Workers’ Suffrage Organisation, The Woman’s Dreadnoughtbecame The Workers’
Dreadnought. News of the split within the WSPU soon reached the national and
international press, including the New York Times.^60 A formal announcement
was made in The Suffragetteand Christabel, in a letter to the press, announced
that WSPU policy and the programme ‘are framed and the word or command is
given by Mrs. Pankhurst and myself ’.^61
In view of the absence of other evidence about the split, it is difficult to
assess whether Emmeline had wanted a compromise with Sylvia, as Sylvia
claimed. What compromise could there be? Emmeline was at one with
Christabel that the WSPU must be independent of any alliance with any of the
main political parties of the day. She had been ‘merciless’ before in her ‘preser-
vation of party discipline’^62 and could have no other view now, especially for a
member of her own family. But the severance troubled her. She wrote to Ethel
about it, who promptly sent a sympathetic reply:
I am so very sorry about Sylvia & know how you must feel; strange that
you have also to do these private family executions. ... Sylvia is ‘mis-
stitched’: and yet it makes me sad to think how, the first time I saw her
with you, – ah! do you remember our interview in the Hotel! – she
spoke so touchingly of C. – how someone had said Campbell
Bannerman had no one in his Cabinet to compare with C. for clever-
ness! – Why should the sister who so frankly & nicely paid that
tribute, decline to come to heel now? – I suppose because then the
P.L.s were ‘Leaders’ too. Also J.K.H. not quite off his pedestal. When it
is a question of obeying one’s sister as sole arbiter (for she knows you
would do what C. wants & probably doesn’t understand it is because
your own judgement would go with C’s) I suppose its harder.^63Sylvia refused to leave the WSPU quietly. She applied to join the Kensington
branch of the Union while also remaining a member of her East End group; the
application was unsuccessful.^64 On 29 January, Emmeline wrote a kind letter to
‘My dearest Sylvia’, as she addressed her daughter, pointing out that while she
was glad that they had settled as to the separate organisations, she and
Christabel were still unhappy about the title of her organisation, ‘The East End
Federation of the Suffragettes’ since the words ‘The WSPU’ and ‘The
Suffragettes’ had become interchangeable. ‘The use of the word “Suffragette”
would prevent the public from realising that your movement in the East End is
something distinct & independent’, Emmeline pointed out. Neither did she and
Christabel like the terms of the announcement of the split that had been drafted
by Sylvia for publication. Seeking to placate her deeply hurt daughter, Emmeline
suggested that the ‘best way to make it impossible for gossip mongers & mali-
cious journalists some of whom are government tools paid to foment that sort of
thing is to concentrate each on our own work & make our supporters imitate our
example.’ That way, she continued, ‘the nine days wonder will soon be at an end
OUSTING OF SYLVIA AND A FRESH START FOR ADELA