other post-boxes earlier that day, acting entirely on her ‘own responsibility’.^14
When she came before the court, the accused claimed that she had engaged in
such action partly as a protest against the vindictive sentence and treatment of
‘my comrade, Mary Leigh’ (who had been sentenced to two months’ imprison-
ment in contrast to Constance Lytton, whose sentence was only two weeks),
and partly because she wished the government to include reference to a
woman’s suffrage measure in the King’s Speech. In the agitation for reform in
the past, Emily explained, ‘the next step after window-breaking was incendi-
arism’, and so she engaged in such an act ‘in order to draw the attention of the
private citizen to the fact that this question of reform is their concern as well as
that of women’.^15 This was the first incidence of incendiarism in the WSPU
campaign and, yet again, such militant action, which was to become common
over the next few years, had been initiated not by the leadership but by an ordi-
nary member; furthermore, as Morley and Stanley point out, this militant act
arose within the context of feminist friendship and worries about what was
happening to one particular comrade.^16 Although Emmeline was in the States
at the time, she later praised the protest, in her autobiography, written with
hindsight, because of ‘its prophetic character’.^17 However, Morley and Stanley
suggest that the situation at the time was quite different in that Emily Wilding
Davison was not in favour with the WSPU leadership since she was an unpre-
dictable militant who went her own way rather than obeying central directives,
and, consequently had had her employment with the WSPU terminated in
1910, although she retained her Union membership; in addition, she was crit-
ical of the ‘leadership’ for its failure to do anything about the heavy sentence
passed on her friend, Mary Leigh.^18 While Emily Wilding Davison’s relation-
ship with Emmeline Pankhurst may have been uneasy, on more than one
occasion, as noted earlier, Emmeline had highlighted in her speeches the unjust
disparity in treatment that was meted out to the working-class Mary Leigh and
the aristocratic Lady Constance Lytton, daughter of Earl Lytton who had once
been British Viceroy in India. When, early in the New Year, the severe
sentence of six months’ imprisonment was passed on Emily Wilding Davison,
Emmeline must have been concerned. It was to this state of affairs that she
returned home on 18 January 1912, determined upon a more serious form of
militancy, a view that had already been aired in Christabel’s defence of the
broken windows policy.^19 The words ‘Sedition!’ and ‘The Women’s Revolution’
were now upon Emmeline’s lips.^20
She had barely arrived at Tilbury Docks when she was almost immediately
back into the swing of campaigning and addressing the weekly Monday after-
noon meeting. On Saturday 20 January she spoke in Wales, at Carmarthen and
Llanelly, and on the 22nd at a welcome home meeting at the London Pavilion
where the audience rose to their feet and cheered and cheered as she entered.^21
Speaking of the Prime Minister’s ‘great betrayal’ of his pledge with regard to the
Second Conciliation Bill, she then congratulated the women who had taken
part in the raid of 21 November, thanking them from the bottom of her heart
THE WOMEN’S REVOLUTION