In 1920 Sylvia Pankhurst was sentenced to six months in prison for
publishing articles in the Workers' Dreadnought asking London dockers
not to load ships with arms to be used against the Bolsheviks. At her
trial she declared: 'Capitalism is a wrong system of society and it has
got to be smashed - I would give my life to smash it.' While she was in
Holloway prison Pankhurst wrote the poems that became Writ on Cold
Slate. It was the product of a period of intense and unrelenting
activism by Pankhurst on behalf of the East London Federation of
Suffragettes, campaigning for votes for women, and against the First
World War. During these years she was imprisoned fifteen times.
First published in 1922, the book takes its title from the refusal of
the prison authorities to allow Sylvia Pankhurst any writing materials,
so she had to use chalk to write what she called 'faithful lines upon
inconsistent slate'. Writ on Cold Slate is a classic account of life
in a women's prison - hardships and consolations, loneliness and
comradeship, cruelty and kindness. It's a book about poor food, hard
beds, jangling keys, cleaning-duties, exercise yards, force-feeding and
padded-cells, 'dark days of madness' lived between 'deep despair' and
'desperate rage.' Above all, it's a book about the stories of the
working-class women Pankhurst met in prison - the young and the old, the
homeless and the hungry, mothers, pregnant women and babies born in
captivity - 'dregs from the ancient system's wheel of waste'.
