that the Labor people resent her coming and assumption that they are not able
to manage their own problems without the interference and leadership of a
foreigner.’^59 And to her pacifist, socialist daughter, Sylvia, Emmeline’s call for
armed intervention in Russia was a betrayal of all the fine ideals she had once
upheld, especially her support for the development of a people ‘with whose long
struggle for liberty she had sympathized from youth upward’. Sharing her views
with her sister, Adela, Sylvia wrote, ‘Mother is in America. It is strange she
takes the opposite view on everything. The most extreme jingoism is scarcely
extreme enough for her. I only look in wonder and ask myself, “Can those two
[her mother and her sister, Christabel] really be sane?” ’^60
But the patriotic Emmeline was sane and had lost none of her power of
oratory. She felt honoured to participate in a special tribute to the bravery and
heroism of the French who had stayed Germany’s progress at the Marne. The
mass meeting, attended by nearly 4,000 people, was held on Bastille Day, 14
July, in Rochester, New York. ‘Mrs. Emmeline Pankhurst, Famous
Englishwoman, Surprises Audience in Beautiful Eulogy of French Soldiers, and
Pictures Touching Scene in Alsace.’ ran the headlines of the Rochester Herald.
With emotion in her voice, Emmeline spoke of how France, in the fight for
liberty, had borne the heat and burden of war ‘for all of us’, and how the time
had come to share that burden. ‘To-day we are all one in soul and aspiration,
fighting for that great cause, as we pay tribute to that mother of freedom. Say
with me: “Vive la France”.’^61 The lessons that the nine-year-old Emmeline had
learnt from Carlyle’s The French revolutionhad never left her but remained, as
noted earlier, ‘a source of inspiration’ all her life.^62
While Emmeline was in the USA, some Canadian women contacted her,
pleading with her to visit them and so she spent the last ten days of her tour in
Canada. When she spoke to the Canadian Club in Toronto, in mid September,
the themes were familiar. Emmeline expressed her grave disappointment that
after its revolution, Russia had not moved on and taken her place with the
democratic nations of the world. Instead all the talk was of the revolution
‘being one step nearer’ the day when the working classes would rule the world.
‘Class rule is an evil thing, whether the authority is that of an aristocracy or a
mobocracy, and whether it is exercised by a single tyrant or by a whole class.’ A
Bolshevik, pro-German element could be found in Britain, the USA and
Canada, preaching, she scornfully noted, that ‘the war was an imperialist war
and not a people’s war, a war of capitalists and not of workers. The very people
whose sons and brothers were dying in the trenches were being invited to take a
class advantage out of it.’^63
On returning to England in mid October, a welcome meeting was arranged
for Emmeline at the Queen’s Hall on 30 October at which she gave an account
of her five-month tour. A patriotic feminist, she called not only upon the
rhetoric of imperial ideologies to vigorously reaffirm her faith in the British
Empire, but also to advocate a particular role for the new women citizens within
such discourses as reformers who could aid its progress:
LEADER OF THE WOMEN’S PARTY