AS INTERNATIONAL Working Women’s Day approaches, it feels timely to reflect upon the myriad ways in which the dissenting histories of women have been censored and obscured, with their commitment and profound contribution to radical social change omitted from our popular narratives of global struggle and erased over time.
Even in the most publicly accessible story of women’s activism, that of the women’s suffrage movement, so many voices have been lost or elided, edited out in order to create an acceptable version of this once incendiary campaign, a version that the capitalist patriarchy will tolerate liberal, not militant, reformist, not revolutionary and overwhelmingly middle class.
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By Rachel Holmes
On Jan. 5, 1921, Sylvia Pankhurst stood in the witness stand at Londonâs Guildhall and reminded the court that, as her biographer Rachel Holmes puts it, she had âfaced death many times for her beliefs.â Arrested at the offices of the newspaper she ran, on suspicion of inciting sedition, Pankhurst, then 38, appeared with a red carnation in her buttonhole, and held the courtâs attention for 90 minutes as she told the story of her life â a tale spanning her upbringing in Manchester as the daughter of feminist reformists whose social circle encompassed American abolitionists, Hindu nationalists and founding members of the Labour Party; her early ambition to paint; her winning a scholarship to the Royal College of Art; and her 13 prison sentences as a suffragist, during which she was subjected to force-feeding and solitary confinement in cramped cells infested with vermin.