Activism for Ladies

Superficially, Annie Besant and Sylvia Pankhurst had much in common - not merely in their recurrent ideological conversions, but in their feminism, their violation of behavioural norms, their inveterate sectarianism and their passionate espousal of the causes of the oppressed. Where Annie defied convention by abandoning her children, Sylvia became an unmarried mother at the age of forty-five. While Annie's earthly paradise lay in Indian nationalism, for Sylvia it was the Ethiopian kingdom of Haile Selassie. Both were romantically involved with major radical public figures - Annie with the atheist Bradlaugh, Sylvia with Keir Hardie. Both of them carried conviction to bizarre extremes - Sylvia in her communist days being one of the hare-brained anti-parliamentary zealots lampooned by Lenin in "Left-Wing Communism - An Infantile Disorder." Both were superbly and abrasively self-confident. When Sylvia died in 1960 this life-long atheist was given a state funeral and interred in the Trinity Cathedral at Addis Ababa as a "Walata Kristos" (Child of Christ).