arguments to Sylvia Pankhurst about the benefits of including

women’s perspectives in political decision making.25

Pankhurst commended the policies of such

women’s organizations which called for peace and stood in opposition to the “men-made

Governments of Europe” which rushed “heedless on to war.”26

Women’s enfranchisement was a

vital issue for Pankhurst, not only because she supported universal suffrage regardless of class or

sex, but because she believed that women’s inclusion in the political system would have resulted

in the war’s end or at least lessened its impact.27

Not only was the war a symptom of women’s political exclusion, stressed Pankhurst, but

women in particular were harmed by war. After witnessing the departure of Dublin reservists,

she described the weeping women who as mothers, sisters and wives had to “bear the harder part

of suffering without the excitement and adventure” that allowed male soldiers to continue

fighting.28

In 1915 feminist activists also considered peace and war to be important concerns for

women and thus convened an International Congress of Women at The Hague. It was at this

24

Smith, The British Women’s Suffrage Campaign, 1866-1928, 76–78.

25

Andrew Flinn, “‘Mothers for Peace’, Co-Operation, Feminism and Peace: The Women’s Co-Operative Guild and

the Anti-War Movement between the Wars,” in Consumerism and the Co-Operative Movement in Modern British

History: Taking Stock, ed. Nicole Robertson and Lawrence Black (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009),

144.

26

E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Going to War: What Women Can Do,” Woman’s Dreadnought, August 8, 1914.

27

As a suffrage campaigner Pankhurst advocated for universal suffrage regardless of sex or class as there were still

restrictions that prevented some men from voting. In 1918 suffrage for most men over the age of 18 and limited

suffrage for women based on age and property was established. For more on electoral reform and how it affected

electoral politics and notions of citizenship see Laura Mayhall, The Militant Suffrage Movement: Citizenship and

Resistance in Britain, 1860-1930 (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); Martin Pugh, Electoral

Reform in War and Peace, 1906-18 (London; Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978); Duncan Tanner, Political

Change and the Labour Party, 1900-1918 (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

28

Ibid.

12

Congress that the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom was established.29

Though the British government refused to grant passports and permits to the proposed British

delegation, Pankhurst ensured that the resolutions of the Congress reached British women

through the pages of her paper. The first resolution was an echo of Pankhurst’s own views about

the war. It stated that women could not be protected under the conditions of modern warfare and

it protested vehemently “against the odious wrongs of which women are the victims in the time

of war, and especially against the horrible violation of women which attends all war.”30

In

subsequent articles in the Woman’s Dreadnought, Pankhurst underscored the violation of women

due to war, publishing stories that described the suffering of individual British women married to

military men. Women married to aliens, particularly Germans, had their houses ransacked and

their families seized and placed in internment camps.31

The government’s lack of financial

support during the war forced women to seek charity in order to feed their children. Pankhurst

was outraged by this lack of support and compared enlistment in the army to slavery which

bound the entire family of enlisted men.32

Highlighting the suffering of women as non-

combatants and wartime workers, Pankhurst contended that women suffered as much if not more

than the men fighting on the front lines of the conflict.

29

Vellacott, “A Place for Pacifism and Transnationalism in Feminist Theory,” 29.

30

“A Call to the Women of All Nations”, Workers’ Dreadnought, April 24, 1915; E. Sylvia Pankhurst,

“International Congress of Women”, Woman’s Dreadnought, May 8, 1915.

31

E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Let Us Not Be Cowards,” Woman’s Dreadnought, May 8, 1915; E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “The

Shame of War!,” Woman’s Dreadnought, December 30, 1916.

32

E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Slavery,” Woman’s Dreadnought, September 23, 1916; E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “The Shame of

War!” Woman’s Dreadnought, December 30, 1916; E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Justice,” Woman’s Dreadnought,

September 23, 1916.

13

While she opposed the war because of its causes as well as its effects on women,

Pankhurst’s protest of the war also embodied broader ideas about the purpose of pacifism.

Recalling her anti-war stance over a decade after World War One had ended, she described her

beliefs as foregone. She claimed that when the war came she was “inevitably…a pacifist,” and

thus she started work almost immediately to improve the quality of women’s and children’s lives

on the home front and publicly demand an end to the war.33

While Pankhurst labeled herself a

pacifist during and after the war, she questioned the pacifist identity of others. Those who called

themselves pacifists because they believed in an equal peace at end of the war, but maintained

that the war must be fought until Britain won, were not pacifists according to Pankhurst. In her

April 8, 1916 article “What is a Pacifist?” she identified the “true pacifist” as one who, like her,

was a “rebel against the present organisation of society.”34

According to Pankhurst and some

fellow socialists the restructuring of the international system, and the abolition of imperialism

and capitalism in particular, were necessary in order to foster a peaceful future.35

The Russian

Revolution only added to her belief in transformative change brought about through the

“solidarity of the common people.” Pankhurst argued that the Revolution “demonstrated that the

workers can win complete emancipation by the universal strike” while “the War has shown that

modern warfare is so costly and also so slow and cumbrous and hideously dehumanising that the

strike is the only revolutionary weapon which the workers can use successfully.”36

This kind of

33

E. Sylvia Pankhurst to unknown, 10 December 1930, ESPP.

34

E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “What Is A Pacifist?” Woman’s Dreadnought, April 8, 1916.

35

Ceadel, Pacifism in Britain, 1914-1945, 5.

36

E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “A Separate Peace?” Woman’s Dreadnought, June 23, 1917. She maintained this belief

despite the violent nature of the Russian Revolution. Pankhurst was influenced by Leon Trotsky’s pamphlet “War or

Revolution” in which he argued for an end to the European wide “work of mutual annihilation” in order to preserve

the revolutionary energy of socialists. See E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Empire and Nationality” Workerss Dreadnought,

14

political pacifism gained currency more broadly during the Great War as pacifism was no longer

solely expressed in the religious terms that had previously dominated the movement.37

Pankhurst

conceived of more than an ideal world system that would facilitate peace. She also positioned

women who were still fighting against a system of inequality as the ideal fighters in this battle

against oppression.

Women’s duty was twofold according to Pankhurst. Women had a responsibility to

protest the war as well as work toward an alternate system of settling disputes among the

international community without resorting to war. A woman’s sense of maternal devotion was

needed to further the pacifist mission and enable the success of the peace movement. In

addressing her fellow women pacifists, Pankhurst argued that “we Pacifists must be still more

constant, still more zealous in our propaganda, devoting every available moment to spreading the

Peace ideal.”38

At the first Council meeting of the British section of the Women’s International

League for Peace and Freedom, Pankhurst was elected to the executive committee along with

other influential members of the women’s suffrage movement such as Kathleen Courtney,

Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence and Helena Swanwick.39

The manifesto written at meeting opened

June 1, 1918. Pankhurst also viewed the violence of the Revolution largely as a product of “anti-Bolshevik

Russians” engaged in a “reactionary fight” to regain control of the government. See E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “League of

Nations” Workers’ Dreadnought, January 1, 1919.

37

Ceadel, Pacifism in Britain, 1914-1945, 17, 34.

38

E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “We All Want Peace,” Woman’s Dreadnought, January 13, 1917.

39

Kathleen Courtney (1878-1974) was a member of the non-militant suffrage movement and was an active peace

campaigner, who was, for instance, very involved in the British Women’s Peace Crusade after 1916. Courtney was

awarded the United Nations Peace Medal in 1972. Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence (1867-1954) served as treasurer of

the Women’s Social and Political Union, the militant suffrage organization, and was very influential in the

organization until Emmeline and her husband Frederick Pethick-Lawrence were ousted from the organization in

1912. Pethick-Lawrence continued to work for feminist and international organizations through the interwar period.

She served as the treasurer of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, an international feminist

and anti-war organization, from 1915 to 1922 and president of the Women’s Freedom League from 1926-1935.

Helena Swanwick (1864-1939) joined a suffrage society affiliated with the non-militant National Union of Women’s

15

with the line: “Upon women as non-combatants, lies a special responsibility at the present time

for giving expression to the revolt of the modern mind of humanity against war.”40

Though the

government and politicians called on women to take on war service, Pankhurst and the

organization that she led, the Workers’ Suffrage Federation, considered it to be their wartime

duty “to work for peace and to endeavor to minimize…the havoc wrought by war.”41

She also

urged women to abandon their work producing munitions and instead become advocates for

peace, calling for an end to the bombings and other wartime uses of the weapons they were

working to produce.42

Additionally, Pankhurst stressed that it was not enough for women simply to oppose war.

Women needed to contribute to the creation of a new system of settling international disputes

without military conflict. In keeping with this, the International Congress of Women at The

Hague did not discuss conventions of warfare. The primary goals of the convention were to “find

some means other than war of settling disputes” and ensure that women had an “equal part with

men on a democratic basis in settling international affairs.”43

Pankhurst’s conception of women’s

Suffrage Societies in 1905 but split from the organization over the NUWSS’s pro-war stance after the outbreak of

WWI. Throughout WWI and the interwar period Swanwick was very involved in the peace movement and served on

the executive of the Union of Democratic Control and was a chairman of the Women’s International League for

Peace and Freedom.

40

E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “The Women’s International League,” Woman’s Dreadnought, October 9, 1915.

41

E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “The Woman’s Cause is Man’s,” Woman’s Dreadnought, July 22, 1916.

42

E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Swashbuckling!” Woman’s Dreadnought, December 23, 1916; E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “A

Separate Peace?” Woman’s Dreadnought, June 23, 1917. For more on women munitions workers in Britain during

WWI see Deborah Thom, Nice Girls and Rude Girls: Women Workers in World War I (London; New York: St.

Martin’s Press, 1998).

43

E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “The War Cure,” Woman’s Dreadnought, October 3, 1914; E. Sylvia Pankhurst,

“International Congress of Women,” Woman’s Dreadnought, May 8, 1915.

16

duties during and after the war – to oppose war and foster the creation of a new international

system – was echoed in the aims of the Congress despite her absence.

