Sylvia
Pankhurst
strongly disagreed with her mother, Emmeline
Pankhurst, and her sister, Christabel
Pankhurst, about the arson campaign that
started in 1912. Sylvia now ceased to be active in the WSPU
and instead concentrated her efforts on helping the Labour
Party build up its support in London.
Sylvia Pankhurst was a member of the
Workers'
Socialist Federation in the East End of London. In March 1914, Zelie
Emerson, a fellow member, suggested that Pankhurst should start a
socialist newspaper that focused on the problems of working women.
Pankhurst agreed and together with a small group of women made plans
to produce a weekly paper for working-class women. Pankhurst favoured
calling it the Workers' Mate but
the group preferred the title the Women's
Dreadnought.
The first edition of the Women's Dreadnought
appeared on 21st March 1914. It was hoped that adverts would make
up 50% of the four pages and therefore Sylvia
Pankhurst could keep the newspaper at a price that working women
could afford. However, by the time the first edition was published,
the women had only sold 3 inches of advertisement. Although two companies,
Neave's Food and Lipton's Cocoa, paid for large adverts in the newspaper,
the Women's Dreadnought failed
to make money. In 1917 the paper's name was changed to the Workers'
Dreadnought.
The Workers' Dreadnought (3rd May, 1919)
(1)
Sylvia Pankhurst, The Suffrage Movement
(1931)
I think it was Mary Paterson who suggested the Women's Dreadnought.
It would not have been my choice, but the members generally acclaimed
it, and I fell in with their view. I wished it had been The Workers'
Mate, a name which occurred to me later. "Mate" was
a favourite term of address with our people in the East End, and to
my mind a most genial and sympathetic one.
It was my earnest desire that it should be a medium through which
working women, however unlettered, might express themselves, and find
their interests defended. I took infinite plans in correcting and
arranging their manuscripts, endeavouring to preserve the spirit and
unsophisticated freshness of the original. I wanted the paper to be
as far as possible written from life; no dry arguments, but a vivid
presentment of things as they are, arguing always from the particular,
with all its human features, to the general principle.
(2)
In
1920 the American poet, Claude McKay worked
for the Workers' Dreadnought.
Sylvia
Pankhurst wrote asking me to call at her printing office in Fleet
Street. I found a plain little Queen Victoria sized woman with plenty
of long unruly bronze-like hair. There was no distinction about her
clothes, and on the whole she was very undistinguished. But her eyes
were fiery, even a little fanatic, with a glint of shrewdness.
She said she wanted me to do some work for the Workers' Dreadnought.
Perhaps I could dig up something along the London docks from the coloured
as well as the white seaman and write from a point of view which would
be fresh and different. Also I was assigned to read the foreign newspapers
from America, India, Australia, and other parts of the British Empire,
and mark the items which might interest Dreadnought readers.
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