wealthy suffragists, as well as representatives from the Women’s Trade Union
League, the National American Women’s Suffrage Association, the Medical
Women’s Society, the Collegiate Equal Suffrage League, the Women’s
Progression Suffrage Union, and the William Lloyd Garrison League. In order
that poorer working women could attend the meeting, Harriot Stanton Blatch
also made sure that hundreds of free tickets were distributed.^28 As the dignified
Emmeline rose to speak, a deep hush fell. Standing on the platform in a mauve
velvet dress with large, loose sleeves lined in dull green, over a skirt of the same
shade of green and white close-fitting lacy blouse, she looked ‘as if she were
ready to pour a cup of tea in an English vicarage’.^29 But at her first words – ‘I am
what you call a hooligan’ – a great wave of warm, sympathetic laughter
erupted.^30 And this was part of the secret of Emmeline’s charismatic power as a
speaker. Her dignity and ladylike femininity made it impossible for people in
her presence to believe the ‘scurrilous things’ the press wrote about her.^31 Was
the ‘cultured gentlewoman’, as F. L. Bullard described her, really a hooligan?^32
The New York Post had no doubts. Those expecting the leader of the
‘ “screaming sisterhood” ’ to be a ‘bold, coarse, aggressive, unfeminine woman’
found themselves listening to a speaker of ‘attractive voice, of refinement, and
of rare ability’.^33
For two hours, wrote the admiring Arthur Ruhl, Emmeline Pankhurst
spoke without notes, without repetition or fatigue, without even pausing for a
drink of water, absolutely confident of her cause, and absolutely in control of
her audience. When the long address explaining the necessity for militancy in
the WSPU had ended, she then dealt with half an hour of heckling.^34 Tw o
days later, Emmeline wrote to Elizabeth Robins, explaining how she had met
her sister-in-law, Margaret Drier Robins, President of the Trade Union League,
at the Carnegie Hall. ‘The orthodox suffrage movement here is just where
ours was a few years ago’, she observed, ‘& it needs women of your sister’s
stamp to get it out of the rut & bring it into real life. ... I am having a really
wonderful time.’^35
After visits to Rochester, Pittsburg and Buffalo, and then to Toronto, in
Canada, where at one meeting an estimated 5,000 people were turned away,
Emmeline came back to the States for a farewell meeting; the big gathering,
held in Cooper Union Institute, New York, on 30 November, was sponsored by
the Collegiate Equal Suffrage League and the Collegiate Institute.^36 ‘I had never
heard mortal speech so appealing, so uplifting’, commented Helen Garrison
Villard. ‘There were men in that audience who cried, and I know that it was
with difficulty that I kept my own tears back.’^37 Before Emmeline began to tell,
once more, the story of the women’s fight for freedom in Great Britain, she
expressed her gratitude to the American people for the kindness and sympathy
they had shown her. Then, in a speech that was replete with references to the
women’s army, campaigns, battles and final victory, she took time to explain the
term ‘militant’ since she knew that the woman militant was regarded as a
female deviant, especially when engaged in the violence of stone throwing.
PERSONAL SORROW AND FORTITUDE