Sylvia Pankhurst - Shirley Harrison

Sylvia Pankhurst - daughter of Emmeline and younger sister of Christabel - is in many ways the most fascinating member of the Pankhurst family: not only a courageous and dauntless political campaigner but someone who led a singularly maverick and exotic life. As a young woman she supported the Suffragette cause of her mother and sister, and during several periods of imprisonment endured the horrific ordeal of force-feeding. She also enjoyed a long and intimate relationship with the veteran Labour politician Keir Hardie. Expelled from the Suffragettes after the war for refusing to drop the campaign for social justice in favour of the war effort, she subsequently became a Communist, met Lenin in Moscow, and then had a child with an Italian political exile, with whom she campaigned against Italian fascism and for the cause of Ethiopian independence. She spent the last years of her life in Ethiopia at the grateful invitation of Haile Selassie, and remains the only foreigner to have been honoured by an Ethiopian state funeral.