and to men paying more than £10 annual rent in the boroughs, she did not
understand fully the implications of the changes that were introduced but
remembered well some of the controversy that it provoked. A chance to show
her support for the Liberal Party, of which her father was a member, came in the
first election after the bill when the daring Emmeline persuaded the willing
Mary to follow her in the mile-long walk to the nearest polling booth, in a
rough factory district. Since both girls were wearing new winter green frocks
with red flannel petticoats, the colours of the Liberal Party, she had suddenly
decided that they should parade before the queues of waiting voters, daintily
lifting the edge of their skirts, in order to encourage the Liberal vote. When the
nursery maid caught up with the children, she angrily stopped such a display of
impropriety.^15 The incident showed, perhaps, an early liking for performance
that may have been related to her father’s main hobby. Robert Goulden was a
well-known amateur actor in the Manchester area, especially of Shakespeare’s
plays, which he knew by heart, and the young Emmeline probably watched him,
admiring his skills.^16
When she was fourteen years old, the future leader of the WSPU attended
her first suffrage meeting. Coming home from school one day she met her
mother setting out to hear Lydia Becker who was Secretary of the influential
Manchester National Society for Women’s Suffrage and also a key figure in the
Victorian women’s rights movement. An enthusiastic Emmeline begged to be
taken too since she had long admired Miss Becker as the editor of the Women’s
Suffrage Journalwhich came to her mother every month. A plain, bespectacled
woman with her hair pulled back tightly into a bun at the back of her head,
Lydia Becker’s appearance and rather stern countenance was frequently the butt
of gibes in a sexist press.^17 But she was much in demand as a suffrage speaker.
Her talk this day enthralled and excited the schoolgirl so much that she left the
meeting ‘a conscious and confirmed’ suffragist. ‘I suppose I had always been an
unconscious suffragist. With my temperament and my surroundings I could
scarcely have been otherwise.’^18 Manchester was then the centre of the
women’s enfranchisement campaign and other important activists who lived in
the city or surrounding areas included Elizabeth Wolstenholme, Ursula Bright
and her husband, Jacob, and Dr. Richard Pankhurst, a radical barrister who was
a member of the far left of the Liberal Party and an advocate not just of
women’s rights but also other advanced causes of the day.^19
Emmeline, who had not yet met Richard Pankhurst, the man destined to
become her husband, was preoccupied with her forthcoming stay in France. Her
parents wanted their eldest daughter to be an accomplished young lady and so
sent her to Paris where she became a pupil at the Ecole Normale de Neuilly, a
pioneer institution in Europe for the higher education of girls. The Paris of her
schooldays was a city still bearing the scars of the recently ended Franco-
German war in which France had been defeated; even Emmeline’s school,
which had served as an infirmary for the sick and wounded, had walls riddled
with shell and the marks of bullet shots.^20 But worse was the suffering of the
CHILDHOOD AND YOUNG WOMANHOOD