Sylvia Pankhurst was arrested near Charing Cross station during a 1914 International Women's Day march.
The incident took place in London on 8 March 1914, during a demonstration supporting women's suffrage. Pankhurst was on her way to speak in Trafalgar Square when police arrested her in front of Charing Cross station. The arrest became part of the tense confrontation between militant suffragists and the authorities.
Sylvia was the daughter of Emmeline Pankhurst, but the two women were not political duplicates. Sylvia increasingly concentrated on working-class women's activism in London's East End. By 1914 she had made the East London Federation of Suffragettes independent from her mother's Women's Social and Political Union, whose strategy and leadership she criticized.
This event is often confused with the careers of other British suffrage campaigners. Emily Davison was killed in 1913 after stepping onto the track at the Epsom Derby, while Millicent Fawcett led the constitutional National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies. Emmeline Pankhurst, Sylvia's mother, was a separate figure from the woman arrested at Charing Cross.