Slippery Adela Pankhurst

1885 Adela Pankhurst (d. 1961), feminist and pacifist, Communist, then fervent anti-Communist, daughter of Britain's most prominent suffragist, Emmeline Pankhurst, with whom she became estranged, mainly because of Adela's political positions on many issues, which were further to the left than those of her mother. She was sister of Sylvia Pankhurst and Christabel Pankhurst, who, with mother Emmeline, edged Adela out of their movement.

Pankhurst moved to Melbourne, Australia in 1914 partly for reasons of her health, and joined the Victorian Socialist Party (VSP), editing its children's magazine. There she worked with Vida Goldstein and the Women's Political Association, campaigning on the 'No' side of the WWI military conscription controversy, particularly with the Women's Peace Army. By war's end she was living in Sydney. In 1917 Adela married the Irish seaman's unionist Tom Walsh of the Federated Seamen’s Union of Australasia, a widower with three daughters; they had a further five children. In 1920 she and Walsh became founding members of the Communist Party of Australia, from which she was later expelled. Sometime between the wars, her politics shifted from left to right, and in 1941, she formed the Australia First Movement, a conservative, nationalist, quasi-fascist organization ...

Categories: wwI, australia, suffragette, radical-history, suffragism, peace, war, activism, communism, women, womens-history, womens-rights, peace-movement