sharply that all the windows were barricaded to prevent the children from
falling out.^5
Emmeline was now nearly sixty years old and beginning to feel her age. The
hardships of her imprisonments had played havoc with her body and the
desperate food situation in Russia had aggravated her health problems.
Although instances of her old fire, power of oratory and iron determination
remained, the direction of the WSPU came increasingly under the control of
the younger, fitter and more vigorous Christabel. That autumn, Emmeline
allowed herself just a short convalescence before she reported to Lloyd George
about her Russian trip. With Christabel by her side, she attended a breakfast
meeting at 10 Downing Street where she told the Prime Minister in no uncer-
tain terms about the chaotic and desperate situation in Russia, urging him to
intervene against the forces of Bolshevism by sending Allied troops to help the
Cossacks and other loyal sections regain control. That the Bolsheviks were now
in power seemed to Emmeline a tragic consequence of the low standard of
education of the Russian masses, 80 per cent of whom were illiterate; ‘entirely
dependent upon what people told them’, they had been deluded by the ‘machi-
nations of the German agents’.^6 In press interviews, she bitterly condemned
Kerensky, now fallen from power, who had begun his own reign of terror. ‘There
were wholesale arrests of people whom he feared; no less than forty officers were
arrested at the hotel at which I myself was staying. The loyal and patriotic
elements in Russia were repressed by methods of outrageous tyranny.’ Since the
majority of the Russian people were patriotic but lacked armaments, Emmeline
now publicly called for armed intervention by the Allies to restore order and to
save Russia from the oppression of the armed Bolsheviks who, she believed,
were German agents.^7 She was not alone in expressing such views. World-wide,
there was a strong condemnation of Bolshevism, as governments and peoples
feared it could destabilise the old order.
Emmeline found the situation in England in regard to women’s enfranchise-
ment much changed. The House of Commons had passed the clause giving the
parliamentary vote to certain categories of women aged thirty years and over
and it was now waiting to go through the House of Lords, early in 1918. On the
instigation of the Standing Joint Committee of Industrial Women’s
Organisations, a conference was held in London that October on Women’s
Civic and Political Responsibilities at which the key issues debated were
whether women, once the vote was won, should seek equality with men or the
pursuit of goals of specific concern to women, and the forms of political organi-
sation best suited to these differing tasks. The prominent socialist feminist
Marion Phillips argued for women to develop ‘a strong political organisation
embracing both men and women ... not to follow the line of sex division’, a
stance supported by the majority of the delegates, including Millicent Garrett
Fawcett.^8 Emmeline and Christabel were strongly opposed to such a form of
organisation and had just relaunched the women-only WSPU as the Women’s
Party. ‘While the Women’s Party is in no way based on sex antagonism’, it was
LEADER OF THE WOMEN’S PARTY