revealed. Looking after younger siblings was considered the most natural duty of
the elder middle-class daughters, an early lesson in femininity.^9
Despite these early responsibilities, Emmeline remembered her childhood
with affection, as a time when she was protected with love and comfort, rather
than the deprivations, bitterness and sorrow which brought so many men and
women in later life to a realisation of the social injustices of Victorian society.
Nevertheless, while still very young she began ‘instinctively to feel that there
was something lacking, even in my own home, some false conception of family
relations, some incomplete ideal’. This vague feeling took a more definite shape
when her parents discussed the issue of her brothers’ education ‘as a matter of
real importance’ while the education of Emmeline and her sister Mary, about
two and a half years Emmeline’s junior, was ‘scarcely discussed at all’.^10 Robert
and Sophie Goulden, although more liberal than many other Victorian parents,
held traditional views about the expected future role of their daughters, mainly
that they should be prepared for lives as ladylike wives and mothers rather than
as paid employees.^11 Thus despite the fact that Emmeline was a gifted child
whom her brothers nicknamed ‘the dictionary’^12 for her command of language
and accurate spelling, she followed the typical path of most middle-class girls of
her day by attending, when she was about nine years old, a small, select, girls’
boarding school, run by a gentlewoman. The main aim of such family-like insti-
tutions was not academic but the cultivation of those social skills that would
make their pupils attractive to potential suitors.^13 Although Emmeline was
taught reading, writing, arithmetic, grammar, French, history and geography,
undoubtedly in an unsystematic way, the prime purpose was to inculcate in the
pupils ‘womanly’ virtues, such as making a home comfortable for men, a situa-
tion she found difficult to understand. ‘It used to puzzle me ... why I was under
such a particular obligation to make home attractive to my brothers. We were
on excellent terms of friendship, but it was never suggested to them as a duty
that they make home attractive to me. Why not? Nobody seemed to know.’ An
answer came to her question one evening when, feigning sleep in her bed, she
heard her father say, ‘What a pity she wasn’t born a lad.’ Emmeline’s first
impulse was to sit up in bed and protest that she did not want to be a boy but,
instead, she lay still, listening to her parents’ footsteps pass towards the next
child’s bed. For many days afterwards, she pondered on her father’s remark but
decided she did not regret being a girl. ‘However, it was made quite clear’, she
recollected, ‘that men considered themselves superior to women, and that
women apparently acquiesced in that belief.’^14
Such a view Emmeline found difficult to reconcile with the fact that both
her parents were advocates of equal suffrage for women and men, another
frequent topic of debate in the Goulden household. Her devoted father, to
whom his eldest daughter was his favourite child, used to set Emmeline the task
of reading the daily newspaper to him, as he breakfasted, an activity that helped
to sharpen an interest in politics. Still young when the Reform Act of 1867 was
passed, which extended the parliamentary franchise to all male householders
CHILDHOOD AND YOUNG WOMANHOOD