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By Root 1139 0

East End to work with the poor. For the time being, she and the East End women she started organizing remained formally, if uneasily, affiliated with the WSPU. Living with a couple who were shoemakers, she continued to stage the dramatic confrontations that were the Pankhurst trademark. She arranged, for instance, for a woman to be hidden in a large padded box, which was delivered as freight through the service entrance of the House of Commons. Once inside, the woman slipped out of the box unobserved, and from the visitors' gallery dumped the contents of a three-pound bag of flour over the head of the anti-suffrage prime minister, Herbert Asquith. But despite her love of the limelight, the organization Sylvia built did far more than such stunts. Among other things, it offered classes or lectures on public speaking, the legal position of women, child care, and, unusual for the time, sex education. Many women she helped train later went on to leadership positions in trade unions or elective office.

During a long, bitter dock strike, she organized women to help feed the dockers' children, and in return hundreds of East End labor unionists joined a solidarity march to Holloway Prison in support of a hunger-striking suffragette. After all, many working-class men also did not have the right to vote, since roughly 40 percent of Britain's adult males were too poor to qualify. Basil Thomson's men at Scotland Yard kept Pankhurst and her new allies under close surveillance. A police inspector who arrested her in 1913 reported to his superiors that he had had a narrow escape from "a hostile crowd" of men, some of whom "were armed with ... docker's hooks ... and were going to make every possible effort to prevent Sylvia Pankhurst being arrested." For a brief few years, her East End work seemed a living embodiment of that always elusive socialist dream: solidarity among society's have-nots. And at one point it seemed as if another dream of Sylvia's might be fulfilled when her mother came to visit her while she was bedridden after a prison hunger strike. Could she finally be winning a place equal to Christabel's in Emmeline's heart?

Charlotte Despard, of course, had long preceded Sylvia into London's slums. Although of different generations—Despard was 38 years older—the two women now found themselves political allies, often speaking from the same platform. Oratory, in this pre-television era, was the primary way for radicals and dissidents to get their message out,* and Despard was as at ease on a street-corner soapbox as in a lecture hall. Crowds in the hundreds, sometimes thousands, turned out to hear her. The writer Christopher St. John described her talking suffrage to a rally in Hyde Park: "The arms were raised Cassandra-like; the whole thin, fragile body seemed to vibrate with a prophecy, and, from the white hair, the familiar black lace veil streamed back like a pennon."

Despard and many of her followers refused to pay taxes, declaring, like the American rebels of 1776, "no taxation without representation!" In response, the government seized her household furniture. Now nearing 70, she felt so energized by the battles for women's suffrage and the rights of labor that she declared, "I was older at twenty than I am now." However much Despard identified with the dispossessed, she never lost her aristocratic sense of entitlement, even on the four occasions she went to prison. "I was thrilled to see that stately and commanding figure enter," another prisoner wrote. "...Her first act was a calm refusal to take the medicine the doctor had prescribed. 'I have never taken medicine in my life—I do not propose to begin now.' Her word was immediately taken as law. All the officers appeared to be in awe of her." Another inmate remembered: "I have never heard of [another] prisoner before or since who slept soundly through the first night of sentence."

"News in the Paper ... makes one think that the class war has already begun," Despard wrote hopefully in her diary in early 1914. If there was a revolution in Britain, someone destined by his