cities – which would take some of the drudgery out of housework and clean up
the smoky, dirty atmosphere – and the Empire. ‘It was always a great grief to
me’, she told a Daily Newsreporter, ‘to have to put aside all my wider interests
for the sake of a single object – to break down the sex barrier. Now I think I
deserve to be allowed to work for the general questions affecting women and
the country generally.’^3 On 2 March, she attended the dinner organised by the
Six Point Group in her honour at the Hyde Park Hotel where Nancy Astor, in a
eulogy to the distinguished guest, offered to resign her seat as an MP in favour
of the one-time militant suffragette leader. Gracefully, Emmeline declined the
offer but expressed her willingness to contest a seat that might fall vacant; she
denied a rumour that she had accepted an invitation to become a Conservative
candidate.^4
While the rumours continued, Emmeline was facing a still more pressing
issue – how to earn some money. She initiated a discussion with the McClure
Syndicate in New York about publication of a series of articles but the essays
never materialised. Emmeline was not a writer but a skilled orator who thought
best through the spoken word; the immediate response of an audience was what
she thrived on. Nevertheless, she published short articles in the English press
about women’s improved status in British society. ‘Sixty years ago in England
every girl, with one exception – the Queen upon the throne – could be
described as a compulsory feminine Peter Pan – a human being who politically,
and to a great extent legally, never grew up but was all her life an infant’, she
wrote in the Evening News. Although women had not yet secured equal polit-
ical rights with men, the ‘barrier of sex’ had been broken; women were now
voters and, with the passing of the 1919 Sex Disqualification Act, could now
enter the professions and become magistrates, lawyers, police women and top
civil servants. ‘What a change from the time when to be healthy and active, to
be intelligent and intellectual, to be ambitious to take part in the world’s work,
was to be unladylike and unwomanly and unsexed!’^5 However, despite such
reminiscences, it was the approaching General Strike of May 1926 that now
preoccupied Emmeline.
She had returned to an England in which class conflict and industrial
disputes were endemic. For a few months, Emmeline had been corresponding
with Esther Greg, a wealthy Conservative whose husband, John, was a Major in
the Special Reserve. Esther had put up the money for the Women’s Guild of
Empire (WGE), founded by Flora Drummond and Elsie Bowerman in 1920, and
which had grown to more than thirty branches with a membership of about
forty thousand women, most of them the wives of working men.^6 The WGE,
which strongly disapproved of fascism, promoted co-operation between
employers and workers and campaigned against communism and trade union
tyranny; strikes and lockouts, it was argued, only caused misery and unemploy-
ment, and it was working wives, who were never consulted about stoppages at
work, who bore the brunt of the poverty as they scrimped and scraped to feed
their hungry children and pay the rent. As the industrial situation became
CONSERVATIVE PARLIAMENTARY CANDIDATE