This was Emmeline’s first imprisonment, the harshness and indignity of
which she never forgot. She was ordered to strip – although the authorities did
allow her to take off her underclothes in a bath-room – and shivered herself
into patched and stained underclothes, coarse, brown woollen stockings with
red stripes, a shapeless prison dress stamped with broad arrows, and mismatched
old shoes. Despite her prison garb, to the other imprisoned suffragettes
Emmeline still retained ‘a certain “chic” which none of us ever hoped to
acquire’.^44 Once in her prison cell, the hard narrow bed seemed almost
welcoming to Emmeline’s exhausted body, but the feeling soon passed. The
enclosed cell space, like ‘a tomb’, pressed heavily upon her, causing another
attack of migraine.^45 After two days of solitary confinement she was sent to the
hospital where, about midnight, she was awoken by the moaning of a woman in
labour in the cell next to her own. ‘I shall never forget that night, nor what I
suffered with the birth-pangs of that woman, who, I found later, was simply
waiting trial on a charge which was found to be baseless.’^46 Being in hospital,
she was deprived of chapel and of work. Desperate to keep herself occupied,
Emmeline asked her wardress for some sewing and knitting. She also translated
a French book, brought by the chaplain from the prison library, on a slate that
was given her instead of a pencil and paper, and tried to remember the content
of some of her school lessons. Finding the cold hard to bear, she asked for her
fur coat to keep her warm, but was refused the request.^47
While Emmeline was in prison, Stanger’s Women’s Enfranchisement Bill
passed its second reading on 28 February by 271 votes to 92; however, the bill
was blocked from progressing further since the Speaker had ruled that a vote
was only permitted on condition that the bill did not pass to one of the
standing committees set up to deal with such measures but to a committee of
the whole House – which meant that the government would not provide facili-
ties. On the 28th, Herbert Gladstone, the Home Secretary, made a statement
that greatly interested Emmeline and other WSPU members when he suggested
that experience revealed that argument alone ‘is not enough’ to win women’s
suffrage:
There comes a time when political dynamics are far more important
than political argument. ... Men have learned this lesson, and know
the necessity for demonstrating the greatness of their movements, and
for establishing that force majeure which actuates and arms a
Government for effective work. ... Looking back at the great political
crises in the ‘thirties, the ‘sixties and the ‘eighties it will be found that
people ... assembled in their tens of thousands all over the country. ...
Of course it cannot be expected that women can assemble in such
masses, but power belongs to the masses, and through this power a
Government can be influenced into more effective action than a
Government will be likely to take under present conditions.^48AUTOCRAT OF THE WSPU?