(CNCCVD) as part of a much wider campaign to help the various educational
and curative programmes developed by the Canadian Social Hygiene Council.
Special clinics, partly supported by federal grants, had been opened, a team of
medical lecturers recruited, and various forms of educational leaflets and films
prepared. What was missing was a lecturer with the common touch, who could
communicate easily with the people, and lead a moral crusade. Dr. Bates had no
doubt that Emmeline Pankhurst was the ideal person for the job. The problem
would be to persuade the Executive Committee of the National Council that
the well-known militant, with her forthright views, was the right person.
By mid December, when Emmeline had left Victoria and was in Raleigh,
North Carolina, the United States, she was writing to Dr. Bates asking him to
send the necessary literature to an address in Chicago, promising to make of it
what she could in her present speaking tour. Emmeline enclosed with her letter
a cutting from the Raleigh News and Observerabout a recent court case where a
Mecklenburg jury had awarded a woman damages against her husband for
infecting her ‘with a foul and loathsome disease’. For Emmeline this was an
encouraging sign that the double sexual standard, which she had condemned so
forcibly in the past, was no longer being accepted. ‘It shows that even in the
backward Southern States a far better public opinion is growing’, she informed
Dr. Bates. ‘I want to do more to mould that opinion than I am doing. My diffi-
culty is that as yet the ordinary lecture agencies are not ready to take up the
question and no single individual can arrange speaking engagements without an
agency of some kind.’ Angling for a lecturing post with the CNCCVD,
Emmeline expressed the hope that, after the end of this season, she would be
speaking under ‘other auspices & have more freedom. In any case I shall not be
tied down so closely to the Anti-Bolshevist work because now many other
people are doing the work I started in 1917 & I can turn my attention to other
subjects.’^20 Emmeline did not want to miss the opportunity of crusading against
venereal diseases, a subject dear to her heart and about which Christabel had
written so effectively in The great scourge. She had never forgotten her time as a
Registrar of Births and Deaths when sometimes the mother registering the
death of a baby did not know that the doctor’s certificate in the sealed envelope
listed venereal disease as the cause.
With Emmeline being away so much from home, the children were brought
up by Catherine Pine who, recollected Mary, was ‘terribly strict, really like an
old-fashioned nanny’. Emmeline, revelling in having the small girls by her side,
always made sure that they were dressed alike, in pretty Kate Greenaway-type
clothes which she usually made herself. The girls spent most of their time in
the nursery but, in typically Victorian manner, were always dressed up in their
best clothes for tea, hair fully brushed, and had a rather formal relationship
with ‘Mother’, as they called Emmeline. Kathleen remembered that, in the
mornings, on the infrequent occasions when Mother was at home, they would
knock on her bedroom door and she would say, ‘Come in’. Then they would
enter the room very quietly, kiss Emmeline on the cheek, and go out again.
LECTURER IN NORTH AMERICA