doctors in Chicago are going to sign a protest against forcible feeding
& send it to the English Govt. We had a splendid time there also in
Minneapolis & Saint Paul. People who had opposed my coming came
round & confessed they were wrong & that I had done great good for
suffrage here!^19For one admirer, a reporter for the Canadian newspaper the Toronto Sunday
World, Emmeline Pankhurst was ‘the most talked of person in the world to-day’.
Hated and loved, praised and blamed, misrepresented and appreciated, ‘[n]o
queen ever made such a triumphal march through any country as she is making,
through the land of Lincoln and Walt Whitman’.^20 But the triumphal orator,
applauded on the public stage, still had private, family matters to attend to. She
wrote to the unsettled Adela, who wanted to travel, telling her that some
friends had invited her to go with them to Chicago, the following spring.^21
Emmeline’s farewell meeting on 24 November, in the great auditorium of the
Carnegie Hall, New York, was so popular that 1,000 people were turned away.
She spoke mainly on the white slave traffic and upon the need for an equal code
of morals for men and women. ‘The English Government is the greatest white
slaver there is’, she announced. ‘It is engaged directly in the white slave traffic
in the miserable army of native women it provides for its army and navy in the
East.’ She went on, ‘A broken window is a small thing when one considers the
broken lives of women, and it is better to burn a house than to injure little chil-
dren. This is a holy war.’^22 Everywhere Emmeline had spoken, copies had been
sold ofThe Suffragetteand of Christabel’s book.Plain facts about a great evilhad
caused something of a stir, especially in New York where Anthony Comstock
and the Society for the Suppression of Vice tried to ban it.^23
On 26 November, Emmeline and Rheta Childe Dorr boarded the White Star
liner Majestic, due to reach Plymouth on 3 December. Emmeline had collected
£4,500 for the WSPU war chest, and while she was away a ‘Great Collection’
was being organised to greet her return, as well as a women’s demonstration to
be held in the Empress Theatre, Earl’s Court, on Sunday, 7 December; the
Home Office had already been warned about plans for the latter.^24 The ship was
delayed by one day, and Emmeline was uncertain as to the fate that would await
her on her arrival. But even more worrying was the news that Christabel had
sent her some time earlier, namely about the very public rift she had had with
Sylvia over the direction of WSPU policy. Emmeline had spoken in confidence
to Rheta about her worries and also written to Ethel Smyth about the matter.
On 1 November 1913, Sylvia had spoken at a large socialist and trade union
rally in the Albert Hall, organised by the Daily Heraldto protest against a mass
lock-out in Dublin and to demand the release of Jim Larkin, one of the key
leaders. She spoke on a platform with George Lansbury, James Connolly, the
Irish socialist and a leader of the Irish Transport and General Worker’s Union
(ITGWU), Delia Larkin, sister of the imprisoned Jim Larkin and organiser of
the women’s section of the ITGWU, Charlotte Despard and Fred Pethick
OUSTING OF SYLVIA AND A FRESH START FOR ADELA