As the war progressed, Pankhurst continued to advocate for its speedy resolution. As the

revolutionary Russian government sought to negotiate a separate peace with Germany, Pankhurst

demonstrated her support for the proposed Russian peace terms of no annexations and no

indemnities.44

Even after Russia reached a peace agreement with the Central Powers at Brest-

Litovsk on March 3, 1918, Pankhurst continued to support Russian peace terms. She voiced her

support despite the fact that the Bolshevik separate peace would undermine a united Allied

victory and hinder the British peace movement as it allowed Germany the opportunity to launch

a western offensive which effectively put an end to hopes that an immediate peace was imminent

for Britain and it allies.45

Pankhurst renewed her support for the terms of no annexations and no

indemnities as the Allies began to discuss the sort of peace terms that would be imposed on

Germany and the other Central Powers. Believing that the German people should have the right

to determine their own government in the wake of the First World War, she argued that in

addition to her previously stated peace terms the “rights of peoples to decide their own

destinies,” the creation of an “international Federation of Socialist Republics,” and an

international meeting of workers, should also be guaranteed.46

Pankhurst criticized the Paris

Peace Conference proposals for falling fall short of her recommended terms and for continuing a

legacy of secret diplomacy that ultimately benefitted the Great Powers. She believed that Jan

44

E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “A Separate Peace?” Woman’s Dreadnought, June 23, 1917; E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “How to

Secure Peace,” Workers’ Dreadnought, January 5, 1918.

45

Ceadel, Semi-Detached Idealists, 233.

46

E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Peace!” October 12, 1918; E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Peace Coming? Where is the Labour

Party?” Workers’ Dreadnought, November 2, 1918.

17

Smuts’s proposal of enforcement through commercial boycott and military action against the

aggressor nation would lead to another war.47

Pankhurst also criticized the League of Nations,

which she termed “the Capitalist League of Nations,” because she contended that it was “a

League of powerful Governments to control the world as they please.” She disagreed with the

establishment of the mandate system as well, reasoning that the powerful nations would hinder

the development of socialism in their mandatory territories.48

Not only did the peace terms

ensure a capitalist supremacy, claimed Pankhurst, they ensured that foreign policy would

continue to be determined by “the self same clique” which brought Britain into the war.49

Though a new international system was established in the form of the League of Nations, this

was not enough for Pankhurst, whose pacifism was rooted in the belief that the entire system of

power needed to be overthrown, preferably through a socialist revolution.50

Pankhurst continually advocated for women’s presence in politics and often used the war

to justify this inclusion. Without women, she argued, the international system would remain

unchanged, and it would only be a matter of time before another war was fought over material

47

E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “The League of Nations,” Workers’ Dreadnought, January 18, 1919. For more on Smuts’s

proposal for a League of Nations see George Curry, “Woodrow Wilson, Jan Smuts, and the Versailles Settlement,”

The American Historical Review 66, no. 4 (July 1, 1961): 968–86, doi:10.2307/1845866; Erez Manela, The

Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (Oxford; New

York: Oxford University Press, 2007); Mark Mazower, No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the

Ideological Origins of the United Nations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 40–42.

48

E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “The League of Capitalism,” Workers’ Dreadnought, February 22, 1919. For more on

mandates and specifically women’s involvement in the mandate system see Susan Pedersen, “The Meaning of the

Mandates System: An Argument,” Geschichte Und Gesellschaft 32, no. 4 (October 1, 2006): 560–82; Susan

Pedersen, “Metaphors of the Schoolroom: Women Working the Mandates System of the League of Nations,”

History Workshop Journal 66, no. 1 (2008): 188–207.

49

E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “A Robbers’ Peace, Attempt to Enslave German Workers,” Workers’ Dreadnought, May 17,

1919.

50

Not all of those on the Left shared the same opinion of the League, however. For an analysis of how the League of

Nations was viewed by various parties and political organizations in Britain see Helen McCarthy, The British People

and the League of Nations: Democracy, Citizenship and Internationalism C. 1918-45 (Manchester; New York:

Distributed in the U.S. exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 46–70.

18

gain and Great Power politics. Her opposition to the war and her work to draw attention to how

war negatively affected members of society outside of the trenches extended to her critique of

the peace settlement. The terms negotiated at the Paris Peace Conference failed to challenge the

system that, according to Pankhurst, initially brought Europe into the Great War. Pankhurst was

disappointed in the terms of the peace settlement and in women’s wartime peace activism. In her

editorial “We Did Not Stop It” she described a profound guilt for not preventing or ending the

war. Pankhurst was particularly taken by the accusations Andreas Latzko made against women in

his book Men In War.51

Latzko recalled his experiences in the war and criticized women for not

doing more to end the war. He pointed to the militancy and level of activism of women in the

suffrage movement and questioned whether such activism could have been employed by women

either to prevent or stop the war far sooner than it was. Responding to his assessment Pankhurst

agreed that women could have done more in the campaign for peace, and commented on the

unpopularity of the movement stating that, “yes, women endured torture for the franchise; but,

then, votes for women were the fashion.”52

Pankhurst concurred with his criticism, further

conceding that “women, who were to make all wars impossible; women, self-advertised as the

beings who would save mankind by bringing the spirit of tender motherhood into politics” had

failed to achieve any of these goals.53

Throughout the war, Pankhurst attached her hopes to the

possibilities and power of women’s peace activism, but at the war’s end she made it clear that

her high expectations remained unmet.

51

Andreas Latzko (1867-1943) was an Austro-Hungarian writer, playwright and journalist who served in WWI as

an officer in the Austrian army. His book Men In War was reviewed in major publications such as the New York

Times, the New York Sun, the Chicago Daily Tribune, shortly after it was translated into English in 1918. Andreas

Latzko, Men in War, trans. Adele Szold Seltzer (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1918).

52

Pankhurst, “We Did Not Stop It,” Workers’ Dreadnought, December 7, 1918.

53

Ibid.

19

The modern British peace movement began with the Great War, but it was not united by

a clear doctrine. Instead, pacifism remained individually conceived along religious, political, or

humanitarian lines.54

Pankhurst’s commitment to a socialist inspired pacifism, which

incorporated women as the ideal agents of peace, is one example of this. In keeping with socialist

critiques of the war, Pankhurst viewed capitalism and imperialism, and the Great Power rivalries

they created, as the primary causes of the war. Pankhurst also maintained that women’s

exclusion from the political system contributed to the outbreak of war, and she saw women’s

political participation as the logical solution not only to putting an end to the current war but as a

means of preventing any future wars. Women’s activism and socialism now bore Pankhurst’s

hopes for a peaceful future, and in the aftermath of the Great War, the growing threat to

socialism and women’s rights was fascism.

54

Ceadel, Pacifism in Britain, 1914-1945, 17, 31.

20

CHAPTER III

THE MENACE OF FASCISM

In the immediate aftermath of WWI, Pankhurst focused on socialism. From 1918 until

1924 when it ceased publication, her paper the Workers’ Dreadnought was filled with articles

supporting the Bolshevik revolution, communism, and socialism even though she was expelled

from the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1921 after she refused to turn over the Workers’

Dreadnought to Party control. Benito Mussolini’s March on Rome in 1922 marked the beginning

of the rise of fascist governments in Europe. Pankhurst’s disillusionment with organized

Communism and the Communist revolution in Russia was furthered by Mussolini’s recognition

of the Soviet Government.55

Pankhurst’s opposition to fascism first appeared in the Workers’

Dreadnought in the same year that witnessed Mussolini’s ascent to power and was expressed in

communist terms.56

Her critique of fascism became broader and more severe, however, when

confronted with the rise of Hitler, the Italian invasion of Abyssinia, and the outbreak of the

Spanish Civil War.

While many people, including British politicians, demonstrated ambivalence in regard to

fascism in the interwar period, Pankhurst’s views of fascism were consistently negative. In the

first years of her opposition, Pankhurst conceptualized fascism as a product of capitalism. “Let

55

E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Our View,” Workers’ Dreadnought, February 9, 1923.

56

Those who subscribed to this conception of fascism understood it as an agent of capitalism and the bourgeoisie.

This interpretation of fascism (including German National Socialism) was formally adopted by the Third

International in 1924. For an analysis of this interpretation of fascism see Payne, A History of Fascism, 1914-1945,

443–444. Pankhurst’s opposition to fascism was also influenced by Silvio Corio, her Italian partner and father to her

son Richard, who routinely published articles about Italian fascism in the New Times and Ethiopia News. Pankhurst,

Sylvia Pankhurst, Artist and Crusader, 185.

21

there be no mistake,” she declared in 1922, “Fascism is an international menace…the White

Terror of modern Capitalism.” She went on to explain that fascist organizing was “based on the

conditions of modern industrial society.”57

Pankhurst reflected on the rise of Italian fascism in

the wake of the March on Rome calling Mussolini “the renegade ex-socialist who deserted the

Party to join the Jingoes in the war…supplied with funds by the great industrial employers of

Italy.”58

This idea of fascism as linked to industrialism, and more importantly capitalism, was a

common feature of Pankhurst’s articles about fascism in the Workers’ Dreadnought.

Refusing to accept the Daily Herald’s stance that fascism presented no threat to the

international community, Pankhurst urged people to recognize the dangers of fascism. As the

Italian fascist government began enacting new laws, Pankhurst repeatedly tried to convince her

readers that fascism spelled destruction for socialism and workers’ rights in Italy. She opposed

the idea put forth by the Daily Herald’s editor Hamilton Fyfe that fascism was a mild form of

socialism, arguing that the position of fascism was clear. It stood for “aggressive and oppressive

industrial Capitalism.”59

After the Italian government lowered wages and increased the working

hours of railway workers, Pankhurst highlighted this new policy as just one more way in which

fascism fostered the oppression of workers.60

Pankhurst also contended that the rise of fascism

was linked to socialism, specifically to its failure. In a 1923 editorial she argued that “the

Socialists, having failed to make good their promise to create a new society,” opened the way

57

E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “The Fascisti Menace,” Workers’ Dreadnought, November 11, 1922.

58

E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “The Truth About the Fascisti,” Workers’ Dreadnought, November 4, 1922.

59

E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Our Views,” Workers’ Dreadnought, June 28, 1923.

60

E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Our View,” Workers’ Dreadnought, March 10, 1923.

22

“for Fascism to rebuild the old.”61

As the fascist government worked to secure its power in Italy,

Pankhurst became less concerned with socialists’ culpability in its rise and instead demonstrated

a concern that she was the only journalist in Britain aware of the dangers of fascism.

Pankhurst had strong opinions about the ills of fascism, but was concerned that neither

the government nor her old allies shared them. Pankhurst was particularly skeptical of Prime

Minister Bonar Law’s willingness to continue diplomatic relations with Italy after the fascist

seizure of power.62

She criticized Law for having “entered into cordial relations with the Fascisti

Government, without any hint of refusal to recognise it as constitutional.”63

For Pankhurst, this

represented a sharp departure from the attitude of the British government when faced with

another revolution, in Russia. After posing the question why was there such a different reception

in Britain to the Russian Revolution and the revolution of Mussolini in Italy, she answered that

“the Russian Revolution was a menace to Capitalism,” while the fascist revolution was a

“support to it and a ruthless attack upon the working class.”64

Once again Pankhurst emphasized

British acceptance of fascism, despite its status as a foreign ideology.

