piece of legislation ‘to a civilised country like ours in the twentieth century’.
Conscious that she could win a number of the audience to her side, she was
tactful enough to praise those doctors present who were willing to discuss ‘the
greatest evil in the civilised world ... prostitution’, and went on to explain how
it was not until women had the power of the parliamentary vote that such evils
- including ‘the worse disease of all, the most contagious, the most destructive
of mind and soul’ (a euphemism for VD) – would be eradicated.^68
Emmeline did not attend the free speech demonstration held in Trafalgar
Square on Sunday, 10 August, but Sylvia, a ‘mouse’ on a licence, did. The rally
of between 20,000 and 30,000 people was held under the auspices of the Free
Speech Defence Committee and the socialist Daily HeraldLeague to protest
against the imprisonment of George Lansbury; its speakers were mainly well-
known trade unionists, Labour men, socialists and socialist feminists, such as
Keir Hardie, John Scurr, Ben Tillett, Charlotte Despard and Sylvia. Although
Emmeline had sympathy for the plight of Lansbury, it was WSPU policy to
remain independent of allegiance to any of the major political parties of the
day. Before the meeting, Sylvia had refused to comply with a request from Frank
Smith that she should not ask the people to march to Downing Street; she
feared that the Labour Party was too subservient to the Liberal government, a
view that was shared by a number of other socialists. The issue was a particularly
sensitive one for her since Christabel had been emphasising this very point in
recent issues of The Suffragette.^69 And Sylvia knew that her mother took the
same line. She told Hardie of her answer to Frank Smith and sensed his dislike;
their relationship was cooling and she did not see him again until the following
summer, having told him ‘it was too painful, too incongruous he should come in
the midst of the warfare waged against him and the Labour Party by the orders
of my sister’. When Emmeline came to see her daughter, she complained that
she would have come earlier but had heard that Hardie would be present and,
claimed Sylvia, ‘feared to encounter him. She spoke as though he were a person
a Suffragette should be ashamed to meet. So far had divergence of opinion on
tactics, not on principles, destroyed her old friendship.’^70 At the demonstration
on the 10th, the frail Sylvia was upheld by her supporters; she stood by a WSPU
flag bearing the inscription, ‘Deeds, not words’ and said, ‘it is the argument of
sticks and stones from the East End that is going to win freedom for women.
Come to Downing Street.’^71 A fight broke out with the police during which
Sylvia was amongst the eighteen people arrested.
With one of her daughters again in Holloway, Emmeline spoke at the last
summer meeting of the WSPU on 11 August. She addressed especially the
medical men in the audience, asking them to question that popular medical
belief that the women’s movement ‘was a kind of hysterical wave that needed
medical investigation’. When suffragettes were imprisoned, she explained,
medical specialists visited them ‘with a view to finding evidence of mental
derangement’. They were, however, ‘sane women who were in full revolution’.
She believed that both she and Annie Kenney, also speaking at the meeting,
PRISONER OF THE CAT AND MOUSE ACT