Sylvia Pankhurst: Sexual Politics and Political Activism

Description

Along with her mother Emmeline, and her sister Christabel, Sylvia Pankhurst was one of the leading women's suffrage activists in early twentieth-century England, working with the militant Women's Social and Political Union. Unlike her family, however, who looked to parliament and spoke to elite and middle-class women's concerns, Sylvia consistently looked to working women and the labour movement as central to her feminist politics. In this illuminating political biography, feminist historian Barbara Winslow recovers Sylvia Pankhurst's life and work for a new generation of socialists and feminists. From Pankhurst's organizing with immigrant and working women in London's East End to her revolutionary communism and growing internationalism and anti-fascism, Winslow gives us the story of a brilliantly inspiring unorthodox feminist and unorthodox socialist. With a preface from internationally recognized socialist feminist historian and activist, Sheila Rowbotham.

Barbara Winslow is professor emerita of Women and Gender Studies at Brooklyn College, CUNY; and the founder and director emerita of Shirley Chisholm Project for Brooklyn Women's Activism at Brooklyn College.

Barbara Winslow not only gives us an impressive account of Sylvia Pankhurst's feminism and socialism; she reveals a forgotten strand of radical politics, extremely relevant today. -- Sheila Rowbotham * Preface * Winslow offers a valuable perspective on a woman who faced challenges of race and sex as she pushed the agenda for social justice in her long political career. * Booklist (review of Shirley Chisholm book) *