as she was described by the J. B. Pond Lyceum Bureau that had exclusive
management of her tour, some questioned the wisdom of the visit.^21 Carrie
Chapman Catt, the leader of moderate suffragism in New York, feared that
Emmeline’s charisma and advocacy of militancy might produce a ‘deluge of
suffrage anarchy’ while another well-known suffragist, Anna Garlin Spencer,
refused to endorse the visit.^22 But nothing could dampen Emmeline’s enthu-
siasm for this tour, her first visit to the USA. ‘I shall never forget the
excitement of my landing’, she recollected five years later, ‘the first meeting
with the American “reporter”, an experience dreaded by all Europeans.’^23
Harriot Stanton Blatch was amongst the small number of Equality League
members, complete with ‘Votes for women’ banners, allowed by the American
authorities to greet Emmeline on her arrival at New York on 20 October. The
New York Times opined that the stylish Emmeline, ‘a small gentle-looking
woman in a gray checked travelling wrap, wearing a gray fur hat encircled with
a mauve veil, looks younger than the pictures which have reached America ...
more like a nice, home-keeping mother than a political leader’.^24 But the ‘nice,
home-keeping mother’ had a large trunk of suffrage literature on which she and
Dorothy Pethick had to pay $7 duty. Not missing an opportunity for fun and
publicity, Emmeline and Dorothy recuperated part of the extra outlay by selling
leaflets to the customs officers, who raised their hats and cheered them as they
left the dock.^25 The incident set the tone for the rest of the tightly packed tour
as, wherever Emmeline went, enthusiastic crowds came to hear her.
Dubois makes the point that in planning Emmeline’s American visit, Harriot
Stanton Blatch struggled to keep the social class extremes of women together as
well as the range of suffrage organisations. Thus, on the evening of the 22
October, just two days after her arrival, Emmeline spoke to 2,500 people at
Tremont Temple, in conservative Boston, as a guest of the Massachusetts
Woman Suffrage Association and the Boston Equal Suffrage Association for
Good Government. ‘The enthusiasm was unusual from an audience expected to
be reserved’, commented the Boston Herald. ‘She was continually interrupted by
bursts of applause, sometimes by hurrahs, as she reached a climax in her descrip-
tion of the stages in the struggle to put the Suffragette question in the forefront
of practical politics.’^26 Emmeline’s speech, however, was not just about the
suffrage campaign; she also spoke about her sick son. ‘As the youngest of her
family, he has always been “her baby”, and though the doctor assured her it
would be all right for her to go, she was in acute anxiety till she got the good
news that he was better.’^27 Despite her popularity in Boston, it was Emmeline’s
lecture at Carnegie Hall, New York, given under the auspices of the Equality
League, that grabbed the headlines.
The ‘little Englishwoman’, as she was termed by the New York Times,
captured the heart of the 3,000 strong audience, nearly all women, on the
evening of 25 October. Four hundred members of the Equality League, repre-
senting ‘all shades and grades of professional and industrial work – lawyers,
doctors, nurses, artists etc.’, sat on the platform. In the boxes sat a number of
PERSONAL SORROW AND FORTITUDE