Pankhurst was disappointed not only in the British government’s acceptance of fascism

but also in the support of suffragists, specifically the International Women’s Suffrage Alliance,

for fascist leadership.65

She underscored her disapproval of the decision of the IWSA to contact

61

E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Our View,” Workers’ Dreadnought, November 3, 1923.

62

As Prime Minister Bonar Law met with Benito Mussolini,, Raymond Poincaré, and Georges Theunis in London in

December of 1922 in an attempt to resolve the problem of French aggression as a response to Germany’s default on

its war reparations. See R. J. Q. Adams, Bonar Law (London: John Murray, 1999), 384; Andrew Taylor, Bonar Law

(London: Haus, 2006), 121–122, 158.

63

E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “The Fascisti Menace,” Workers’ Dreadnought, November 11, 1922.

64

E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “The Outlook,” Workers’ Dreadnought, November 11, 1922.

65

The IWSA was founded in Berlin in 1904, though for most of its existence it was headquartered in London. The

first president of the organization was Carrie Chapman Catt, the head of the National American Woman Suffrage

23

Mussolini during its annual congress in Rome. Describing this decision in the Workers’

Dreadnought Pankhurst denounced the organization for disgracing itself “by asking the brigand

Mussolini to receive a deputation of its members.”66

Pankhurst leveled criticism at the IWSA

after the conference took place. As a preface to her main critique she stated that IWSA “has long

been representative of the more backward elements in the feminist movement” and was

becoming obsolete because it still focused on Parliamentarism while the “most forward

movements” tended to “reach out towards the Soviets.”67

This, however, was not the most

grievous error of the IWSA. The organization appointed Mussolini president of its annual

congress in Rome thereby achieving “a dishonourable notoriety” according to Pankhurst. Not

surprisingly, Pankhurst added, “in addressing the Conference, the dictator showed

himself…opposed to everything for which the pioneers of the women’s movement stood.”68

Once again Pankhurst found herself expressing an opinion in direct opposition to her former

suffrage colleagues, but just as with her opposition to the First World War, this did not alter her

views or her willingness to express them.

Pankhurst’s willingness to voice dissent perhaps contributed to her severe criticism of the

fascist government’s suppression of opposition in Italy. In particular, Pankhurst highlighted the

government’s targeted intimidation of communists and socialists, including those who still held

political office. These opposition groups were often the victims of violent crimes and arrested

Association, who served until 1923. From 1923 to 1946 Margery Corbett Ashby of Britain served as president.

Other British members included Millicent Fawcett, president of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies,

Virginia Crawford, Mary Sheepshanks, and Ethel Snowden.

66

E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Our View,” Workers’ Dreadnought, March 3, 1923.

67

E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Our View,” Workers’ Dreadnought, May 26, 1923.

68

Ibid.

24

while Italian Fascisti were pardoned after committing those very crimes.69

In an editorial

Pankhurst also detailed how Italian Socialist MPs were subjected to physical abuse and police

raids, despite the fact that they had been democratically elected.70

Italian Fascisti also threatened

a freedom close to Pankhurst’s heart. In an attempt to further stifle opposition, the government’s

fascist squads destroyed the printing presses of their rivals and government officials were given

final approval of the appointment of newspaper editors, which enabled them to censor

dissenters.71

Pankhurst’s critique of fascism went beyond unsavory election tactics such as the

intimidation of voters at the ballot box in order to ensure a fascist victory. She was emphatic that

violence was integral to fascism.72

After witnessing Hitler’s rise to power in Germany over ten

years after the Fascist party took power in Italy, Pankhurst contended that “every impartial

person who has studied Fascist and Nazi history and doctrine knows that its main feature is the

violent elimination of opposition and the literal extermination of opponents who refuse to be

silenced.”73

Violent suppression of opponents was therefore not unique to Germany or Italy but

would occur wherever fascism took hold, according to Pankhurst, and therefore it could not be

tolerated.

69

E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Our View,” Workers’ Dreadnought, December 9, 1922.

70

E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Our View,” Workers’ Dreadnought, February 17, 1923.

71

E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “The Truth About the Fascisti,” Workers’ Dreadnought, November 4, 1922; E. Sylvia

Pankhurst, “Our View,” Workers’ Dreadnought, July 21, 1923; E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Our View,” Workers’

Dreadnought, December 22, 1923. For more on Italian Fascism see Alexander De Grand, Italian Fascism : Its

Origins & Development, 3rd ed. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000).

72

“Fascist Election Methods,” Workers’ Dreadnought, May 3, 1924.

73

E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Ras Imru In Chains,” New Times and Ethiopia News, February 6, 1937. For more on how

violence was inherent in fascist governments see E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Our View,” Workers’ Dreadnought,

November 3, 1923. For two influential accounts of the rise of the Nazis see Anthony Nicholls, Weimar and the Rise

of Hitler, 4th ed. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000); Conan Fischer, The Rise of the Nazis, 2nd ed.

(Manchester ;New York: Distributed exclusively in the USA by Palgrave, 2002). For an influential work on the

Nazis in power see Ian Kershaw, The Nazi Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation, 4th ed.

(London: Arnold, 2000).

25

Pankhurst continued to dedicate herself to exposing the truth behind male-dominated

bellicose regimes and called attention to the harmful effects that war had on women by applying

these same critiques to militaristic fascist regimes. Even before Italy and Germany threatened the

peace of Europe, Pankhurst’s opposition to their fascist governments was linked to the pacifist

beliefs that she expressed during the Great War. Once again her opposition was influenced by

her political viewpoint and concern about the status of women. While the terms of her

commitment to peace were modified as Pankhurst reevaluated her politics when confronted with

a changing political landscape, certain core beliefs remained.

In October of 1935, after months marked by border skirmishes and Ethiopian appeals for

League of Nations intervention, fascist Italy invaded Ethiopia.74

Pankhurst immediately opposed

the Italian invasion and from the publication of the first issue of her newspaper the New Times

and Ethiopia News in London in May 1936, she worked to publicize the Ethiopian cause and win

over British public support. She viewed the Italian invasion as a violation of the principles the

League of Nations established in order to prevent another war and allow nations to determine

their own government. In the first years after the Italian invasion Pankhurst continued to pressure

the British public and the British government to take steps in support of Ethiopia. In addition to

seeing the League as the best hope for providing an international solution to the fascist advance

in Ethiopia, through the idea of collective security and the economic sanctions enshrined within

the League Covenant, Pankhurst argued that the British government also had an important role to

74

For more on this period of Ethiopian history see Saheed Adejumobi, The History of Ethiopia (Westport, Conn.:

Greenwood Press, 2007); Alberto Sbacchi, Legacy of Bitterness: Ethiopia and Fascist Italy, 1935-1941

(Lawrenceville, NJ: Red Sea Press, 1997); Bahru Zewde, A History of Modern Ethiopia, 1855-1991, 2nd ed.

(Oxford: Addis Ababa University Press, 2001).

26

play.75

Under no circumstances, according to Pankhurst, should the British government

recognize the Italian seizure of Ethiopia. She commended those countries that first declared they

would not recognize the Italian conquest writing that “these honourable Powers may spur the

Great Powers to save the League from destruction and humanity from a Fascist world war.”76

Pankhurst continually reminded her readers that the fight was not over, that despite lack of

interest shown by the rest of the British press and the government in the years after the conquest

began, Ethiopians continued to fight for the independence of their country.77

For Pankhurst the

decision to support Ethiopians in their continued struggle against Italian fascist invaders was

based on her support of the League Covenant as well as the maintenance of an international

peace. She felt that such a stance should be readily adopted by the British people and the

international community. In an article in the New Times and Ethiopia News she wrote that the

“duty of all honest people” was clear because the “violations of Fascism—the arch-promoter of

dissension, violence and civil war” occurred before the invasion of Ethiopia and would continue

to mount until fascism was defeated.78

The injustice and violations caused by fascism would not

be limited to Ethiopia as Pankhurst saw this crisis as larger than Ethiopia.

75

E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Our Policy,” New Times and Ethiopia News, May 5, 1936; E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Call for

Justice,” New Times and Ethiopia News, June 13, 1936; E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “The Great Powers Betrayed Us,” New

Times and Ethiopia News, July 11, 1936; E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “The Fight for Justice,” New Times and Ethiopia

News, July 4, 1936. For a historiographical review of scholarship on the League see Susan Pedersen, “Back to the

League of Nations,” The American Historical Review 112, no. 4 (October 1, 2007): 1091–1117,

doi:10.2307/40008445.

76

E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Italy’s Aggression Must Be Defeated,” New Times and Ethiopia News, May 16, 1936. See

also E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “This Betrayal Must Not Stand,” New Times and Ethiopia News, June 27, 1936.

77

For example see E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Italy’s Aggression Must Be Defeated,” New Times and Ethiopia News,

May 16, 1936; E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Plain Truth,” New Times and Ethiopia News, October 24, 1936; E. Sylvia

Pankhurst, “Guns Against Gibraltar,” New Times and Ethiopia News, July 24, 1937; E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Britain –

Whither?” New Times and Ethiopia News, March 19, 1938; E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “An Urgent Plea For a Change of

Policy,” New Times and Ethiopia News, December 10, 1939.

78

E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Not for C3 Men,” New Times and Ethiopia News, September 5, 1936.

27

A central argument as to why governments and people should act to stop fascism,

reasoned Pankhurst, was that it was an insidious and dangerous disease that threatened world

democracy. Not only did she link Italian fascism to Hitler’s rise to power and the Nazi

movement, but she also linked the Italian invasion of Ethiopia to the Spanish Civil War.79

Not

only had Ethiopia and Spain been “sacrificed to the god of war,” that sacrifice was in vain.80

Pankhurst lamented that “the horrors which are suffered in Ethiopia and Spain to-day may at any

time break upon any and every other country, for the peace of the world is broken, and none can

tell how fast or how far the breach will spread.”81

Fascism was not just threatening because it

was spreading throughout Europe and Africa, Pankhurst warned that fascism would plunge the

world into another global war.

