While she was in Paris early in the New Year of 1914, Emmeline could not
escape hearing the mounting criticism, both public and private, of the auto-
cratic style of leadership in the WSPU, especially of her beloved Christabel. On
13 January, Beatrice Harraden wrote to Christabel, accusing her of being
responsible for the dwindling band of loyal workers. ‘Never a week passes but
that some one has been slighted, rebuffed, or dismissed ... your exile prevents
you from being in real touch with facts as they are over here.’ In particular,
Beatrice asked Christabel plainly whether she sanctioned the ‘continued and
long drawn out sacrifice of your dear mother’ which was ‘an appalling night-
mare’ to which there seemed to be no possible end ‘except her death’.
Christabel sent a sharp reply, defending the present policy. ‘Everything the
Union does is done with a view to serving the cause.’ She also outlined possible
alternative courses of action that Emmeline might follow – serve her three
years’ penal servitude, declare to the government that she will no longer be a
militant or incite others to militancy, or remain abroad while she returned to
England. ‘I have shown this letter to my mother who is here just now and it
meets with her entire approval’, Christabel added in a postscript. ‘On certain
points she would have expressed herself even more strongly especially on the
idea of her staying abroad.’ But Beatrice would not be deflected. She wrote
again, on 20 January, speaking of the grim fate of those caught under the Cat
and Mouse Act, suggesting that Mrs. Pankhurst’s sacrifice, in the present
circumstances, ‘is a vain and a useless one, for the simple reason that public
opinion has been allowed to die down, because the W.S.P.U. now has no
speakers to rouse and educate the country’. Beatrice begged Christabel to ‘recall’
the friends of the Union, and ‘restore ... the old spirit ... still devoted, though
distressed’. Christabel refused to budge,^1 a view which Emmeline full endorsed.
Early in February, a ‘diplomatic’ letter, signed by a number of suffragists,
was sent to Christabel about a new suffrage organisation, the United
Suffragists (US), whose formal establishment was announced on 6 February.
The US, which demanded a government measure to enfranchise women on
equal terms with men, was open to both men and women and to militants and
non-militants, and was explicitly non-party. It attracted a number of socialists
nancy kaufman
(Nancy Kaufman)
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