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

This book is a collection of Sylvia Pankhurst's writing on her visits to North America in 1911-12. Unlike the standard suffragette tours which focused on courting progressive members of America's social elite for money, Pankhurst got her hands dirty, meeting striking laundry workers in New York, visiting female prisoners in Philadelphia and Chicago and grappling with horrific racism in Nashville, Tennessee. Adored by socialist students and progressive politicians, Pankhurst was also shocked by the dark underbelly of American society. Bringing her own experiences of imprisonment and misogyny from her political work in Britain, she found many parallels between the two countries. These never-before-published writings mark an important stage in the development of the suffragette's thought, which she brought back to Britain to inform the burgeoning working-class suffrage campaign there. The book also includes a contextualising introduction by Katherine Connelly.