From the first issue of the New Times and Ethiopia News published May 5, 1936, the

motto of the paper was “Remember: Everywhere, Always, Fascism Means War.”82

Pankhurst

emphatically and repeatedly stated that the recognition of the conquest of Ethiopia would not

lead to a lasting world peace. She called attention to statements made by Mussolini which

highlighted the futility of this policy, citing a speech he made in Milan in which he

“categorically denounced” what he called “‘the three great illusions of post-war Europe’ –

disarmament, collective security, and indivisible peace.” She beseeched her readers to “recognise

clearly that the Fascist Dictatorships ever since they rose to power have striven ceaselessly to

79

“Fascists Versus Nazis,” ESPP.

80

E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Not Universal,” New Times and Ethiopia News, October 10, 1936; E. Sylvia Pankhurst,

“Fascism As It Is,” New Times and Ethiopia News, December 19, 1936.

81

E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “The Grave International Situation,” New Times and Ethiopia News, November 28, 1936.

82

Though the paper was printed with the publication day of May 9, 1936 the first issue of the paper was published

on May 5, 1936. Richard Pankhurst, “Sylvia and New Times and Ethiopia News,” in Sylvia Pankhurst: From Artist

to Anti-Fascist, ed. Richard Pankhurst and Ian Bullock, 1992, 155.

28

frustrate these ideals.”83

Labeling fascism “the great war menace” Pankhurst drew a sharp

distinction between the contemporary international situation and the period before the First

World War.84

This time, however, it was clear that war was on the horizon. While she herself

worked to maintain peace in hopes of avoiding another war she contended that:

our desire that Europe shall be spared the horror of another great war must not blind us to

the fact that forces over which we have no control are rapidly making for war. Many of

those mainly responsible for the conduct of New Times and Ethiopia News already more

than a long decade ago held and exposed the view that Fascism would lead to war. The

contention, alas, has proved correct.85

In the wake of the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, Pankhurst argued, no one could deny that fascism

was putting the world on the path of war.

The memory of the Great War and its devastating effects resonated in Pankhurst’s

writing. Echoing arguments that she had made about women’s suffering during the Great War,

Pankhurst proclaimed that “war is the inferno of women, and under Fascism the State is

perpetually at civil war!”86

She highlighted the role of Ethiopian women as combatants in the

face of fascism arguing that the “resistance of the people is so desperate that even the women

have taken up arms to repel the invaders.”87

It was not, however, as combatants that Ethiopian

women suffered most during Italian occupation. Women were the victims of poison gas attacks,

bombings, and sexual assaults.88

According to Pankhurst, there were widespread reports of

83

E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Britain, Fascism and the League,” New Times and Ethiopia News, November 7, 1936. See

also E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Ethiopia and the World: The Next Steps,” New Times and Ethiopia News, July 25, 1936.

84

“Fascism Today,” ca. 1935, ESPP.

85

E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “The Urgent Duty of Democracy,” New Times and Ethiopia News, June 13, 1936.

86

E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Fascism As It Is,” New Times and Ethiopia News, November 28, 1936.

87

E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “International Law,” New Times and Ethiopia News, August 24, 1936.

88

E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Urgently We Ask Your Assistance,” New Times and Ethiopia News, August 15, 1936; E.

Sylvia Pankhurst, “Ethiopia Wins Her Seat,” New Times and Ethiopia News, October 3, 1936.

29

Ethiopian women being forced into prostitution for the benefit of Italian troops.89

She wrote that

the Italian fascist government had committed crimes against the people of Ethiopia, “above all

against the women, whom, from the poorest labourers’ wives and daughters to the most sheltered

ladies in the land…[were] requisitioned like cattle for the use of [Italy’s] Blackshirt troops.”90

In

the November 21, 1936, issue of the New Times and Ethiopia News Pankhurst published an

account of Italian abuses of Ethiopian women as reported to the Ethiopian Legation in London

by a woman who had recently fled Ethiopia. The woman recounted how Italian treatment of

Ethiopian women had grown progressively worse after the Italians gained control of the capital

Addis Ababa. She stated that “ten or twelve Italian soldiers would get hold of any Ethiopian

woman and abuse her in turn in such a way that many maidens and young women have died as

the result.”91

Pankhurst urged her readers to bring these facts to the attention of all women’s

organizations in order to pressure the British government and the League to take action,

demanding an end to “these atrocities, and especially the hideous maltreatment of women,

through whose most cruel and grievous sufferings two races are brought to shame and sorrow.”

She continued her condemnation of Italian atrocities against women, arguing that using “their

very womanhood as a means of punishment and pain is the deepest indignity which can be

89

E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “The Infamous Anniversary: October 3, 1936,” New Times and Ethiopia News, October 3,

1936; E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Facts – Not Fiction,” New Times and Ethiopia News, February 13, 1937; E. Sylvia

Pankhurst, “The ‘Unjust Betrayal of Abyssinia’, A Conway Hall Meeting,” New Times and Ethiopia News, February

20, 1937. Ethiopian women were exploited by Italian soldiers and bureaucrats even though sexual relations were

prohibited between citizens and subjects; see Charles Burdett, “Journeys to Italian East Africa 1936–1941:

Narratives of Settlement,” Journal of Modern Italian Studies 5, no. 2 (2000): 222,

doi:10.1080/13545710050084359.

90

E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Ethiopia and the League,” New Times and Ethiopia News, September 19, 1936.

91

“An Ethiopian Woman Tells of the Italian Occupation,” New Times and Ethiopia News, November 21, 1936.

30

heaped on the mothers of men.”92

Once again Pankhurst cited the suffering and devastation

experienced by women during war in order to urge the British people and government to put an

end to the war, though now war was taking place in Africa.

In addition to arguing that fascist war harmed women, Pankhurst also highlighted the

dangers inherent in fascism for women in Italy and Germany as well as in war-torn countries

such as Spain and Ethiopia. Fascism, for Pankhurst, threatened the legacy of the women’s

movement in which she had been an active participant. She was deeply concerned that the

achievements of the women’s movement were “menaced on every hand” as women in Italy and

Germany were being forced out of public and professional life which she viewed as “an attempt

to put back the clock so far as women are concerned, and to reduce them to a position of even

greater subjection than that against which Mary Wollestonecraft [sic] issued her historic

‘Vindication of the Rights of Women’ in 1792.”93

Pankhurst took the Italian Fascist Government

further to task, contending that the government only valued women as reproducers of militant

men who would serve and fight for the fascist cause. She also decried women’s lack of

autonomy in the realm of fascist politics and women’s forcible removal from employment as

teachers and other professional positions. At the end of an article Pankhurst published in the New

Times and Ethiopia News, she exclaimed, “alas, poor woman; hers is a wretched position in the

Fascist State!”94

Furthermore, Pankhurst criticized the Italian penal codes enacted by the Fascist

Government in 1929, which she viewed as placing “women in a position of extreme legal

92

E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Grave News from Abyssinia,” New Times and Ethiopia News, November 21, 1936.

93

“What the Suffragettes Should Do,” ESPP. Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) was an advocate of women’s rights

and an author who was considered to be one of the leading heroines of the feminist movement by Pankhurst and her

contemporaries.

94

E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Fascism As It Is,” New Times & Ethiopia News, November 21, 1936.

31

inferiority towards men in every relationship affected by the law.”95

For Pankhurst then, Nazism

and fascism presented a threat to all of the achievements of the women’s movement and she felt

that women should work against them. Under fascist regimes women were once again subjugated

and therefore, urged Pankhurst, they “must again raise the cry which we heard in the Suffragette

Movement: ‘It’s women for women now,’” and do everything in their power to “save these

sisters of ours.”96

The male-dominated fascist regimes, like the bellicose Great Power

governments of the First World War, were extremely detrimental to the well-being and status of

women.

Pankhurst evoked women’s experiences of war, both in Ethiopia and in Britain, as well as

the denial of women’s rights under fascism in order to persuade women to act. As was the case

when confronted with the outbreak of the Great War, she viewed women’s absence from

international politics as one of the reasons that international peace had been violated and would

continue to be threatened.97

Pankhurst wrote, “In view of this danger, I utter the strongest appeal

I can to women: ROUSE YOURSELVES AGAINST FASCISM…it certainly means war.”98

She

also invoked the legacy of the suffrage movement to inspire women to act to prevent war.

Pankhurst argued that opposing fascism and maintaining peace was a cause “worthy of all the

95

E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Fascism As It Is,” New Times & Ethiopia News, November 28, 1936. In this article

Pankhurst discusses both the terms of the Lateran Accords between the Vatican and Italy as well as changes enacted

in the Italian penal codes, though many were put into effect not in 1929 but in 1931. For more on how this treaty and

penal codes effected Italian women see Victoria De Grazia, How Fascism Ruled Women: Italy, 1922-1945

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 55, 58, 88–91, 137; Perry Willson, The Clockwork Factory:

Women and Work in Fascist Italy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 4; Alexander De Grand, “Women under Italian

Fascism,” The Historical Journal 19, no. 4 (December 1, 1976): 956–959.

96

“The Last Fifty Years,” ESPP. Not all feminists shared Pankhurst’s assessment of fascism. Some even looked to

fascist organizations and their militancy as a continuation of the legacy of the suffrage movement. For more on

British women, and feminists’ involvement with fascism see Gottlieb, Feminine Fascism.

97

Ibid.

98

“What the Suffragettes Should Do,” ESPP.

32

fire and more which the Suffragettes expended in their struggle for the vote.”99

Furthermore, she

felt that women were better suited to be pacifist activists than men because “the most untutored

woman knows in the depths of her heart that war is war, whether the people who are massacred

live in Europe or Africa.”100

In order to end this war in Africa, women needed to “act nationally

and internationally…and take a leaf out of the book of the suffragette, by making themselves felt

in a public way.”101

In particular Pankhurst called on international women’s organizations to take

action to mobilize international opinion by calling attention to “atrocities perpetuated upon these

sisters of ours in Ethiopia.”102

Additionally, she reasoned that women’s organizations should not

be concerned about becoming involved in controversial issues, because there were long-standing

precedents for this. Just as American leaders of the women’s movement such as Lucy Stone and

Lucretia Mott worked to end slavery so, urged Pankhurst, “we of to-day…must recognise our

clamant duty to support the women of Ethiopia against this outrage.”103

Fascism threatened

women’s rights and the legacy of the suffrage movement. For these reasons, as well as because

she saw women as particularly suited to pacifist activism, Pankhurst conceived of women as

ideal agents of anti-fascism.

99

Ibid.

100

E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Women Can Stop War—and Must!” Daily Mirror, October 11, 1935.

101

Ibid.

102

E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “The Certainty of Hope,” New Times and Ethiopia News, January 30, 1937.

