First World War
During the First World War, Sylvia was horrified to see her mother and her sister Christabel become enthusiastic supporters of the war drive, and campaigning in favour of military conscription. She herself was opposed to the war. Her organization attempted to organize the defence of the interests of women in the poorer parts of London. They set up "cost-price" restaurants to feed the hungry, without the taint of charity. They also established a toy factory in order to give work to women who had become unemployed because of the war. Sylvia worked incessantly to defend soldiers' wives rights to decent allowances while their partners were away, both practically by setting up legal advice centres, and politically by running campaigns to oblige the government to take into account the poverty of soldiers' wives. She supported the International Women's Peace Congress, held during the war at The Hague, support which lost her some of her allies at home.
Read more about this topic: Sylvia Pankhurst
Famous quotes containing the words world and/or war:
“How marvellous it all is! Built not by saints and angels, but the work of men’s hands; cemented with men’s honest blood and with a world of tears, welded by the best brains of centuries past; not without the taint and reproach incidental to all human work, but constructed on the whole with pure and splendid purpose. Human, and yet not wholly human—for the most heedless and the most cynical must see the finger of the Divine.”
—Archibald Philip Primrose, 5th Earl Rosebery (1847–1929)
“The British blockade won the war; but the wonder is that the British blockhead did not lose it. I suppose the enemy was no wiser. War is not a sharpener of wits.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)