as leader of the WSPU by drawing up the lines of engagement for the women’s
revolution. ‘It is perhaps one of the strangest things of our civilisation’, she
pointed out, to think that women in the twentieth century are in a world
‘where they are forced to say that an appeal to justice, that an appeal to reason,
that evidence of their fitness for citizenship, should be of less value than the
breaking of panes of glass.’ Praising Emmeline Pethick Lawrence and the depu-
tation that she had lead on 21 November for forcing a Cabinet crisis, she
announced that the weapon and argument that they were going to use at the
next demonstration on 4 March, which she was going to lead, was the stone. ‘If
the argument of the stone, that time-honoured official political argument, is
sufficient, then we will never use any stronger argument.’ Passionately,
Emmeline outlined her reasons for the endorsement of the new tactics, pointing
out how for years women had submitted patiently to insult and to assault:
Women had their health injured. Women lost their lives. We should
not have minded that if that had succeeded, but that did not succeed,
and we have made more progress with less hurt to ourselves by
breaking glass than ever we made when we allowed them to break our
bodies.Emmeline then calmly announced her intention of leading her followers to
destroy public and private property on a much larger scale than previously.
‘[W]e are going on the next demonstration in full faith that this plan of
campaign, initiated by our friends whom we honour to-night, will on this next
occasion prove effective.’^26
Although Emmeline expected to be arrested for making such a speech,
which was widely reported in the press, this was not so. Ironically, at the very
moment when she had been stating the political necessity for more serious mili-
tant action, Charles Hobhouse, a Cabinet Minister, had been asserting, at an
anti-suffrage meeting in Bristol, that in the case of woman suffrage there had
not been the kind of popular feeling which accounted for the burning of
Nottingham Castle in 1832 or the pulling down of the Hyde Park railings in
1867, prior to the passing of the Reform Bills in these two years. Hobhouse’s
provocative speech was ‘like a match to a fuse’.^27 As Emmeline Pethick
Lawrence pointed out, the holding up to women of the example of men in 1832
and 1867 indicated that Mr. Hobhouse took ‘the very grave responsibility of
inciting them to serious forms of violence in comparison with which Mrs.
Pankhurst’s exhortation is mildness itself ’.^28 Emmeline Pankhurst, who
endorsed such views, was not well again so that Lady Constance Lytton was
asked to take her place at three scheduled meetings at Bristol, Shrewsbury and
Stroud.^29 The poorly WSPU leader retreated toCoignwhere, on a secluded
part of Hook Heath, Ethel Smyth taught her how to throw a stone by aiming
her missile at the largest fir tree. ‘One has heard of people failing to hit a
haystack’, remembered Ethel, ‘what followed was rather on those lines. I
THE WOMEN’S REVOLUTION