The newly married Emmeline, settling into her new home at 1 Drayton Terrace,
Old Trafford, Manchester, was soon pregnant. Anxious to be a good wife and
companion, she confided to Richard how conscious she felt about the gap
between his erudition and her own limited knowledge, asking for his help and
advice. Eager to please, Richard earnestly drew up a list of serious books for
Emmeline to study, but the young lively wife found the course of instruction
dull. She soon abandoned her plan for self-education and returned to reading
fiction. All her life she was to remain a copious novel reader, cleverly and
quickly skimming the pages to select what interested her, dealing with newspa-
pers in the same manner.^1 But it was an active rather than sedentary life that
Emmeline’s ardent nature desired, and marriage to Richard soon enabled her to
develop her powers in those causes in which she was already interested.
By March 1880 she is listed as a member of the Executive Committee of the
Manchester National Society for Women’s Suffrage which included not only
her husband and Lydia Becker but also Alice Cliff Scatcherd, wife of a textile
factory owner in the Leeds area and a radical suffragist.^2 Like Elizabeth
Wolstenholme Elmy, Alice Scatcherd was critical of many aspects of the
existing forms of marriage and refused to wear a wedding ring or to attend a
wedding service in the established church where brides had to pledge a vow of
obedience to their husbands.^3 In addition to meeting and working with such
non-conventional, strong-minded women, Emmeline also became part of the
network around the Manchester Married Women’s Property Committee to
which she was co-opted, as ‘a compliment to her husband’, and on which she
found herself ‘the youngest and least informed’ of its members.^4 Through such
work, the idealist Emmeline wanted to prove herself a worthy partner to her
husband in his great reforming mission.^5 More ambitious for him than for
herself, she hoped he would become a Member of Parliament and ‘do great
things for the working masses’ such as rescuing them from poverty, bad housing
and overwork. She was determined that his wings, ‘as reformer and champion of
great causes’, should not be clipped or weighed down by his marriage and was
hopeful that her father would settle property on her now that she was a wife and
expecting a baby; such a gesture would give her some economic independence
nancy kaufman
(Nancy Kaufman)
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