Members of Parliament. ‘They had all agreed to support the Conciliation Bill’,
she stressed, ‘although it did not give women all they were entitled to ...
because they recognised that ... it did remove the worse grievances women had
to complain of ... [that] the fact of their being born women, should make them
incapable of having citizen rights.’^79 It was, presumably, at such meetings that
Emmeline sold picture postcards of herself, usually obtainable from WSPU
shops, since she had asked Miss Birnstingl to arrange for fifty to be sent to her.^80
While Emmeline was in the Highlands, she wrote again to Helen Archdale,
advising that Adela should relinquish her post as WSPU Organiser for
Sheffield, and now follow the college course she wanted to do. A worried
Emmeline did not favour London, since she thought Adela ‘in her present
nervous condition’ would never settle down to studying there, because of all the
excitement of the women’s movement. Instead she thought somewhere healthy
and quiet by the sea would be best:
I’m not wedded to Aberystwith [sic] but thought of there because the
college is good & within our means. If she preferred St Andrews I’m
agreeable. ... She would not be lonely living in a college with other
young women of her own age. On the contrary I’m sure she would
make friends & become less morbid & introspective. ... I really am
anxious about her future. She is very clever in many ways but quite a
child in others & physically is not strong. I shall not be happy or
comfortable until I feel she is better equipped to make her own way in
the world & more self reliant. I’d rather find more money & feel the
most is being made of it while I’ve the strength & power to earn it for I
cannot leave her independent. She will always unless she marries have
to earn her living.^81Emmeline had already planned another lucrative lecture tour to North
America that autumn, in order to earn some money for the professional
retraining of her twenty-six-year-old daughter, and she now met up with Adela,
to finalise the college plans. Adela wanted to go to Aberystwyth, but Emmeline
later confided to Helen Archdale that she did not think her daughter was ‘well
enough just now for a stiff entrance exam ... altho she looks well there were
many signs of nerve weakness as she talked to me’. Hoping that Adela had
talked matters over with Helen, Emmeline asserted, ‘I will agree to any course
always stipulating that she must study in a healthy country or seaside place.’^82
Emmeline was tired when she arrived back in London, but the prospect of
her lecturing tour in the USA and Canada, to be undertaken under the
auspices, again, of the J. B. Pond Lyceum Bureau, seemed to revitalise her. ‘The
voyage there and back always rests me’, she said, almost the only rest,
Christabel commented many years later, that her mother ever got.^83 In cheery
mood, Emmeline wrote in mid September to Alice Morgan Wright, now in the
USA, who wanted to meet her, on her arrival, explaining that she and Dorothy
THE TRUCE RENEWED