103

Ibid. Pankhurst was not the only one to call attention to slavery, historic or otherwise, in order to support her

case. Some members of the Anti-Slavery Society supported Italian rule in Ethiopia. They reasoned that the

outlawing of slavery by the Italians in order to put an end to the practice of slavery that continued under the rule of

Emperor Haile Selassie was ample justification for supporting Italian colonial rule. For more on the debates about

slavery in Ethiopia see, Suzanne Miers, Slavery in the Twentieth Century: The Evolution of a Global Pattern

(Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2003); Susan Pennybacker, From Scottsboro to Munich: Race and Political

Culture in 1930s Britain (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2009).

33

After almost two years of Italian occupation in Ethiopia, the cause Pankhurst worked so

hard to promote was fading from the headlines of British newspapers and agendas of government

ministers and diplomats.104

Increasingly the matter was considered settled. It was during this

period that Pankhurst continued to push for the enforcement of the League of Nations Covenant

in order to prevent war, but also acknowledged that violent resistance was one of the only

options remaining for Ethiopians. In March of 1937, she described the armed resistance of

Ethiopians as “unwilling violence performed with amazing courage.”105

Pankhurst continued: “to

us it is sorrow, deep and abiding, to write thus of war and to confess, with grief, that Ethiopia in

the sad present can look for the preservation of her existence only to her own fortitude.”106

While

she disapproved of military intervention and the use of force by the international community,

Pankhurst began to realize that those living under fascist dictatorship or under fascist occupation

were running out of options.

As the twin challenges of fascism and war confronted the world community, Pankhurst

persisted in her advocacy for peace and women’s rights. Viewing fascism as intrinsically warlike

she rearticulated her pacifist beliefs in order to incorporate her anti-fascism, allowing for violent

104

This lack of interest was pervasive despite the impassioned speeches the Emperor of Ethiopia, Haile Selassie,

delivered to the League of Nations as the representative of a member state. The most prominent speech made by

Selassie was delivered to the League in June of 1936, after which he was named Time magazine’s Man of the Year.

See Adejumobi, The History of Ethiopia, 53–92. The Emperor also spent his exile (1936-1941) in Bath, England.

Upon his arrival in London he was met by a crowd of supporters who included Sylvia Pankhurst. However, though

Pankhurst’s enthusiasm for his cause remained steadfast, his presence failed to sustain the interest and support of

British politicians and their constituents. See Richard Pankhurst, “Emperor Haile Sellassie’s Arrival in Britain: An

Alternative Autobiographical Draft by Percy Arnold,” Northeast African Studies 9, no. 2 (2002): 1–46. There was

sustained interest on the part of Pan-Africanist activists working in London who collaborated with Pankhurst. For

more on Pankhurst’s activism on issues of race see Pennybacker, From Scottsboro to Munich, 81, 88, 90, 103, 152,

200–201. After the war Pankhurst continued her friendship with Emperor Selassie and in 1956 accepted his

invitation to move to Ethiopia where she died in 1960.

105

E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “The Shame and Pity of It All,” New Times and Ethiopia News, March 13, 1937.

106

Ibid.

34

resistance to fascist regimes. Once again, Pankhurst continued her encouragement of women’s

activism by calling on women to oppose fascism, as she saw it threatening the legacy of the

suffrage movement and the gains women achieved as a result of it.107

In doing so she continued

to carve out a space in the peace movement for women activists, which paralleled the role she

saw for women in the context of the First World War. Pankhurst based this prescribed role for

women on the idea that women were natural advocates for peace and as such should work to

secure a lasting peace through international cooperation and involvement in the political system.

The early years of Pankhurst’s opposition to fascism were thus clearly linked to, and a part of,

the individualized pacifism that she developed in the context of the First World War. Her anti-

fascism began to challenge her commitment to mainstream pacifism, however, as Britain headed

down a road that she was convinced would lead to war.

107

For more on women and Italian Fascism and Nazism see De Grazia, How Fascism Ruled Women; Jill

Stephenson, Women in Nazi Society (Routledge, 2013); Jill Stephenson, Women in Nazi Germany (Harlow, England;

New York: Longman, 2001); Claudia Koonz, Mothers in the Fatherland : Women, the Family, and Nazi Politics, 1st

ed. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987).

35

CHAPTER IV

PEACE THROUGH VICTORY

The next phase of Pankhurst’s anti-fascist activism was focused primarily on one aspect

of fascism; the endless war that it would cause. Her socialist critique of fascism became muted

and the pacifist component of her activism became more pronounced. It is during this period that

we see the strength of Pankhurst’s pacifism before she ultimately decided to support the Allies in

the Second World War. Her shift away from the peace movement stemmed from her belief that

wars would continue to occur if fascism continued to exist, rather than an abandonment of her

core values. This shift coincided with the pacifist movement’s loss of most of its members, and

the new commitment of those who stayed to a personal-witness pacifism rather than open anti-

war campaigning.108

It was Pankhurst’s desire for peace, however paradoxically, that led to her

support of the war. Pankhurst argued that not only would the fascist governments lead the world

into war, but that in order to create a lasting peace, fascism would have to be overthrown. While

initially she felt this objective could be achieved without the use of force, through the League of

Nations Covenant and the imposition of economic sanctions, when war was declared on

Germany on September 3, 1939, Pankhurst supported the British government’s decision. From

this point on, she conceived of war as both the problem of fascism and the solution to it.

108

Martin Ceadel, “A Legitimate Peace Movement: The Case of Inter-War Britain, 1918-1945,” in Challenge to

Mars: Essays on Pacifism from 1918 to 1945, ed. Peter Brock and Thomas Paul Socknat (Toronto and London:

University of Toronto Press, 1999), 141; Jill Liddington, The Road to Greenham Common: Feminism and Anti-

Militarism in Britain since 1820, Syracuse University Press ed. (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1991),

158–161; Andrew Rigby, “The Peace Pledge Union: From Peace to War, 1936-1945,” in Challenge to Mars: Essays

on Pacifism from 1918 to 1945, ed. Peter Brock and Thomas Paul Socknat (Toronto and London: University of

Toronto Press, 1999), 176–177.

36

In the years following Neville Chamberlain’s appointment as Prime Minister, the League

of Nations and the governments of Europe continued to be confronted with the growing

territorial ambitions of Italy, Germany, and Japan. While Chamberlain and his government

attempted to avoid another world war by relying on the policy of appeasement, or granting of

concessions to the would-be belligerent nations, Pankhurst condemned this approach.109

She

argued that the policy would never succeed because it failed to recognize fundamental aspects of

the nature of fascism. For instance, Pankhurst advised that appeasement would not work because

fascist governments could not be trusted. She went so far as to say that “no agreement with

Fascism is worth the paper it is written upon.”110

Pankhurst also contended that an alliance with

one fascist power would not secure peace. After Chamberlain reached an agreement with

Mussolini to recognize the Italian conquest of Ethiopia, Pankhurst wrote scathingly that the

agreement was “a gross betrayal of International Justice and our national honour.” Furthermore,

she announced that it was “a cruel and utterly unjustified blow at Ethiopia who trusted the word

of England.” 111

After highlighting the lack of popular support in Britain for such an agreement,

she returned to the idea that fascist governments could not be trusted, insisting that British

diplomats failed to “realise that Fascism neither keeps engagements nor believes in them.”112

109

For an analysis of the British policies headed by Chamberlain in the lead up to the Second World War and a

definition of appeasement see Williamson Murray, “Britain,” in The Origins of World War Two: The Debate

Continues, ed. Joseph Maiolo and Robert Boyce (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 273–85; Zara Steiner,

The Triumph of the Dark: European International History, 1933-1939 (Oxford; New York: Oxford University

Press, 2011), 329, 604–609, 647–648.

110

E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “The Fight for Justice,” New Times and Ethiopia News, July 4, 1936; see also E. Sylvia

Pankhurst, “Justice Will Triumph Yet,” New Times and Ethiopia News, August 8, 1936.

111

E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Down With the Chamberlain Treaty,” New Times and Ethiopia News, April 23, 1938.

112

Ibid.

37

Pankhurst was also critical of appeasement because she argued that no agreements or

recognition of fascist aggression would prevent fascism from further military action in the future.

According to Pankhurst, the fascist governments were just exploiting Britain’s opposition to war

by “blackmailing us with the threat to make a war in which we ourselves will be involved, unless

we permit them to strangle without interference victim after victim.”113

Furthermore, the idea

that “peace can repose on injustice” was “wholly false” and thus the sacrifice of vulnerable

nations in an attempt to secure a lasting peace would never succeed, counseled Pankhurst. 114

Finally, Pankhurst pointed out the fallacy behind the policy of appeasement, arguing that it

would never prevent war. She argued that there was a fundamental misunderstanding of the term

“peace” in this context, particularly in the wake of the Czechoslovakia crisis.115

Pankhurst urged

the government to recognize that what was being discussed was “‘our British peace,’ for the

peace of the world is not being preserved. It was broken long ago, and now to the three victim

nations, Ethiopia, Spain and China, must be added a fourth–Czechoslovakia.”116

Appeasement,

in other words, had never led, and would never lead to peace.

Pankhurst continually challenged the notion that appeasement was the only means to

avoid war and secure peace, and she offered a range of alternatives to this policy. She maintained

that the question to be debated was not whether Britain should go to war, but rather “whether we

113

E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Pernicious Dictators,” New Times and Ethiopia News, July 17, 1937.

114

E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Shall By-gones Be By-gones?” New Times and Ethiopia News, July 31, 1937.

115

In 1938 Hitler’s territorial ambitions turned to Czechoslovakia. Amid growing demonstrations and pressures

from Germans living in the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia the threat of a German military attack grew and

became a major concern of the governments of Great Britain, France and Czechoslovakia. Under Chamberlain’s

policy of appeasement, Great Britain decided to negotiate with Hitler. The subsequent Munich Agreement was

reached on September 30, 1938 and gave Germany the right to annex certain territories in Czechoslovakia. See

Steiner, The Triumph of the Dark, 552–670.

116

E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Another Sacrifice of the Innocents,” New Times and Ethiopia News, September 24, 1938.

