secretary, should not overstep its supportive role in the women’s cause by
assuming a leadership role. The Conciliation Committee has been giving us
good advice, she said, but when:
we find ourselves at variance with ... [them] we are bound to prefer our
own opinion and our own judgment. One thing we lay down here defi-
nitely and finally; this is a woman’s movement, led by women, and we
are not prepared to surrender the leadership of this movement to men,
however well meaning, however earnest, and however devoted.^116Such pronouncements by Christabel probably account for Brailsford’s disillu-
sion with the Pankhurst leadership since he told Nevinson, the day after the
Queen’s Hall meeting, that he was ‘much distressed at the W.S.P.U. distrust of
him & their action agst his advice’.^117 But these Queen’s Hall speeches make
clear that both Emmeline and Christabel, despite their differing emphases,
welcomed men’s support for the women’s cause. The differing shades on the
‘problem of men’ in the women’s movement, that each addressed, reflected,
perhaps, their own individual biographies. The older woman, a widow, had been
happily married for eighteen years to a man she adored and with whom she had
worked in the women’s rights movement. Her impatient, unmarried thirty-year-
old daughter, on the other hand, was one of the new generation of
university-educated women, trained to think clearly and logically, and yet
barred from further training as a lawyer because she was a woman. Where both
mother and daughter converged in their thinking was in their insistence that
the militant movement was a women’s movement where men had a limited role
and would always be outsiders.
After the Queen’s Hall meeting, Emmeline was soon campaigning hard
again, since a general election had been called. At Wisbech the local WSPU
Organiser, Grace Roe, recollected that the Union leader spoke ‘about five times
every night’ despite the fact that she was not in a good state of health and living
on a liquid diet. ‘Simply marvellous ... she was so frail.’^118 Two days before
Christmas, Emmeline presided over the welcome luncheon in the Criterion
Restaurant for the released Holloway prisoners, including her sister, Mary. ‘It
was plain to those who knew her best’, observed Emmeline, ‘that her health had
suffered seriously from the dreadful experience of Black Friday and the after
experience of prison.’^119 Nevertheless, Mary then hastened that evening to
Brighton and returned on Christmas Eve to the London home of her brother,
Herbert Goulden, where she joined Emmeline and other family members. At
the mid-day meal on Christmas Day, Mary quietly left the table saying she felt
tired and wanted to lie down. When Emmeline went upstairs to see her, she
found her dying. Mary had burst a blood vessel in her brain.
Emmeline was devastated. Last Christmas, her only son lay dying, in the
spring her mother had died, and now this Christmas she had lost her beloved
sister who had been a second mother to her children. Early on Boxing Day
PERSONAL SORROW AND FORTITUDE