reached the House they were informed that Asquith would not receive them.
The women returned to Caxton Hall. At eight o’clock that evening,
suffragettes ventured forth in twos and threes into the dense crowd gathered in
Parliament Square which was cordoned by 2,000 foot and mounted police.
Those who had volunteered for prison, attempted to make speeches as they
clung precariously to the iron railings of Palace Yard until the police pulled
them down, flinging them into the moving, swaying and excited crowd which
included a number of roughs who had come to amuse themselves.^69 Enraged by
the violence shown to their comrades, Edith New and Mary Leigh took a taxi to
Downing Street and threw stones at two of the windows of Asquith’s official
residence. They were amongst the twenty-nine arrested, which also included
Jessie Kenney and Mary Clarke, Emmeline’s sister.^70 Since this was the first
wilful damage ever undertaken in the Union’s history, Edith New and Mary
Leigh sent word to the WSPU leader that, having acted without orders, they
would not resent her repudiation. Far from repudiating them, Emmeline
promptly visited them in their police cells, and ‘assured them’ of her approval,
an act which caused some WSPU members, such as Helen Fraser, to resign their
membership.^71 The magistrate, when sentencing the two window-breakers to
two months in the Third Division warned them that ‘it would be far better ...
to adopt gentle methods. They would not attain their object by trying to terrify
men.’^72 Emmeline pertly noted that window-breaking when Englishmen do it is
regarded as an ‘honest expression of political opinion’; when undertaken by
Englishwomen, however, it is ‘treated as a crime’.^73
The action of Edith New and Mary Leigh throws further light on the issue of
Emmeline Pankhurst’s ‘autocratic’ rule. The popular representation of rank-and-
file members as cultural dupes who mindlessly followed the orders of their
dictatorial leaders is troubling since it denies feminist women agency for their
own actions. As Vicinus highlights, ‘autocracy’ contained a strange paradox: any
suffragette who accepted militancy to the full was following the policies of the
leaders although, at the same time, she was making her own independent judg-
ment about which acts she should engage in. Furthermore, as Stanley and
Morley make clear, one cannot maintain a case for the Pankhurst leadership
manipulating their followers like puppets on a string; the WSPU, they point
out, was a loose coalition of women whose opinions, analyses and actions
differed enormously and who might try out new tactics (as Edith New and Mary
Leigh did) without discussion or the approval of Emmeline Pankhurst.^74 These
important insights into the nature of militancy are supported by more recent
studies of the regional branches of the WSPU which reveal a more complicated
picture than that commonly assumed, suggesting that such branches enjoyed a
considerable degree of autonomy that often reflected local circumstances.^75 This
is not to deny, however, that in the higher echelons of the WSPU the structures
were undemocratic and that close control was kept on the purse strings.
During the oppressively hot summer of 1908, the energy of the fifty-year-old
Emmeline seemed to know no bounds. She regularly spoke, with Christabel and
AUTOCRAT OF THE WSPU?