through the streets dressed in their prison clothes, or exact reproductions of
them, attracting enormous crowds.
On the evening of the poll, 24 March, Emmeline delivered a lecture at the
Portman Rooms on ‘The importance of the vote’, an address that, unlike many
of her other speeches, was published in a one penny pamphlet and sold
throughout the subsequent years of campaigning. The lecture offered a feminist
analysis of the gender divisions between the sexes which disadvantaged all
women while also highlighting the plight of poor women and arguing the case
for social reform. Emmeline outlined a number of instances where the laws
made by men had ignored the women’s side of the issue, as in the case of a
widow left with small children who had no claim to any property of her
deceased husband if, in his will, he had left it to someone else. Similarly, the
divorce laws upheld a double standard. If a man wanted to get rid of his wife, he
only had to prove one act of infidelity, but if a woman wanted to get rid of her
husband she had to prove either bigamy, desertion or gross cruelty in addition to
immorality. The Liberal government’s programme for social reform, she
continued, did not include bringing an end to such injustices but even included
proposals by John Burns, a Cabinet Minister, to introduce legislation to limit
the employment of married women on the grounds that it would stop ‘infantile
mortality and put an end to race degeneracy’. ‘Could you have a greater
example of the ignorance of the real facts?’ she asked. ‘I can tell you this, that
infantile mortality and physical degeneration are not found in the home of the
well-paid factory operatives, but they are found in the home of the slum-
dweller, the home of the casual labourer, where the mother does not go out to
work, but where there is never sufficient income to provide proper food for the
child after it is born.’^53
Emmeline expounded on the plight of women in the sweated industries,
earning a pittance for long hours spent doing a range of backbreaking jobs, such
as sewing men’s shirts or making boxes. Even professional women, who had
faced a long and weary struggle to enter the professions, found that their male
colleagues earned higher pay and enjoyed enhanced career prospects. ‘There is
no department of life that you can think of in which the possession of the
Parliamentary vote will not make things easier for women than they are to-day.’
In arguing for women’s right to equal citizenship with men, however, Emmeline
emphasised that the demand for the vote did not mean that women wanted to
‘imitate men or to be like men’. Women demanding the vote did not need to
give up ‘a single one of woman’s duties in the home. She learns to feel that she
is attaching a larger meaning to those duties.’^54 In stressing women’s traditional
role in the home, Emmeline was emphasising the differences between men and
women and also advancing an argument that had a pragmatic significance. In a
society where the suffragettes challenged the separation between the private
and the public, between the deep identification of women with the ‘social’
rather than the ‘political’, issues of self-representation were critical.^55 Those
opposing women’s suffrage frequently claimed that its campaigners were
AUTOCRAT OF THE WSPU?