38

shall give our moral and financial support” to those countries threatened by fascism.117

Furthermore, Pankhurst maintained that inaction on Britain’s part had the same result as

intervention on the side of the fascists. She contended that “the abandonment of Ethiopia to the

aggressor [was] as disastrous to Europe as to her.” If not for the policy of appeasement she

continued, “the aggression of Italian Fascism could have been curbed, in the first day of

invasion, by a strong diplomatic ‘No’, even without the firing of a single gun.”118

Fascism had to

be brought down by both internal and external pressure, according to Pankhurst. She asserted

that external pressure in the form of economic and political boycotts of the aggressor nations of

Italy and Germany was the true policy of pacifists.119

If democratic nations refused to engage the

fascist governments diplomatically, Pankhurst reasoned, the fascist powers would be subject to

such severe pressure from its citizens that “in a tremendous crisis Fascism will go crashing to its

doom.”120

Pankhurst returned to this idea repeatedly, arguing that “revolt against the immoral

cruelty of Fascism is inevitable.”121

She also called on women to participate in this revolt against

fascism, urging “the leaders of our women’s organisations to broadcast to the mothers of those

countries one message: Pull your war-making Dictators down, so that we women may reach out

our hand of friendship to the world around.”122

Adhering to her pacifist principles, Pankhurst

advocated policies which would cause the demise of fascism rather than appease its leaders.

117

E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Honourable Men,” New Times and Ethiopia News, March 5, 1938.

118

E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “No Friends Must Falter,” New Times and Ethiopia News, January 29, 1938.

119

E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Lest We Forget,” New Times and Ethiopia News, February 19, 1938.

120

E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “The Work in Front of Us,” New Times and Ethiopia News, July 24, 1937.

121

E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Not Dead But Fighting On,” New Times and Ethiopia News, August 28, 1937.

122

E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “What the League of Nations Set-Back Means to Mothers,” New Times and Ethiopia News,

July 22, 1939. For studies of Italian women’s resistance to fascism see Jane Slaughter, Women and the Italian

Resistance, 1943-1945 (Denver, CO: Arden Press, 1997); Perry Willson, “Saints and Heroines: Re-Writing the

39

Pankhurst also criticized those who supported the policy of appeasement by arguing that

the policy was true to the pacifist viewpoint. Ethiopia and Spain in particular, she argued, were

victims of this policy of non-intervention legitimized by an inauthentic pacifism. In regard to the

lack of formal response or aid on the part of the British government in the Spanish Civil War,

Pankhurst warned that “misguided Pacifism, almost equally distant on this occasion from

Humanity and Charity as war-mongers are, abets this policy.”123

Additionally, this appeasement

policy had necessitated military action, or the preparation for it, in countries such as Ethiopia

which were on the path to progress socially and politically. Pankhurst took issue with those who

supported the build-up of armaments, contending that “from progressive disarmament we have

passed to the armaments drive, urged on by even people who have been life-long pacifists and

who staunchly maintained their plea for peace by negotiation, even throughout the terrible Great

War, 1914-1918, when the pacifist convictions of many suffered eclipse.”124

While she still

supported a peaceful resolution to the growing rise and aggression of fascism, she questioned

those who blindly maintained their pacifist beliefs without taking into consideration the current

international situation. Highlighting the particularities of the British context she counseled that

History of Italian Women in the Resistance,” in Opposing Fascism: Community, Authority and Resistance in

Europe, ed. Tim Kirk and Anthony McElligott (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Rosetta D’Angelo

and Barbara Maria Zaczek, eds., Resisting Bodies: Narratives of Italian Partisan Women (Chapel Hill, NC: Annali

D’Italianistica, 2008).

123

E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “And the World Looks On,” New Times and Ethiopia News, August 28, 1937. For general

works on the Spanish Civil War see Helen Graham, The Spanish Republic at War, 1936-1939 (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 2002); Stanley Payne, The Spanish Civil War, the Soviet Union, and Communism

(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004); Paul Preston, The Spanish Civil War: Reaction, Revolution and Revenge

(New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2007); Stanley Payne, The Spanish Civil War (New York: Cambridge University

Press, 2012). For more on British involvement in the Spanish Civil War see Tom Buchanan, Britain and the Spanish

Civil War (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Tom Buchanan, The Impact of the Spanish

Civil War on Britain: War, Loss and Memory (Portland, Or.: Sussex Academic Press, 2007); Hugo García, Truth

about Spain!: Mobilizing British Public Opinion, 1936-1939 (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2010).

124

E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Anglo-Italian Pact Thrice Violated,” New Times and Ethiopia News, June 10, 1939.

40

“we are pacifists in Britain; we are peace lovers, but let us not be slavish; let us not consort with

thieves and murderers to our own undoing, and to the sacrifice of our children’s birthright of

honor and freedom.”125

In other words, though appeasement might appear to be in line with

pacifist goals, in reality it was costing pacifists the ideals they sought to protect.

Once again, Pankhurst called on women to become involved in international governance

as a way of opposing fascism and maintaining international peace. She highlighted the pacifist

activism of women during and after the First World War and argued that the international

community was beginning to recognize the important contributions made by women’s peace

activism. Pankhurst attributed the League’s decision to establish a commission for the study of

the status of women to “the strenuous work of women for peace.”126

Additionally, women were

valued in the international organization because in every country women’s organizations

provided “the most faithful support, the most constant work, for the League of Nations and for

peace itself.” 127

As was the case in the context of the First World War, Pankhurst maintained

that women were the important force behind the movement for peace. Additionally, Pankhurst

challenged mothers who were “long excluded from public affairs,” but were now full citizens in

Britain and many other countries, to continue to work for the continuation of the peace that was

threatened by fascism. She declared that the challenge to “lawless violence…must come from

women as well as men.”128

Without women’s support lasting peace could not be attained.

125

Ibid.

126

E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “The League and the Work and Status of Women,” New Times and Ethiopia News, October

2, 1937.

127

Ibid.

128

E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Challenge of the Dictators to the Peaceable World,” New Times and Ethiopia News,

December 11, 1937.

41

Pankhurst, however, valued women for more than their role as advocates for peace. She

also highlighted women’s participation in military endeavors, though in this case she judged

them by the cause they were fighting for. She used the fact that women were taking up arms

against fascism to demonstrate the severity of the situation. Pankhurst described how Spanish

and Ethiopian women were “going as volunteers to the front to defend their country from

invasion – killed by Fascism.”129

In addition to demonstrating the loss of life due to fascism,

Pankhurst used women’s participation in armed conflict to show how the violations of fascism

were so severe that women were forced to this extreme out of courage and a desire for justice.130

Pankhurst also argued that these women took up arms to “to avenge the death and torture of their

men and the outrages cruelly perpetuated on their sex.” Ethiopian women did not take this task

lightly, Pankhurst stressed that it was “no more affair of parades and uniforms, but of war at the

sternest and most ruthless in which…brave women are bearing a man’s part.”131

This exaltation

of Ethiopian and Spanish women who fought for their countries is a stark contrast to Pankhurst’s

discussion of women fighting for fascist Italy.

Unlike the women in countries fighting against fascism, Pankhurst claimed, Italian

women were being conscripted into military service despite the fact that they lacked full

citizenship rights.132

Firmly opposing the supposed military service of these women, Pankhurst

129

E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Our Illustrations,” New Times and Ethiopia News, July 17, 1937. For more on British

women volunteers in the Spanish Civil War see Angela Jackson, British Women and the Spanish Civil War

(London; New York: Routledge, 2002).

130

E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “No Recognition Uphold the Covenant,” New Times and Ethiopia News, September 11,

1937; E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Honourable Men,” New Times and Ethiopia News, March 5, 1938; E. Sylvia Pankhurst,

“The Struggle Against Fascism,” New Times and Ethiopia News, June 10, 1938.

131

E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Mussolini’s Women Soldiers for Abyssinia,” New Times and Ethiopia News, June 3, 1939.

132

Despite Pankhurst’s claim, Italian women were not enlisted into the Italian armed forces until Allied victory

appeared imminent. On April 14, 1944 women were called by the fascist government to enlist in the Auxiliary

42

contended that “now these Italian women, who have lost under Fascism every right and

protection afforded them by the vanquished democracy, are denied their very womanhood; they

are the first women in history to be mobilised as soldiers to fight in foreign lands.” She went on

to exclaim that “the thing is inhuman, an outrage!” Pankhurst argued that women could never

prosper under fascism because “where the sword rules woman in inevitably the loser.” She

warned, furthermore, that women’s “influence necessarily dwindles when force becomes the

arbiter of all things.”133

While in principle Pankhurst rejected the use of force, she understood the

decision of women to take up arms in countries whose independence was threatened. Women

who fought for fascism were not glorified as courageous fighters, but portrayed as martyrs of a

system of male domination.

Pankhurst maintained her commitment to peace until Britain declared war on Germany in

September of 1939. Even at this moment, however, she still had the makings of a pacifist.

Describing the editorial stance of the paper she wrote, “every fibre of our being is against

war.”134

In invoking her past advocacy for peace, she indicated her support for that position and

described her pacifism as forged through her direct confrontation with the effects of war among

the working class during the time she had spent working in the East End during the First World

War, rather than conceived of in “the bookish abstract.” 135

Nevertheless, despite her first-hand

knowledge of the destructiveness of war, she reluctantly admitted that because she knew the

Women’s Service, or SAF, though it is likely that only a couple thousand women served. De Grazia, How Fascism

Ruled Women, 282.

133

Ibid.

134

E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Our Position Restated and Some Retrospective Information,” New Times and Ethiopia

News, September 16, 1939.

135

Ibid.

43

facts about fascism and understood that fascist victory in Britain would strip British people of

their liberties, she stood “without reserve, for a fight to a finish against the forces of reaction and

violence.”136

In subsequent issues of the New Times and Ethiopia News, she elaborated further

on this complicated and reluctant pro-war stance. She framed the war in the ideological terms of

democracy opposing fascist aggression and dictatorship, and claiming that the war was justified

and that the only way to secure a lasting peace was through the military defeat of fascism; she

had confidence that it would be destroyed and “repulsed by the awakened conscience of

mankind.”137

Pankhurst did not maintain any sympathy for those pacifists who failed to shift their

understanding of what was necessary to achieve a lasting peace. She regarded the Peace Pledge

Union’s work to plan peace terms as admirable, but posed the question: who will be enacting

these terms? “So far as pacifists are concerned, Hitler and his Japanese allies will be masters of

the world, since their consciences admit no opposition to them.”138

From this point forward

Pankhurst viewed those who expressed opposition to the war or worked against it as “aiding a

super-military autocracy, maintained by the sword at home and abroad against a democracy

which has taken up arms very reluctantly with the object only of restoring peace.”139

In this

position, Pankhurst allowed no room for debate or opposition.

136

Ibid.

137

E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “The Case for Justice Restated,” New Times and Ethiopia News, April 27, 1940; E. Sylvia

Pankhurst, “Thoughts on the Festive Season,” New Times and Ethiopia News, December 18, 1937. See also E.

