Transatlantic Sisterhood: Labor and Suffrage Links in the Letters of Elizabeth Robins and Emmeline Pankhurst

Abstract

Radical feminist philosophy has always been more internationalist and more working class than the historians who have studied it. In England, the suffrage movement has been studied only in its late militant relationship to the Liberal Party, in the United States, the Women's Trade Union League (WTUL) only as a footnote in labor history. But the women who won the vote and the eight-hour day were sisters and allies: they served causes other than their own, and the same names, faces, and families turn up in every cause for social justice in England and the United States-from the abolition of slavery to religious freedom, suffrage to temperance, social purity to settlement houses, women's trade unions to international peace. It is ironic that such feminists as Sylvia Pankhurst, Olive Schreiner, and Virginia Woolf have been confined by their biographers to modest little niches in their own country's history.