eliminate the oppressive and work for the noble, we will be much better off.
The great battles which have been won, our institutions and our great reforms
which have been fought for, will be largely in vain unless we build up an impe-
rial race worthy of the heritage.’^48
With such messages of hope to the people of the Dominion, Emmeline’s
popularity soared so that thousands wore the pin she invented for the
CNCCVD, a shield in the WSPU colours of purple, white and green. On her
spring tour of Ontario and the eastern provinces, local and provincial digni-
taries were proud to speak on the same platform with her, occasionally wincing
under the directness of her feminist tongue. The Mayor of Bathurst, New
Brunswick, took Emmeline on a tour of the city, pointing out that an impressive
new building was a Home for Fallen Women. ‘Ah’, Emmeline replied, ‘where is
your Home for Fallen Men?’^49
Emmeline’s eminence was such that she was invited to be one of Canada’s
main representatives at a meeting of the Pan American Conference of Women
which began in Baltimore on 20 April and adjourned to Washington later in
the month. Although Nancy Astor was the key speaker, it was the internation-
ally renowned Emmeline Pankhurst who, despite being restricted to just a
five-minute address on the Canadian government’s work for social hygiene,
stole the limelight. The 3,000 women delegates stood on their seats, cheering
her and waving their handkerchiefs. Privately, Emmeline discussed with Nancy
an issue she could not raise on the National Council platform, prohibition. She
had heard too much about the evils of bootlegging to support legislation that
forbade the making and sale of alcohol and believed that reform should not
come from without but from within.^50 Released from National Council
lecturing for the summer, so that she speak on the Chautauqua circuit as a
lecturer on social hygiene, Emmeline visited sixty-three different towns
between mid May and the end of August, attracting large and sympathetic audi-
ences. She had already written to Christabel, who had not returned to England
but was speaking in California, asking her to join her – which she did, leaving
Elizabeth with Catherine Pine in Toronto. Christabel ended her talks with a
message about the Second Coming of Christ. Although Emmeline was not
particularly enthusiastic about this new direction in Christabel’s life, it was like
old times to have her eldest daughter by her side as they travelled by car on the
Chautauqua circuit.^51
That autumn, Emmeline swung back into her CNCCVD lecturing and also
addressed a number of women’s organisations on social reform, including the
Woman’s Christian Temperance Union in Toronto which she urged, once they
had won the prohibition battle, to take up the fight against sexual immorality.^52
Christabel was seeking her own independent life and was not drawn into her
mother’s campaign against venereal diseases. In November 1922 she preached
to a huge congregation in the John Knox Presbyterian Church in Toronto and
continued her religious speaking throughout the following summer, touring on
the Protestant circuit.^53 As the chilly autumn and winter of 1922 settled in,
LECTURER IN NORTH AMERICA