go there & she must be made to take advantage of the training.’^57 Emmeline
talked the matter over with Christabel and they both decided that things could
not stay as they were. She also agreed with Christabel that they had to take a
tough line with Sylvia.
In early January 1914, Sylvia was summoned to Paris. She had recently
endured her fifth arrest, and release, under the Cat and Mouse Act, and felt
miserably ill; but worse was the thought of what she knew was to come. She
travelled in disguise, with Norah Smyth as her companion; her kind uncle,
Herbert Goulden, who knew about the situation, accompanied both women to
the boat. The only account we have of the meeting is that written by Sylvia
herself, inThe suffragette movement, published in 1931, upon which she heavily
draws for a brief description of the event in her laterThe life of Emmeline
Pankhurst. The relevant passages inThe suffragette movementreveal that, despite
the passing of time, she still felt bitter about her expulsion from the WSPU.
According to Sylvia, when she arrived in Paris she found her mother white and
emaciated, willing to stand aside as Christabel, nursing her tiny dog, took charge
of the proceedings. She experienced the humiliation of being told by her elder
sister that her East London Federation of Suffragettes must become separate
from the WSPU and that if she did not immediately choose another name for
her organisation, a new one would be given. When Sylvia asked Christabel the
reasons for her expulsion, she was told it was because, contrary to WSPU policy,
she had spoken on a platform with George Lansbury, who was now editor of the
left-wingDaily Heraldand active in theHeraldLeague. Furthermore, unlike the
WSPU, the Federation was a working women’s organisation with a democratic
constitution; appeals for funds only increased confusion about its role and could
reduce income intended for Lincoln’s Inn House. Sylvia claims that her mother
was distressed by the conversation and tried to bring about a compromise by
interposing, ‘Suppose I were to say we would allow you something. Would you
–?’ Christabel interrupted, ‘Oh, no; we can’t have that! It must be a clean cut!’
After further exchanges, Sylvia finally said, ‘As you will then.’^58
Thus Sylvia represented herself as being expelled from the WSPU against
her wishes, the decision forced upon her not by her mother, but by her elder
sister, the betrayer of socialist feminism, the autocratic, inflexible leader of what
she saw as a narrow form of feminism which marginalised the influence of class.
She stresses that whereas Christabel’s earlier speeches had dealt with the indus-
trial status of women as a main impetus for militancy, it was now ‘the supposed
great prevalence of venereal diseases and the sex excesses of men’ that were
emphasised.^59 Emmeline is represented as a weak woman who, under the spell
of her eldest and favourite daughter, meekly agrees with the expulsion of her
least favoured daughter, and who shares the man-hating feminist view. Sylvia
claims that she was greatly upset by her severance from the WSPU, but her
Federation had already enjoyed a high degree of independence, and now that its
separate status was formalised, it went its own way. Soon it had its own weekly
paper, The Woman’s Dreadnought, and later, when the Federation became the
OUSTING OF SYLVIA AND A FRESH START FOR ADELA