Art

Lessons from a ground-breaking political artist

By Christina Prentice

Tate Britain’s current spotlight on Sylvia Pankhurst’s art work gives an extraordinary new insight into the most important feminist leader of the 20th century.

It challenges the view that she gave up art for politics and brings alive the importance of her distinctive brand of feminism – not the narrow struggle for parliamentary democracy for elite women, but a hegemonic view of the struggle needed to take the whole of society forward, in Britain and internationally.