and for her second family. When she returned to England in the summer of
1916 she set about making a home for herself, Catherine Pine and the babies by
renting and furnishing a house at 50 Clarendon Road, Holland Park, London.
Just before she moved in, Emmeline confessed to Ethel, ‘All these years I have
persuaded myself that I did not want a home of my own. But now that I can
have one I am all impatience to get into it.’^95 Her joy, once she moved in, was
evident as when she wrote to Una Dugdale, now also a mother, later in the year.
‘[A]t last I have a settled home ... & I shall be delighted if you will come & see
me one day before long. ... Now that you know all about babies I should like to
show you ours & have a talk about all the Union is doing in the war.’^96 But the
maintenance of 50 Clarendon Road over the next couple of years was always a
struggle for Emmeline who had to earn her living by lecturing, a very precarious
activity during wartime.
As Grayzel observes, the introduction of conscription by the British govern-
ment had radically altered the relationship between the franchise and military
service. Since parliamentary voting rights were based in property qualifications
and length of residence, as well as age, large numbers of men did not possess
electoral rights at the beginning of the war; once conscription was introduced,
debates about how suffrage, including women’s suffrage, should be related to
military service and patriotic action resurfaced.^97 Emmeline’s efforts in
demanding women’s war service made an essential contribution to the context
of these debates although it would appear that it was others who formally raised
the issue of women’s and adult suffrage in 1916, including members of the
NUWSS, the US, the WSF and the Suffragettes of the WSPU. In May 1916,
Millicent Garrett Fawcett had sent a letter on the subject of women’s suffrage to
Asquith who promptly denied that the government had any intention of intro-
ducing a reform bill. However, revision of the franchise was considered urgent
since large numbers of men serving abroad in the trenches and men who had
changed their residences to take up war work in new locales were inadvertently
disenfranchised. On 14 August, Asquith, in a confusing speech, stated that
although he had ‘no special desire or predisposition to bring women within the
pale of the franchise’, he had received a great many representations from those
authorised to speak for them which presented a ‘reasonable’ case. ‘[T]he women
of this country’, he continued, ‘have rendered as effective service in the prose-
cution of the War as any other class of the community.’ Nevertheless, he also
warned that ‘nothing could be more injurious to the best interests of the
country ... than that the floodgates should be opened on all those vast compli-
cated questions of the franchise ... at this stage of the War.’^98
Emmeline listened in disbelief. She had heard the hated Asquith too many
times before ever to trust him again. The women’s cause, she insisted, had
nothing to do with the case of soldiers and sailors. Before the war, Asquith was
an old hand at this kind of reasoning – he used the question of more votes for
men to ‘dish’ the women who wanted votes and now he was reversing the
process by using the question of votes for women to ‘dish’ the men who were
WAR WORK AND A SECOND FAMILY