interested in this ... ’.^35 Emmeline was astonished and flattered that this
learned man with twenty years of public service should pay attention to her, a
young, inexperienced woman of twenty-one years old. They fell in love. It was,
as Rebecca West put it many years later, ‘an astounding match’.^36 It mattered
little to Emmeline that Richard was not dashingly physically attractive. He was
below medium in height, for a man of his time, with a gold-red beard covering
the greater part of his face, a broad, lofty forehead crowned with a mane of
ruddy hair, blue-grey, bright eyes, and a shrill, high-pitched voice. But he had a
wonderful smile, and, above all else, was an idealist.^37 Here was her hero, a man
with an intense hatred of injustice who struggled to make the world a better
place by fighting for unpopular causes, such as education for the working classes,
and women’s rights, a man who had been an ardent sympathiser with the North
in the American Civil War. Republican and anti-imperialist, Dr. Pankhurst was
also an advocate of the abolition of the House of Lords and of nationalisation of
the land. His involvement in the early women’s suffrage movement had
included, amongst other activities, acting as counsel in the 1869 case of
Chorlton v. Lings, a law suit which based women’s claim to the parliamentary
vote on the authority of ancient precedents; he had also drafted the first bill
aimed at giving women the vote, introduced unsuccessfully into parliament by
Jacob Bright in 1870.^38
The courtship of the ‘Red Doctor’ and the lively Emmeline Goulden was
short and intense, with the ever watchful Sophie Goulden accusing her
daughter of not keeping a ‘proper maidenly reserve’ and of ‘ ‘‘throwing herself at
him” ’.^39 By 23 September Richard was writing to Emmeline as his ‘Dearest
Treasure’ although, predictably, he also conversed on wider social issues, in
particular their common interests in reform. ‘In all my happiness with you’, he
wrote, ‘I feel most deeply the responsibilities that are gathering round us. ...
Every struggling cause shall be ours.’ Stressing the useful work they could jointly
undertake, he pleaded, ‘Help me in this in the future, unceasingly. Herein is the
strength – with bliss added – of two lives made one by that love which seeks
more the other than self. How I long and yearn to have all this shared to the
full between us in equal measure !’^40
The appeal to Emmeline, whose ‘ardent nature’ had moved her to desire to
do ‘some great thing’ was intoxicating.^41 Richard was still a member of the
Manchester Married Women’s Property Committee which had been formed in
1868 to campaign against the property disabilities of wives who, once married,
gave their property (as well as their legal identity) over to their husbands. In the
autumn of 1879, the agitation for reform was in full swing, with campaigners
pressing for married women to enjoy the same rights as single women and for
wives as well as husbands to have separate property interests.^42 Perhaps it was
an awareness of these debates that prompted Emmeline to suggest to her
intended that they dispense with a legal church ceremony and form a free union
- ‘Wouldn’t you have liked to try first how we should get on?’^43 The wise
Richard loved Emmeline too much even to contemplate such an idea. He knew
CHILDHOOD AND YOUNG WOMANHOOD