Suffrage campaigners on the ocean wave – Sylvia Pankhurst Memorial Lecture – 12th August 2011
The Sylvia Pankhurst Memorial Committee
is pleased to invite you to join us at the
9th annual Sylvia Pankhurst Memorial Lecture
on Friday 12 August 2011 at Wortley Hall, Sheffield, at 7pm
“Suffrage campaigners on the ocean wave” to be given by Dr Jo Stanley
Dr Jo Stanley FRHistS is an internationally recognised expert on gender and the sea. Bold in her Breeches, her book on women pirates has been translated into Japanese. The Merseyside Maritime Museum travelling exhibition, Hello Sailor: Gay Life on the Ocean Wave, which she co-curated, was named The Times number one exhibition (January 2009) and is now being hosted in Halifax Nova Scotia’s Museum of the Atlantic. Currently she is writing Risk! Women on the Wartime Seas, for Yale University Press. She is Honorary Research Fellow at the Centre for Mobilities Research (CeMoRe), Lancaster University.
The lecture is sponsored by the National Assembly of Women, the Sylvia Pankhurst Memorial Committee and Wortley Hall. The lecture will be followed by light refreshments.
If you require accommodation at Wortley Hall for the night you should contact them on 01142 882 100, info@wortleyhall.com / http://www.wortleyhall.org.uk
Sylvia Pankhurst Memorial Committee:
07932 87 38 38
megan@gn.apc.org
http://www.sylviapankhurst.gn.apc.org
National Assembly of Women
naw@sisters.org.uk
http://www.sisters.org.uk
Suffrage campaigners on the ocean wave
Dr Jo Stanley
Fighting for women’s rights brought an inadvertent side-effect: it encouraged thousands of suffragists and suffragettes to seize the freedom of the seas, roads, and railway lines. Women who had never before left their home town went campaigning and networking across the Atlantic and Pacific. They ventured thousands of miles, alone or with sisters from movement, to give and attend key conferences, make lecture tours and investigate conditions. It was a revolution in international connecting as profound as the internet revolution of our times.
Sylvia Pankhurst was one of the many women to seize her rights to mobility by sailing on ships, be it cross-channel steamer to Paris, little ferries from Dublin, or deep sea liners. In WW1 a tiny number of suffragettes such as her mother Emmeline and sister Christabel sailed with impunity for reactionary ends, whereas suffragists were effectively banned from the seas. However Sylvia was a key fighter against the ban on peace campaigners’ rights to attend the 1915 Hague International Conference of Women for a Permanent Peace; it could have ended the war. More than any other organisation, her ELF supported sailors’ (and soldiers’) wives.
This lecture tells the stories of both gallant sailings and frustrations at quaysides. It celebrates the geographical mobility that accompanied women’s new freedoms as they pressed impressively forward to build justice worldwide.
