When asked some fifty years later to sum up Mrs. Pankhurst in one word,
Jessie Kenney replied, ‘Dignity’.^19 A small, slender woman who wore delicate
kid shoes of size three and a half, Emmeline would stand on the platform
looking poised and elegant in a dress of dark purple or black. The impact of her
physical persona was immediate. She had an air of authority and although no
longer young was still beautiful. Her pale face, with its delicate square jaw and
rounded temples, ‘recalled the pansy by its shape and a kind of velvety bloom
on its expression’.^20 She captivated her audience by her apparent contradic-
tions. Her fragile appearance belied a forcefulness, a driving energy, not usually
associated with women described, as she was, as ‘so feminine’.^21 Her radical
words contrasted with her appearance as a middle-class, law-abiding widow and
mother. The power of her oratory was well known and commented upon by
friend and foe, alike. She was vibrant, asserted Rebecca West; one felt, as she
lifted up her hoarse, sweet voice that she was ‘trembling like a reed’ but the reed
was ‘of steel and it was tremendous’.^22 Emmeline could sway great crowds,
holding her audience in the palm of her hand as Ethel Smyth, the composer
and Emmeline’s one-time close friend, describes:
the fiercest opposition would melt away before she had been five
minutes on the platform. She used little gesture beyond the rare
outstretching of both hands. ... It was all done by the expression of her
face, and a voice that, like a stringed instrument in the hand of a great
artist, put us in possession of every movement of her spirit – also of the
great underlying passion from which sprang all the scorn, all the wrath,
all the tenderness in the world. Notes bothered her and I don’t think
she ever used them, but no amount of preparation could have bettered
the words in which her thought spontaneously clothed itself. I never
heard her make a mediocre speech, let alone one that failed to hit the
centre of the target.^23Mary Stocks, a member of the NUWSS, summed it up when she claimed that
Emmeline Pankhurst was a ‘spellbinder’.^24
Yet, while Emmeline might be applauded on a public stage as she travelled
tirelessly, she was often lonely. A ‘bird of passage in some hotel’, she missed the
company of her family and friends, especially Christabel; when the spur of the
cause flagged, her life seemed ‘harsh and joyless’.^25 In spare moments, she would
try to keep herself busy with an occasional visit to the theatre, reading or
sewing, her favourite pastime.^26 Above all Emmeline, who believed she had an
historic role to play, wanted to inspire and encourage her followers. Often this
necessitated writing supportive letters or offering comforting words of advice.
Earlier in the year, while on a train journey to Scotland, she had written to
Jennie Baines in Yorkshire, ‘I asked Miss Milne to send you £2 today also litera-
ture. ... I have also asked Miss Gawthorpe to try to make time to look you up. If
you decide to hold more meetings you could no doubt get her to help and also
AUTOCRAT OF THE WSPU?