time. ‘O how hard it is to have children and friends in a movement like ours’,
Emmeline confessed to Ethel. ‘One’s heartstrings are torn so often ... what a
price is being paid for the vote!’^44
When Sylvia was released on the 18 June, in a severely weakened state, she
was immediately taken to the House of Commons where she lay on the steps,
threatening to starve herself to death in order to force Asquith’s hand to receive
the working women’s deputation. She did not have to wait long. The besieged
Prime Minister did not want a martyr on his hands, especially with a general
election scheduled for the following year; nor did he want her People’s Army, a
trained corps of women and men, marching on parliament. As the police were
about to move Sylvia, Keir Hardie knelt beside his former lover, telling her
quietly that Asquith had agreed to receive the six working women representa-
tives on Saturday morning, 20 June. When Asquith, in his reply to the working
women, emphasised that if change in the franchise had to come, ‘we must face
it boldly and make it thoroughgoing and democratic in its basis’, Sylvia believed
that the government was paving the way for ‘a change of front’ on the women’s
issue.^45 But no immediate change of heart was evident. Asquith had given
similar assurances to the NUWSS deputation which had met him in August,
the previous year.
Romero speculates about the reasons for Sylvia’s motivation at this particular
time in her life in subjecting herself to such psychological and physical torture
and suggests that she may have been wanting to compete with her mother for
publicity on a larger stage or hoping to rekindle her mother’s sympathies.
Although there may be an element of truth in these suggestions, it is much
more likely that Sylvia’s deeply held socialist beliefs were the spring for her
actions as well as the cause of the increasing divide between herself and her
mother.^46 Indeed, as pointed out in the Introduction, Marcus claims that
Sylvia’s description of these events in The suffragette movementrepresents a
victory for socialist feminism, a victory less over the government than over ‘her
real enemies, her mother and sister, the separatist feminists’ who refused to co-
operate with the socialist movement. It is Sylvia ‘and her united charwomen’
who are presented as making the breakthrough with Asquith, not Emmeline
and Christabel.^47
Such a reading is highly plausible since in The suffragette movement, Sylvia
blames Christabel, and by association, also her mother, for the failure to win the
vote in 1914. She tells the story of how, after her deputation had met Asquith,
she asked George Lansbury if he would arrange for her an interview with Lloyd
George, which he did, also being present himself. However, their respective
accounts of the interview differ. According to Lansbury, Lloyd George said that
he and other leading Liberals were willing to make a public pledge that they
would decline to serve as members of any Liberal government cabinet after the
next general election which did not make women’s suffrage ‘the first plank’ in
its legislative programme. Sylvia went further, claiming that Lloyd George
offered to introduce a private member’s bill on women suffrage, drawn on broad
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