The next time I came to Plymouth, or tried to come to Plymouth –
(laughter) – I was a militant Suffragette, I was a convict – (laughter) –
as I still am. Life is a queer, topsy-turvy thing, isn’t it? Here you have a
convict, whose license has expired, and not amnestified, actually
asking people to enlist and fight for the country (laughter). ... If you
go to this war and give your life, you could not end your life in a better
way, – for to give one’s life for one’s country, for a great cause, is a
splendid thing – (prolonged applause).^24Such ideas were far removed from what Sylvia believed, and also the kind of
relief work she was organising through her East London Federation – the setting
up of mother-and-child welfare centres, the running of cost-price restaurants,
the establishing of toy and shoe-making factories run on co-operative lines, and
the founding of a day nursery.^25 Yet, despite her differences with her mother,
Sylvia still craved her approval. Accompanied by Norah Smyth, she decided to
go to Paris that Christmas and see Emmeline who was staying with Nurse Pine
in Christabel’s flat, Christabel being away on a lecture tour of the USA.
According to Sylvia, her mother would speak of nothing but the war – despite
‘perceiving the opposition in our hearts’ – and in her vigorous defence of it,
seemed ‘a very Maenad ... with her flashing eyes’. The pacifist daughter was
relieved when the meeting ended. ‘We were distant from each other as though a
thousand leagues had intervened.’^26 Sylvia was one of the 100 British women
pacifists who had signed an open Christmas letter, published in Jus Suffragii, to
the women of Germany and Austria. ‘Do not let us forget our very anguish
unites us. ... We must all urge that peace be made. ... We are yours in this
sisterhood of sorrow.’^27 The sorrow that Emmeline and Sylvia felt about their
opposing views, however, would never unite them.
Emmeline, like so many other people, had expected the war to be over soon.
By the New Year of 1915, however, when it was apparent that this was not to
be, she voiced more loudly her concerns about the way in which the govern-
ment was handling the war effort. Her intense dislike and distrust of Asquith,
still Prime Minister until his resignation in December 1916, had never lessened
and she did not lose the opportunity to criticise his failure to mobilise women to
enter men’s jobs so that men would be free to go to the war front and replenish
the heavy losses that had been sustained. Emmeline told Edith Shackleton,
when interviewed by her in late January 1915, ‘I’m not nursing soldiers. There
are so many others to do that ... it is no more to be expected that our organisers
should now necessarily take to knitting and nursing than that Mr. Asquith
should set his Ministers to making Army boots or uniforms.’ Emmeline’s insis-
tence that women should not be expected just to perform traditional womanly
tasks was consistent with WSPU policy which had always worked along
‘national lines’. She illustrated the point by comparing unfavourably the situa-
tion of women in Britain with that of women in France. In Paris, women
worked as conductors on the trams, a condition of their employment being that
WAR WORK AND A SECOND FAMILY