of Parliament and Downing Street and is the very heart of our great Empire.
This is to me a most inspiring thought and I feel that it will make us all work
with might and main to win the seat for women.’^87 But Emmeline’s enthusiasm
was not echoed elsewhere. Many of the devoted followers who had surrounded
her in the suffrage struggle had drifted away while her patriotic and vigorous
support for the war effort was regarded now, in peace time, with something like
revulsion as demobilisation revealed the extent of the slaughter and mutilation
in the trenches. Membership of the Women’s Party was dwindling and the
General Secretary of the British Commonwealth Union was threatening to
discontinue any further financial support since no information had been
supplied about how the previous donations had been spent.^88
This falling away of support was keenly felt by the ageing Emmeline. Many
years later, Christabel reflected that after the war she and her mother were ‘two
virtually exiled leaders’ so that loyalty to Emmeline and herself was ‘a very costly
... & a risky thing’ to those who had to grapple with a world which did not
want any of their followers ‘who were “too loyal” ’.^89 Emmeline’s participation
in the Victory Loan Rally, in Trafalgar Square, on 28 June, was her last major
appearance for the Women’s Party which faded away shortly after; nothing more
was heard of Christabel’s candidature.
Martin Pugh claims that what seems striking at this time is that neither
Emmeline nor Christabel envisaged playing any further part in the women’s
movement in Britain.^90 Such a statement reveals a considerable lack of under-
standing of not only the women’s movement but of Christabel’s and Emmeline’s
interests. As noted earlier, Christabel had a new interest in life, namely Second
Adventism, while Emmeline’s feminism and interests were out of tune for the
times. Although a long struggle lay ahead to end the inequalities that women
faced in enfranchisement, pay, employment opportunities, divorce and marriage
laws, Emmeline’s message about the evils of Bolshevism and socialism were seen
as old-fashioned by many feminists and as overshadowing her concern for a
range of other feminist issues, including co-operative housing to lessen the
drudgery of housewives. But, primarily, Emmeline’s insistence upon the primacy
of gender rather than class, plus her autocratic style of leadership, were consid-
ered more appropriate to the old social order than the new. The Daily Newshad
opined late in 1918 that ‘the Pankhurst coterie has for some time been a spent
force in Feminist circles’ and this was indeed the case. The feminist movement
that had once focused on the struggle for the vote was beginning to fracture
into a range of causes, including pleasurable sex within marriage, birth control,
socialism and pacifism. In March 1918, Dr. Marie Stopes, one-time member of
the WSPU, had published Married love, a book that taught men and women the
techniques of love-making, the importance of foreplay and the desirability of
female sexual pleasure. Although the text was condemned as immoral, two
thousand copies were sold within a fortnight and it reached its seventh edition
by summer 1919. Wise parenthood, the treatise on birth control for married people,
published in November 1918, had a similar success.^91 A pull towards socialism,
LEADER OF THE WOMEN’S PARTY