standing alone on the vast stage in a dress of pale green, received a tremendous
welcome home from the mainly female audience who sang ‘For she’s a jolly
good fellow’ and handed up bouquets of roses and lilies.^14 Then, as the applause
subsided, the returned exile announced, ‘We women are determined that the
British citizenship for which we have fought in the past ... shall be preserved
from destruction at the hand of Germany.’ One thing is certain, she continued.
‘You are not now utilising to the full the activities of women. In France, from
which country I have just come, the women, while all the able-bodied men are
at the front, are able to keep the country going, to get in the harvest, to carry
on the industries. It is the women who prevent the collapse of the nation while
the men are fighting the enemy.’ When the war ended in victory, then women
who were paying their share of the price would insist upon being brought into
‘equal partnership as enfranchised citizens of this country’. Since full conscrip-
tion was not yet introduced, Christabel appealed to men to join the
comparatively few British soldiers at the war front.^15
Sylvia was also sitting in the audience, apart from her mother. She listened
not with rapture but with grief; a deeply committed pacifist, she resolved to write
and speak more urgently for peace. Further, as a socialist, she believed that the
war was created by greedy capitalists who would exploit the working classes in
every way possible. When she went backstage to speak to Christabel and
Emmeline, the meeting was icy; she exchanged only a ‘brief greeting’ with her
mother, ‘distant as through a veil’.^16 As Sylvia left the hall, some cheers were
raised for her from members of her East London Federation in opposition to the
cries for Christabel and Emmeline. The rift between the Pankhurst women, now
so public, was to deepen during the coming month as Emmeline and Christabel,
shortly after their return to Paris, announced that they would come back to
Britain to mount a platform campaign to recruit men for the services. Sylvia
wept when she read the news. She never forgave her mother for what she saw as a
betrayal of all the ideals for which Richard Pankhurst had stood. She thought of
the peace crusade, in the 1870s, when he had courted his young bride-to-be and
of Emmeline’s support for her husband during the long years he had advocated
peace and internationalism. She also recollected her widowed mother’s stand,
with her children, against the Boer War. On impulse, she later wrote to
Emmeline only to receive a condemnation, ‘I am ashamed to know where you
and Adela stand.’^17 Adela, also an ardent pacifist and now a leading speaker for
the militant Women’s Political Association in Melbourne, was making inflam-
matory anti-war speeches in Australia and opposing conscription.^18 It is possible,
of course, that the response of the two pacifist Pankhurst daughters was not fired
solely by the political differences that divided them from their mother but partly
by a desire to hit back at her ‘heartlessness’ in ‘abandoning’ her children.
Perhaps, too, the response partly embodied an element of defiance and indepen-
dence against Emmeline’s possessiveness and favouritism for their elder sister
who had led ‘their’ mother ‘astray’, a statement to the world that the dissident
daughters had grown up and were no longer tied to her apron strings.
WAR WORK AND A SECOND FAMILY