 Hello, my name is Jessica Gregory and I'm a curatorial support officer for modern manuscripts at the British Library. I'm here in the British Library's exhibition Unfinished Business, The Fight for Women's Rights to tell you about a little piece of paper that tells a fascinating story. So the piece of paper in question is authored by Sylvia Pankhurst. Sylvia Pankhurst is most commonly remembered for her role in the women's suffrage movement. Sylvia would follow her own particular path through activism. She was dedicated to all sorts of courses, including bringing in the voices of working-class women into the women's suffrage campaign. She was also dedicated to the fight for workers' rights and to trade unionism. Through her suffragette activity, Sylvia Pankhurst would be jailed several times. Later, in 1920, she was charged with sedition for publishing articles that encouraged affection to the Red Army. She published these in The Women's Dreadnought, her own journal that she published in London. It was during her six months in jail that she would author the manuscript that we're looking at today. So I'm standing next to a small rectangular coarse-brown piece of paper. This is actually prison toilet paper. Now when Sylvia Pankhurst would go into Holloway in 1920, she would be classed in one of three divisions. The class that they were put in would dictate the terms of their imprisonment. Sylvia would be imprisoned under the second division. So in this case, she was not entitled to pencils and paper. To get around this, Sylvia would have to smuggle in a pencil. Then she would have to use the only available paper there was, which in this case would be toilet paper. The paper at this time was coarse-brown. It was also not described yet as splinter-free because that would only come after 1930. So Sylvia Pankhurst, when she was writing in her prison cell, found that the most effective way for her to express herself was to express herself in poetry. So the poem in question is called Unto the Birds and it describes women in prison who would take their bread and they would throw it out the window to the birds that were in the prison yard. And it describes the solace that the birds offer the women in the prison and it's very much a metaphor of the freedom of the birds versus the incarceration of the women. Next to this item is a small publication called Rit on Cold Slate. When Sylvia came out of prison in 1921 she took all her drafts on toilet paper smuggled them out of prison and would publish them in a small publication. So this volume reflects on prison life. A lot of the poems describe the conditions that Sylvia was living in but she also focuses a lot on the women that she meets inside the prison. She in particular focuses on women who have come into prison because of the poverty that they've endured during their life. She meets beggars she meets women that have been incarcerated because of prostitution and she also makes friends with the cleaners of the prison and some of the juveniles that have been placed in prison despite their age. Sylvia's focus on these women is not purely creative, it's part of her larger activism to bring in working class voices into the fight for women's rights. So when she came out of prison Sylvia Pancers would advocate for prison reform and the first thing on her list was that women should have pencils and paper to write on. You can view this item in the British Library's exhibition Unfinished Business, a fight for women's rights.