detail of how far Emmeline’s vision was to be carried out by state services,
elected bodies or private enterprise was not revealed. However, Britannia
commented that the abolition of poverty and securing of prosperity for all could
not be achieved by ‘shop stewardism and committee control of industry’ but by
greater progress in organisation, by more discipline and by a shorter, more
productive day with higher remuneration advancing in proportion to increase
in output, a view supported by Lord Leverhulme, the industrialist, who also
wrote for the newspaper.^36 Such views alienated many socialists, including
many male industrial workers, who saw Emmeline Pankhurst as being on the
side of the ruling class, conservatism and the Empire. When male munition
workers in Manchester complained to Emmeline that she had excluded them
from her talk, which was addressed only to their female counterparts, she curtly
agreed to give them ten minutes of her time. She appeared when the men were
at their tea break. Helped onto a strong table to deliver her message, she was
immediately confronted by the banging and breaking of the crockery. Not
prepared to tolerate such behaviour, she swiftly stepped down from the table
and marched out of the room announcing, ‘I’m not going to waste my breath
and try my voice for people like you.’ A silence fell. Although she was entreated
to stay, the leader of the Women’s Party refused to do so. She suspected that her
reception had been orchestrated by the younger Bolshevik agitators. The
women munition workers had been telling her that they were ‘disgusted’ with
some of the men who, not daring because of public feeling to organise a strike
openly, were operating, unofficially, a go-slow whereby they restricted produc-
tion to one-third of a normal day’s output. The male workers were trying to get
the women out of the factory since they were loyal to the war effort and
preventing effective industrial action. They were also refusing to teach the
women their work skills, which Emmeline thought vastly overrated; there was
nothing, she told Ethel Smyth, that could not be taught to women in three
weeks.^37 That the men might be concerned that an influx of lower-paid,
unskilled women might bring about a reduction in their wages, or that women’s
lower remuneration might peg their pay to an unacceptable level, did not hold
any weight with Emmeline. What mattered was that women workers were being
discriminated against by the men who were diminishing the war effort.
Experiences such as these, when she addressed thousands of women in the great
munition centres at Birmingham, Coventry, Manchester and the Clyde, where,
Emmeline claimed, she met ‘[n]ot one pacifist’, stiffened further her hatred of
Bolshevism, the Labour Party and men’s socialism.^38 She looked not to the
leaders of the Labour Party to fulfil her dreams of a better society and equality
for women but to Lloyd George. He was the man who had granted women the
parliamentary franchise, the leader promising extensive social reforms, the
person who was skilfully leading a coalition government that rose above
sectionalism and could usher in the non-party programme that she so desired.^39
On 6 February 1918, when the Representation of the People Act received
the Royal Assent, women who had attained the age of thirty years were entitled
LEADER OF THE WOMEN’S PARTY