administration. About one million women were now employed in such jobs
where they could earn what she termed ‘decent wages’, and she felt sure, as she
told one audience, that the women ‘would not consent to go back to their old
position of dependence’. Her cry that the women must assert themselves was
heeded at large meetings of women munition workers at Birmingham and
Coventry where resolutions moved by Emmeline were overwhelmingly
carried.^48 At Easter, Emmeline was back in her home town of Manchester,
where she spoke in Stevenson Square and at Belle Vue pleasure grounds, as well
as in factories, cinemas and music halls.^49 Then she was off to speak in Sheffield
and in Glasgow and its surrounding district. It was like the old days of the
suffrage campaign although now the pace was a little slower. Since a general
election was likely to be held sometime that year, the Women’s Party opened a
new parliamentary department, with offices, at 5 Victoria Street, in London.
Jessie Kenney was in charge.^50 Money flowed into the ‘Patriots versus Pacifists’
appeal, and there was a general buzz of activity as open-air meetings were held
twice daily in London as well as the weekly Monday meetings at the London
Pavilion and the weekly Tuesday At Homes.^51 Amid such bustle, Emmeline was
overjoyed to be able to visit Alsace in her beloved France, a region that the
French had recently taken from the Germans.^52
In late May 1918 the patriotic Emmeline went further afield, sailing to the
USA and Canada. Her mission was to arouse the American public in favour of
Japanese intervention in Russia. Russia had withdrawn from the war after peace
terms had been agreed with Germany in March 1918, but the cost had been
heavy; the Western portion of its former empire was now in German hands.
The strengthening of German military power allowed the launch, in the spring,
of a Western offensive so that even French and British socialists condemned the
Bolsheviks for their withdrawal from the war.^53 Emmeline was horrified. She
desperately wanted Germany to be defeated, the war to end and the Bolshevik
one-party state to fall. The Bolsheviks had not followed the ‘classic process’,
derived from the French Revolution, of electing an assembly by universal
suffrage; instead an undemocratic process had been followed whereby the
Bolshevik Party conflated its rule with the notion of the ‘dictatorship of the
proletariat’.^54 ‘It becomes more and more evident that the Russian people, as
distinct from their Bolshevik tyrants, look to the Allied forces to come and
rescue them from Bolshevik despotism and German conquest’, ran Britannia.^55
Thus Emmeline argued for Japanese intervention in Russia, not only as a way of
helping the Russian people to bring down their Bolshevik rulers but also as a
way to compel Germany to send reinforcements to the Eastern front, thus
relieving the Allied fronts on the West.
A number of people were not happy about Emmeline’s visit to North
America. Questions were asked in parliament about why, when there was a
policy of restricting sea travelling of women, a permit had been granted to Mrs.
Pankhurst to visit the USA. Was she going as a representative of, or commis-
sioned by, the British government? Were the costs of her journey to be defrayed
LEADER OF THE WOMEN’S PARTY