Sylvia Pankhurst

Estelle Sylvia Pankhurst was the second daughter of Emmeline and Richard Pankhurst and the one with artistic talent. She won a scholarship to the Royal College of Art and designed the banners and badges of the Women's Social and Political Union, but she came to feel that painting was a luxury while women in the East End worked for a few shillings a week. She was imprisoned and force-fed repeatedly, and later described being held down while a tube was pushed through her nose.

In 1913 she founded the East London Federation of Suffragettes, which admitted men, worked with trade unions and believed the vote was only a step towards feeding people. Her mother and sister Christabel expelled her in 1914. During the First World War, which she opposed, she ran a cost-price restaurant, a mother-and-baby clinic and a toy factory paying a living wage in Bow, and campaigned for soldiers' wives who were left without money.

She became a communist, then fell out with Lenin over whether to take part in Parliament, and served six months in Holloway in 1920 for sedition. Her mother cut her off entirely when she had a son with her Italian partner Silvio Corio in 1927 without marrying him.

When Mussolini invaded Ethiopia in 1935 she took up the country's cause, editing a newspaper on it for twenty years. At 74 she moved to Addis Ababa, where she died in 1960 and was given a state funeral.