Sylvia Pankhurst
British suffragist, anti-colonialist
Died when: 78 years 145 days (940 months)Star Sign: Taurus
Estelle Sylvia Pankhurst (5 May 1882 – 27 September 1960) was a campaigning English feminist and socialist. Committed to organising working-class women in London's East End, and unwilling in 1914 to enter into a wartime political truce with the government, she broke with the suffragette leadership of her mother and sister, Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst.
She was inspired by the Russian Revolution and consulted with Lenin, but defied Moscow in endorsing a syndicalist programme of workers' control and by criticising the emerging Soviet dictatorship.
Pankhurst was vocal in her support for Irish independence; for anti-colonial struggle throughout the British Empire; and for anti-fascist solidarity in Europe.
Following the Italian invasion in 1935, she was devoted to the cause of Ethiopia where, after the Second World War, she spent her remaining years as a guest of the restored emperor Haile Selassie.
The international circulation of her pan-Africanist weekly The New Times and Ethiopia News was regarded by the British authorities as a factor in the development of nationalist sentiment in west Africa, and in the West Indies of Ras Tafari.