Sylvia Pankhurst

Natural Born Rebel

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This event took place on 27 October 2020

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Sylvia Pankhurst
Natural Born Rebel

Watch event again now

This event took place on 27 October 2020

Sylvia Pankhurst was born into one of Britain's most famous families but she always carved her own way. As well as a militant campaigner for women's suffrage, she was a gifted artist and orator, a designer, newspaper editor and radical visionary.

Her activism landed her in Holloway prison where she was tortured, and her notes from this episode are featured in our upcoming Unfinished Business exhibition. Pankhurst's life of campaigning led her to America, Soviet Russia, Scandinavia, Europe and East Africa.

Biographer Rachel Holmes shares her adventures from inside the British Library’s Unfinished Business exhibition space, in conversation with Shami Chakrabarti.

This event was part of Unfinished Business: The Fight for Women's Rights, a UK-wide exhibition by the British Library and public libraries.

Speakers

Rachel Holmes

Author

Rachel Holmes is the author of Sylvia Pankhurst, Natural Born Rebel. ‘It’s impossible to summarise adequately a book so magnificent,’ commented The Times . She also wrote Eleanor Marx: A Life, The Secret Life of Dr James Barry and The Hottentot Venus: The Life and Death of Saartjie Baartman. She is co-editor, with Lisa Appignanensi and Susie Orbach, of Fifty Shades of Feminism and co-commissioning editor, with Josie Rourke and Chris Haydon, of Sixty-Six Books: Twenty-First Century Writers Speak to the King James Bible.

Headshot of Rachel Holmes

Shami Chakrabarti

Lawyer and Campaigner

Shami Chakrabarti (Baroness Chakrabarti CBE PC) is a human rights lawyer and campaigner, Labour Peer and was Shadow Attorney General, 2016 to 2020. She was the Director of Liberty from 2003 to 2016 and a panellist on the Leveson Inquiry into media ethics after the phone-hacking scandal. She was the Chancellor of Oxford Brookes University and of the University of Essex and served on the Board of the British Film Institute (BFI) for many years. Shami has written and broadcast widely and is the author of two books; On Liberty (2014) and Of Women (2017).

Headshot of Shami Chakrabarti