Sylvia Pankhurst, “Peace Through Victory Alone,” New Times and Ethiopia News, May 25, 1940; E. Sylvia

Pankhurst, “Keep Our War Aims Clear,” New Times and Ethiopia News, October 25, 1941; E. Sylvia Pankhurst,

“What is Fascism?” New Times and Ethiopia News, August 21, 1943.

138

E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Face the Facts,” New Times and Ethiopia News, September 23, 1939.

139

E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “The Profound Issue of the War,” New Times and Ethiopia News, October 28, 1939.

44

While she re-conceptualized both the goals and methods of pacifism in response to

fascism, Pankhurst continued to locate women in the struggle for justice and equality as she did

during the suffrage movement and the First World War. She spearheaded the founding of the

Women’s War Emergency Council which worked to alleviate the burdens of war on the home

front. The minutes of the opening meeting detailed Pankhurst’s motivation for starting this

organization. Appearing in the New Times and Ethiopia News, the minutes stated that the

“preliminary meeting had been called because it was believed that during the war many

questions of great importance to women would crop up rapidly and immediate action would be

required.”140

The subsequent meetings and topics of the meetings were described in the pages of

Pankhurst’s paper and demonstrate the organization’s focus on the welfare of women and

children in wartime, when their means of support was in jeopardy while their husbands and sons

fought fascism abroad.141

Once again Pankhurst was dedicated to calling attention to the

hardships that women suffered during war and to organizing women to combat these ills.

Pankhurst also regarded fellow British feminists as duty-bound to fight against fascism.

In a June 1, 1940 article she sharply criticized women’s position under the fascist government of

Nazi Germany, particularly in regard to the newly established “Three-Class Marriage” system,

which favored German women with “untainted” bloodlines.142

Pankhurst attempted to persuade

former suffragettes to join her in righting these fascist wrongs, arguing “we Suffragettes, who led

the world struggle for women’s citizenship, have a mission in the present crisis.” Suffragettes

had a duty, Pankhurst continued, to aid their “sisters in other lands to regain their lost freedom”

140

“Women’s War Emergency Council Formed,” New Times and Ethiopia News, October 14, 1939.

141

“Women’s War Emergency Council,” New Times and Ethiopia News, November 11, 1939; “Women’s War

Emergency Council,” New Times and Ethiopia News, December 23, 1939.

142

For a discussion of Nazi marriage policy see Stephenson, Women in Nazi Society, 37–56.

45

and defend their own.143

While throughout the First World War Pankhurst had attempted

through her publications, speeches and demonstrations to convince British women to refuse to

work in munitions factories, she pressured women to do the opposite during the Second World

War. She urged the government to speed up women’s training so that Britain would “not be short

of men and munitions because the women have not been allowed to help.”144

In both wars

women were the solution to problems created by war, though the terms of the problem had

changed.

While Pankhurst’s opposition to war, and its horrible consequences, appears to conflict

with her support of the Second World War, Pankhurst’s ideas were more complex and

connected. It was not that she abandoned her efforts to achieve lasting peace in the world, but

instead she believed that in order for a final peace to be realized the bellicose fascist dictatorships

had to be met with force. Her political commitment to pacifism was unable to survive the threat

that fascism presented to a democratic system in which women won the right to vote. This was

not uncommon, as those who remained pacifists during WWII often viewed their absolute

dedication to non-violence and opposition to the use of force as a faith rather than a political

commitment.145

For Pankhurst, who retained her concern for the status of women, and marked

out a space for their active participation in society and politics, her support of the war was a

reconfiguration of her commitment to peace and a logical continuation of her earlier activism.

143

“Suffragette’s Point of View, Women Must Fight Hitler,” New Times and Ethiopia News, June 1, 1940.

144

E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Standing Up To It,” New Times and Ethiopia News, September 21, 1940.

145

Ceadel, Pacifism in Britain, 1914-1945, 292, 313; Ceadel, “A Legitimate Peace Movement,” 141; Rigby, “The

Peace Pledge Union,” 179.

46

CHAPTER V

CONCLUSION

Sylvia Pankhurst’s activism from the beginning of the First World War until the end of

the Second was marked by a consistent dedication to an international system ruled by advocates

of peace instead of war. Her commitment to women’s rights and socialism was highly influential

in shaping her opposition to the Great War. Similarly, Pankhurst’s participation in the suffrage

and socialist movements also colored her critique of fascism in the 1920s. As fascist regimes

gained power in Europe, Pankhurst continued to protest against these governments. Central to

her objection to fascism was the fascist dictators’ conceptualization of the role of women in

society as subservient to men. But her concerns were broader than this. Not only was fascism

explicitly harmful to women, as she saw it, but it threatened the democratic system that had

enabled the suffragettes to express their opposition to the status quo. Pankhurst’s anti-fascism

was not in any way a departure from her feminist activism, but represented a continuing

commitment to her belief in women’s equality. Furthermore, because fascist states remained in a

continuing state of war, she believed that women living within them would continue to suffer

without a means of redress. The belligerent nature of fascism was the aspect that Pankhurst

objected to the most frequently and most strongly, and this emphasis was clearly connected to

her feminist and pacifist beliefs. Though she eventually saw war as the only way to defeat

fascism, she thought the sacrifice of pacifism was worth it. Without the downfall of fascist

regimes, she reasoned, a permanent international peace could never be established. Thus, even

her advocacy of war should be seen as rooted in her long-standing pacifism.

47

Though Pankhurst’s personal conception of pacifism does not cleanly fit into historians’

categorizations of conventional pacifist activism, understanding her opposition to war and

fascism in her own terms can enhance our understanding of the complex British peace movement

in the first half of the twentieth century.146

Historians of the interwar peace movement in Britain

have argued that those who identified as pacifists actually held beliefs that ranged from anti-

militarism and pacificism to absolute pacifism.147

Pankhurst’s life and advocacy for peace

further illustrates that there were co-existing and competing definitions of pacifism in the

interwar period as people struggled politically and ethically over which international policies to

promote when confronted with the growing threat of fascism. In tracing Pankhurst’s changing

relationship to pacifism one discovers that while the peace movement included people with a

wide range of beliefs, the context of those beliefs changed over time. An individual could move

between absolute pacifism and anti-militarism without internal conflict. Furthermore, an analysis

of Pankhurst’s peace and anti-fascist activism demonstrates that these different conceptions of

pacifism were influenced not only by ethics and morality but by political realities such as the

growing support for appeasement and British women’s desire to further increase their

participation in politics in a post-suffrage era.

Finally, a consideration of Pankhurst’s interwar anti-fascist activism provides a glimpse

into the influential nature of the suffrage movement for those who participated in it, years after

146

Connelly, Sylvia Pankhurst Suffragette, Socialist, and Scourge of Empire, 130; Ceadel, “A Legitimate Peace

Movement,” 135; Eglin, “Women Pacifists in Inter-War Britain,” 150. Connelly does acknowledge that Pankhurst

has her own conception of 'peace' and 'war' but does not analyze them.

147

Martin Ceadel distinguishes between different anti-war viewpoints, identifying pacifism as “the belief that war is

always wrong and should never be resorted to, whatever the consequences of abstaining from fighting” while

pacificism was the “assumption that war, though sometimes necessary, is always an irrational and inhumane way to

solve disputes, and that its prevention should always be an over-riding political priority.” Ceadel, Pacifism in

Britain, 1914-1945, 3; Ceadel, Semi-Detached Idealists, 7.

48

women won the right to vote. Pankhurst continually embraced and exploited the themes, legacy

and network of the suffrage movement in order to garner support for her cause. As a

propagandist Pankhurst would have used an appeal to women that she felt would be the most

effective, and it is significant that she drew on the memory of the suffrage movement. This

highlights the continued prominence that the movement, and those who participated in it,

continued to have, at least among the newly enfranchised female population.148

The symbolic

suffrage legacy was claimed by parties and activists across the political spectrum, highlighting

how important the suffrage legacy had become. In the interwar era the legacy of the suffrage

movement helped to enable British women to continue to position themselves as important

global political actors in the face of new fascist ideologies that threatened the gains of that very

movement.

148

Gottlieb and Toye, eds., Introduction, The Aftermath of Suffrage, 11, 13.

49

REFERENCES

I. Microfilm Collections

Women, suffrage, and politics: the papers of Sylvia Pankhurst, 1882-1960: from the

Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis, Amsterdam. Reading, Berkshire,

England: Adam Matthew Publications, 1991.

II. Primary Sources

Newspapers

The Daily Mirror

New Times and Ethiopia News

Woman’s (Workers’) Dreadnought

Books

Horne, Charles, and Walter F. Austin, eds. Source Records of the Great War. Vol. 1. 7 vols. New

York: National Alumni, 1923.

Latzko, Andreas. Men in War. Translated by Adele Szold Seltzer. New York: Boni and

Liveright, 1918.

Pankhurst, E. Sylvia. India and the Earthly Paradise. Bombay: Sunshine Publishing House,

1926.

———. Save the Mothers; a Plea for Measures to Prevent the Annual Loss of about 3000 Child-

Bearing Mothers and 20,000 Infant Lives in England and Wales, and a Similar Grievous

Wastage in Other Countries. London: A.A. Knopf, 1930.

———. The Home Front: A Mirror to Life in England during the World War. Hutchinson & Co.

Ltd., 1932.

———. The Suffragette Movement: An Intimate Account of Persons and Ideals. Longmans,

Green and co., 1931.

III. Secondary Sources

Adams, R. J. Q. Bonar Law. London: John Murray, 1999.

Adejumobi, Saheed. The History of Ethiopia. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2007.

Bingham, Adrian. “Enfranchisement, Feminism and the Modern Woman: Debates in the British

Popular Press, 1918-1939.” In The Aftermath of Suffrage: Women, Gender, and Politics

50

in Britain, 1918-1945, edited by Julie V. Gottlieb and Richard Toye, 87–104.

Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

Buchanan, Tom. Britain and the Spanish Civil War. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge

University Press, 1997.

———. The Impact of the Spanish Civil War on Britain: War, Loss and Memory. Portland, Or.:

Sussex Academic Press, 2007.

Bullock, Ian, and Richard Pankhurst, eds. Sylvia Pankhurst: From Artist to Anti-Fascist. New

York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992.

Burdett, Charles. “Journeys to Italian East Africa 1936–1941: Narratives of Settlement.” Journal

of Modern Italian Studies 5, no. 2 (2000): 207–26. doi:10.1080/13545710050084359.

