A Suffragette in America: Reflections on Prisoners, Pickets and Political Change

About the Author\nE. Sylvia Pankhurst (1882–1960) was an English campaigner for the suffragette movement, a prominent left communist and, later, an activist in the cause of anti-fascism. Katherine Connelly is a writer, historian, and an expert on Sylvia Pankhurst. She is the author of the biography Sylvia Pankhurst: Suffragette, Socialist and Scourge of Empire.\nIn 1911, leading English suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst visited America. Unlike other suffragette leaders, who spent their time in America among the social elite, Pankhurst wasted no time getting right to the heart of America’s social problems. She visited striking laundry workers in New York and female prisoners in Philadelphia and Chicago, and she grappled firsthand with shocking racism in Nashville.
This book gathers Pankhurst’s writings from the year-long visit, in which she reveals her shock at the darkness hidden in American life, and draws parallels to her experiences of imprisonment and misogyny in her own country. Never before published, these writings mark an important stage in the development of the suffragette's thought, which she brought back to Britain to inform the burgeoning suffrage campaign there.