The pacifist view was a minority view during the 1914–18 war, and over the
next four years it was Emmeline rather than Sylvia who occupied the limelight
in Britain as, together with Flora Drummond, Annie Kenney, Grace Roe and
Norah Dacre Fox, she campaigned up and down the country for the war effort,
arguing against trade union opposition to women’s war work, encouraging men
to sign up for the war front, and urging workers in industrial areas not to be
tricked by socialism and Bolshevism into strike action. Such thinking does not
indicate an abandonment of feminism, the common interpretation of most
historians.^19 Emmeline kept a feminist analysis firmly in view during these war
years, but it was not socialist feminism nor pacifist feminism; it was a patriotic
feminism which emphasised women’s contribution to the war effort and to
militarism. She had a deep distrust of the male-dominated Labour Party and
trade unions, knowing that women’s interests took second place to those of
men. Further, she believed that strike action by workers could lead to military
defeat and the establishment of a society where women would have no equality,
but be confined to the home and kitchen. All the political work of the WSPU
in advancing the cause of women was useless, she insisted, unless there was
industrial peace. ‘[I]f we do not calm industrial unrest and restore harmony
between the workers and those who direct them, if we do not keep up the
supply of munitions at the front, all the other work might just as well never
have been done.’^20 I have found no evidence whatsoever to support the claim
that Emmeline personally handed out white feathers to young men still in
civilian dress.^21
Emmeline’s campaign, organised by Grace Roe, began in earnest on 21
September 1914, when she made a speech under the auspices of the WSPU at
the Brighton Dome explaining that although she had believed in peace from
her childhood, and still did, she had no doubt about the righteousness of this
war. The neutrality of Belgium had to be maintained, and it was ‘our duty’ to
stand by the great nation of France. The status of women in Germany was the
lowest in the civilised world, and if Germany conquered Britain, all that women
had been struggling for would cease to be. Appealing to young men who had
not made up their minds, to join soldiers at the war front, she emphasised that
in taking part in the war ‘we are fighting for our existence as a nation and all
the ideals for which our forefathers have fought and sacrificed in the past’.^22
Challenging dominant definitions of femininity, which defined women’s work
in wartime as voluntary caring work, she insisted that women should enter the
jobs of men so that men could be free to go to the war front. The WSPU, she
pointed out, held that ‘it is not our duty to form relief committees, or open
workrooms, or do work of that kind. This duty falls upon the Government of
this country.’^23 That she had lost none of the power of her oratory, as she trav-
elled up and down the country with such messages, was borne out in an account
of a speech she gave in Plymouth in mid November 1914, a city, she reminded
her audience, she had first visited many years ago, when she came with her
husband to address a meeting:
WAR WORK AND A SECOND FAMILY