the address she usually gave on Social Hygiene as well as details about the fees
she charged.^32 Emmeline told him that the lecture bureaux charged $250 to
$500 for her services, but she only asked for $100 from the women’s clubs since
she took a special interest in their work. ‘I am very keen to help your move-
ment’, she continued, ‘so keen that if I were a rich woman I would give you a
whole year for nothing and pay my own expenses.’ Her reply in regard to the
question about the line in her addresses is revealing for the way she presented
herself in order to be engaged as a CNCCVD lecturer:
I appeal for a higher standard of public health & public morals and I
illustrate the need for both from my experience in England as a
member for some years of two elective bodies the School Board and
the Board of Poor Law Guardians and later as a Registrar of Births &
Deaths under the Local Government Board.
A great many people think of me as a worker for women’s suffrage
only. As a matter of fact I have had a good deal of practical experience
in Poor Law Hospitals, workhouses, schools etc. I prefer leaving
medical details to medical men although of course if no expert is
present I can speak generally as to venereal disease. My conclusion is
that physical health & moral health must go together. I have no
manuscript address for I am an extempore speaker. Your Council must
trust me to say the right & the tactful things in the right way if I speak
under their auspices.^33Emmeline’s lecture tour of the United States, on the evils of Bolshevism, was
drawing to an end, and once an agreement had been reached with Dr. Bates
about her fees and the payment of her travelling expenses, she was ready to
begin her new career as lecturer on social hygiene for the CNCCVD.
On 21 April Emmeline arrived in Toronto brimming with confidence, ready
to speak at Massey Hall the following day. True to her suggestion that in order
to have successful meetings one had to rouse the public and work up an interest,
she held a number of press interviews before the meeting where she revealed
that she had lost none of her dramatic flair for catching attention. Sexual
diseases, she announced to an eager reporter for the Toronto Evening Telegram,
which come from sex promiscuity, are closely related to Bolshevism which was
like an infectious mental disease. ‘If you get a healthy race ... mental and moral
diseases will disappear.’ The Toronto Daily Star had no doubt that Mrs.
Pankhurst, who had come to plead the cause of ‘moral sanity’, was ‘one of the
great women of this or any other age’. When the suffrage for which she fought
did not come, she did not sulk but devoted her considerable talents to the war
effort. ‘She is one of the great agitators who have learned that in quietness and
confidence, as the Scripture saith, there is unconquerable strength.’^34
Crowds flocked to hear Emmeline’s Massey Hall address on ‘Social hygiene
and the world’s unrest’. Mr. Justice Riddell, President of the CNCCVD, opened
LECTURER IN NORTH AMERICA