Ceadel, Martin. “A Legitimate Peace Movement: The Case of Inter-War Britain, 1918-1945.” In

Challenge to Mars: Essays on Pacifism from 1918 to 1945, edited by Peter Brock and

Thomas Paul Socknat, 134–48. Toronto and London: University of Toronto Press, 1999.

———. Pacifism in Britain, 1914-1945: The Defining of a Faith. Oxford: Clarendon Press,

1980.

———. Semi-Detached Idealists: The British Peace Movement and International Relations,

1854-1945. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Connelly, Katherine. Sylvia Pankhurst Suffragette, Socialist, and Scourge of Empire. London:

Pluto Press, 2013.

Curry, George. “Woodrow Wilson, Jan Smuts, and the Versailles Settlement.” The American

Historical Review 66, no. 4 (July 1, 1961): 968–86. doi:10.2307/1845866.

D’Angelo, Rosetta, and Barbara Maria Zaczek, eds. Resisting Bodies: Narratives of Italian

Partisan Women. Chapel Hill, NC: Annali D’Italianistica, 2008.

Davis, Mary. Sylvia Pankhurst: A Life in Radical Politics. London; Sterling, Va.: Pluto Press,

1999.

De Grand, Alexander. Italian Fascism : Its Origins & Development. 3rd ed. Lincoln: University

of Nebraska Press, 2000.

De Grazia, Victoria. How Fascism Ruled Women: Italy, 1922-1945. Berkeley: University of

California Press, 1992.

Eatwell, Roger. “Towards a New Model of Generic Fascism.” Journal of Theoretical Politics 4,

no. 2 (April 1, 1992): 161–94. doi:10.1177/0951692892004002003.

51

Eglin, Josephine. “Women Pacifists in Inter-War Britain.” In Challenge to Mars: Essays on

Pacifism from 1918 to 1945, edited by Peter Brock and Thomas Paul Socknat, 149–68.

Toronto and London: University of Toronto Press, 1999.

Eustance, Claire, Joan Ryan, and Laura Ugolini. “Introduction: Writing Suffrage Histories – the

‘British’ Experience.” In A Suffrage Reader: Charting Directions in British Suffrage

History, edited by Claire Eustance, Joan Ryan, and Laura Ugolini, 1–19. New York:

Leicester University Press, 2000.

Fischer, Conan. The Rise of the Nazis. 2nd ed. Manchester ;New York: Distributed exclusively in

the USA by Palgrave, 2002.

Flinn, Andrew. “‘Mothers for Peace’, Co-Operation, Feminism and Peace: The Women’s Co-

Operative Guild and the Anti-War Movement between the Wars.” In Consumerism and

the Co-Operative Movement in Modern British History: Taking Stock, edited by Nicole

Robertson and Lawrence Black, 138–54. Manchester: Manchester University Press,

2009.

García, Hugo. Truth about Spain!: Mobilizing British Public Opinion, 1936-1939. Brighton:

Sussex Academic Press, 2010.

Gottlieb, Julie. Feminine Fascism: Women in Britain’s Fascist Movement, 1923-1945. London:

I.B. Tauris, 2000.

———. “Suffragette Experience Through the Filter of Fascism.” In A Suffrage Reader: Charting

Directions in British Suffrage History, edited by Claire Eustance, Joan Ryan, and Laura

Ugolini, 105–25. New York: Leicester University Press, 2000.

Gottlieb, Julie V., and Richard Toye, eds. The Aftermath of Suffrage: Women, Gender, and

Politics in Britain, 1918-1945. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire; New York:

Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

Graham, Helen. The Spanish Republic at War, 1936-1939. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 2002.

Grand, Alexander De. “Women under Italian Fascism.” The Historical Journal 19, no. 4

(December 1, 1976): 947–68.

Griffin, Roger. The Nature of Fascism. London; New York: Routledge, 1993.

Harrison, Shirley. Sylvia Pankhurst: A Crusading Life 1882-1960. London: Aurum, 2003.

Horne, Charles, and Walter F. Austin, eds. Source Records of the Great War. Vol. 1. 7 vols. New

York: National Alumni, 1923.

52

Jackson, Angela. British Women and the Spanish Civil War. London; New York: Routledge,

2002.

Kershaw, Ian. The Nazi Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation. 4th ed.

London: Arnold, 2000.

Koonz, Claudia. Mothers in the Fatherland : Women, the Family, and Nazi Politics. 1st ed. New

York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987.

Liddington, Jill. The Road to Greenham Common: Feminism and Anti-Militarism in Britain

since 1820. Syracuse University Press ed. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press,

1991.

Manela, Erez. The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of

Anticolonial Nationalism. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Mayhall, Laura. The Militant Suffrage Movement: Citizenship and Resistance in Britain, 1860-

1930. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Mazower, Mark. No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the

United Nations. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009.

McCarthy, Helen. The British People and the League of Nations: Democracy, Citizenship and

Internationalism C. 1918-45. Manchester; New York: Distributed in the U.S. exclusively

by Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

Miers, Suzanne. Slavery in the Twentieth Century: The Evolution of a Global Pattern. Walnut

Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2003.

Miller, Carol. “‘Geneva – the Key to Equality’: Inter-War Feminists and the League of Nations.”

Women’s History Review 3, no. 2 (1994): 219–45. doi:10.1080/09612029400200051.

Murray, Williamson. “Britain.” In The Origins of World War Two: The Debate Continues, edited

by Joseph Maiolo and Robert Boyce, 273–85. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.

Nicholls, Anthony. Weimar and the Rise of Hitler. 4th ed. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000.

Noakes, Lucy. “War and Peace.” In Women in Twentieth-Century Britain, edited by Ina

Zweiniger-Bargielowska. Harlow: Longman, 2001.

Pankhurst, Richard. “Emperor Haile Sellassie’s Arrival in Britain: An Alternative

Autobiographical Draft by Percy Arnold.” Northeast African Studies 9, no. 2 (2002): 1–

46.

———. “Sylvia and New Times and Ethiopia News.” In Sylvia Pankhurst: From Artist to Anti-

Fascist, edited by Richard Pankhurst and Ian Bullock, 149–91, 1992.

53

———. Sylvia Pankhurst, Artist and Crusader: An Intimate Portrait. New York: Paddington

Press : distributed by Grosset & Dunlap, 1979.

———. Sylvia Pankhurst: Counsel for Ethiopia. Tsehai Publishers, 2003.

Paxton, Robert. The Anatomy of Fascism. 1st ed. New York: Knopf, 2004.

Payne, Stanley. A History of Fascism, 1914-1945. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,

1995.

———. The Spanish Civil War. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012.

———. The Spanish Civil War, the Soviet Union, and Communism. New Haven: Yale

University Press, 2004.

Pedersen, Susan. “Back to the League of Nations.” The American Historical Review 112, no. 4

(October 1, 2007): 1091–1117. doi:10.2307/40008445.

———. Eleanor Rathbone and the Politics of Conscience. New Haven: Yale University Press,

2004.

———. “Metaphors of the Schoolroom: Women Working the Mandates System of the League

of Nations.” History Workshop Journal 66, no. 1 (2008): 188–207.

———. “The Meaning of the Mandates System: An Argument.” Geschichte Und Gesellschaft

32, no. 4 (October 1, 2006): 560–82.

Pennybacker, Susan. From Scottsboro to Munich: Race and Political Culture in 1930s Britain.

Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2009.

Preston, Paul. The Spanish Civil War: Reaction, Revolution and Revenge. New York: W.W.

Norton & Co., 2007.

Pugh, Martin. Electoral Reform in War and Peace, 1906-18. London; Boston: Routledge &

Kegan Paul, 1978.

Purvis, June. “Sylvia Pankhurst (1882-1960), Suffragette, Political Activist, Artist and Writer.”

Gender & Education 20, no. 1 (2008): 81–87.

Rigby, Andrew. “The Peace Pledge Union: From Peace to War, 1936-1945.” In Challenge to

Mars: Essays on Pacifism from 1918 to 1945, edited by Peter Brock and Thomas Paul

Socknat, 169–85. Toronto and London: University of Toronto Press, 1999.

Romero, Patricia. E. Sylvia Pankhurst: Portrait of a Radical. New Haven: Yale University Press,

1987.

54

Sbacchi, Alberto. Legacy of Bitterness: Ethiopia and Fascist Italy, 1935-1941. Lawrenceville,

NJ: Red Sea Press, 1997.

Slaughter, Jane. Women and the Italian Resistance, 1943-1945. Denver, CO: Arden Press, 1997.

Smith, Harold. The British Women’s Suffrage Campaign, 1866-1928. 2nd ed. Harlow, England;

New York: Pearson/Longman, 2007.

Steiner, Zara. The Triumph of the Dark: European International History, 1933-1939. Oxford;

New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.

Stephenson, Jill. Women in Nazi Germany. Harlow, England ;New York: Longman, 2001.

———. Women in Nazi Society. Routledge, 2013.

Tanner, Duncan. Political Change and the Labour Party, 1900-1918. Cambridge; New York:

Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Taylor, Andrew. Bonar Law. London: Haus, 2006.

Thom, Deborah. Nice Girls and Rude Girls: Women Workers in World War I. London; New

York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998.

Vellacott, Jo. “A Place for Pacifism and Transnationalism in Feminist Theory: The Early Work

of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom.” Women’s History Review

2, no. 1 (1993): 23–56. doi:10.1080/09612029300200021.

Willson, Perry. “Saints and Heroines: Re-Writing the History of Italian Women in the

Resistance.” In Opposing Fascism: Community, Authority and Resistance in Europe,

edited by Tim Kirk and Anthony McElligott. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1999.

———. The Clockwork Factory: Women and Work in Fascist Italy. Oxford: Clarendon Press,

1993.

Wiltsher, Anne. Most Dangerous Women: Feminist Peace Campaigners of the Great War.

London; Boston: Pandora Press, 1985.

Winslow, Barbara. Sylvia Pankhurst: Sexual Politics and Political Activism. New York: St.

Martin’s Press, 1996.

Woldemariam, Metasebia. “Sylvia Pankhurst: Against Imperialist Occupation of Ethiopia.” In

African Agency and European Colonialism: Latitudes of Negotiation and Containment:

Essays in Honor of A.S. Kanya-Forstner, edited by Kwabena Opare Akurang-Parry and

Femi J. Kolapo, 141–50. Lanham (MD); Plymouth: University Press of America, 2007.

55

Zewde, Bahru. A History of Modern Ethiopia, 1855-1991. 2nd ed. Oxford: Addis Ababa

University Press, 2001.