This book is a collection of Sylvia Pankhurst's writing on her visits to North America in 1911-12. Unlike the standard suffragette tours which focused on courting progressive members of America's social elite for money, Pankhurst got her hands dirty, meeting striking laundry workers in New York, visiting female prisoners in Philadelphia and Chicago and grappling with horrific racism in Nashville, Tennessee.
Adored by socialist students and progressive politicians, Pankhurst was also shocked by the dark underbelly of American society. Bringing her own experiences of imprisonment and misogyny from her political work in Britain, she found many parallels between the two countries. These never-before-published writings mark an important stage in the development of the suffragette's thought, which she brought back to Britain to inform the burgeoning working-class suffrage campaign there.
The book also includes a contextualising introduction by Katherine Connelly.

Sylvia Pankhurst was an English campaigner for the Suffragette movement, a prominent left communist and, later, an activist in the cause of anti-fascism.

Photographs
Acknowledgements
Sylvia Pankhurst's North American Tours - Timelines
Note on the Text
Introduction by Katherine Connelly
SYLVIA PANKHURST'S TEXT AND EDITOR'S INTRODUCTIONS
Preface
1. A Strike of Laundry Workers in New York
2. Laundries from the Inside
3. A Festival
4. Prisoners
5. A Socialist Administration - The Milwaukee City Council
6. A Red Indian College
7. Universities and Legislatures
8. The South
Notes
Index