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|title=Sylvia Pankhurst: The Rebellious Suffragette

|author=Shirley Harrison

|borrow=Yes

|isbn=9781780950181

|pages=399

|publisher=Golden Guides Press

|date=April 2012

|summary=A biography of the noted suffragette campaigner and pacifist, and her often divided family who had similar aims but often disagreed on how to achieve them.

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To some extent, the history of the suffragettes was also the history of the Pankhurst family. Sylvia, born in 1882, was the second daughter of Dr Richard and Emmeline Pankhurst, and one of three sisters. The family had always been heavily politicised, Richard being a founder member of the Fabian Society alongside George Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells, and the children had quite an austere upbringing. When their father’s health took a sudden turn for the worse in 1898, Emmeline and eldest daughter Christabel were abroad on business and Sylvia was left in charge of her younger siblings as well as having to nurse him, taking the full force of the shock when he died in her arms. With his passing the family were left strangely detached from each other. His widow became heavily involved in public work and political agitation, an increasingly remote mother from the young children who needed her.

It must have been tempting for the author to probe the psychology of the family and the differences which divided them when all of them had basically the same objective. She prefers to avoid that, instead devoting the book to hard fact, both biographical and historical. This is done very effectively, for the campaign of female suffrage took place against the background of a turbulent age with the First World War and the Home Rue crisis also occupying the minds of the government. The result is a skilfully balanced and very readable narrative. It is prefaced with a four-page foreword by her son Richard Pankhurst, in which he reflects on the changes at which his mother might have rejoiced and mourned in the half-century since her death.

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[[Category:Politics and Society]]