How many more women must die before you say ‘the time is now’ ...
even now you are not really moved. Still you say ‘patience & prepare’.
And you could do so much through your paper. ... Our duty as women
is clear. We must go on no matter what the danger or the cost to
ourselves. We cannot submit to the affairs of the nation of which we
are a part being any longer settled by men who do not hold themselves
responsible to women as well as to men. Do, I beg of you, help us to
retain our belief in human justice & recover our faith in & respect for
men by prompt action.^7The ink had barely dried from her pen when a personal and very public attack
was made against her.
On 12 January, the New Agepublished the first of three articles by Teresa
Billington-Greig which offered what the Anti-Suffrage Reviewtermed a ‘bitter,
contemptuous, and stinging denunciation’ of WSPU activists. Announcing her
resignation from the post of Secretary of the WFL, a militant organisation
which she had helped to found in the split from the WSPU in 1907 and which
did not approve of attacks on persons or property, Teresa reserved her scorn for
what she saw as the autocratic style of the leaders of the WSPU ‘Mrs.
Pankhurst, Miss Pankhurst, and Mrs. Pethick Lawrence’. This dictatorship, she
asserted, which seeks emancipation in a hurry, imposes ‘a yoke of emotional
control by which the very virtues of the members are exploited; they produce a
system of mental and spiritual slavery. The women who succumb to it’, she
continued, ‘exhibit a type of self-subjection not less objectionable than the
more ordinary self-subjection of women to men, to which it bears a close rela-
tion.’ Furthermore, the WSPU had suppressed free speech, edged out the
working-class element from the ranks and become ‘socially exclusive, punctil-
iously correct, gracefully fashionable, ultra-respectable, and narrowly religious’.^8
The attack was reported in all the main newspapers, the Daily Expresseven
covering the story on its front page and politely pointing out that although the
WSPU now included women of title among its members, the number of
working-class members had also increased.^9
Emmeline and the other two WSPU leaders held their tongues about such a
scathing denouncement, at least in public. Despite their discreet silence, there
was no escaping the bad publicity since the three articles were soon incorpo-
rated into a book with the title The militant suffrage movement, emancipation in a
hurry, published in late March.^10 Nevinson’s assessment of the treacherous
attack, as he called it, as ‘[m]ere jealous vanity & hatred’, harmful outside the
women’s movement rather than within it, was not entirely accurate.^11 There
was a small but growing minority of WSPU members, including Mary
Gawthorpe and Dora Marsden, who were not entirely happy with the style of
leadership and direction of the WSPU. Furthermore, conflicts and tensions
appeared to be developing between the London headquarters and the local
organisers in the regions.^12
THE TRUCE RENEWED