for Ireland, an issue on which no other contender had yet made a stand. The
Manchester Liberal Association, furious at Richard’s defection, instructed its
members not to vote for him while most of the press condemned his defence of
the Irish cause, suggesting that it was the strongest reason not to support him at
the poll. While fighting against such odds, Richard also made his candidacy a
much harder task by announcing his intention of abiding by the new Corrupt
Practices Act, not yet in force, which forbade the use of paid canvassers and the
taking of voters by cab to the election poll and also set a limit on election
expenses. His opponent, who had fewer scruples about such matters, spent
£5,559 on his expenses while Richard’s amounted to a mere £541.^12
An anxious Emmeline, resentful against those whom Richard had once
supported and who now refused to support him, rushed impulsively to Lydia
Becker, asking her to make an official declaration in Richard’s favour, in the
name of the Manchester Women’s Suffrage Society. Much to Emmeline’s aston-
ishment, Miss Becker coldly refused, telling the young wife that her husband
was a ‘fire-brand’. With anger in her heart, Emmeline wept when she told
Richard the news.^13 Emmeline may not have known about the past disagree-
ments between Lydia Becker and her husband, otherwise she may not have
sought Miss Becker’s help so eagerly. In 1874, one of the bitterest disputes
between the two had erupted over Lydia’s support for a women’s suffrage bill
sponsored by William Forsyth, a Conservative MP, which explicitly excluded
married women; she reluctantly advocated a pragmatic acceptance of a fran-
chise limited only to single women since it would enfranchise at least 800,000
widows and spinsters. Lydia had expected Richard Pankhurst to support her in
this controversial move but he refused to do so, standing firm with Jacob and
Ursula Bright, and Elizabeth Wolstenholme, in vehemently opposing any
measure that excluded married women.^14 In addition to this history of past
disagreements, there may have been also another more personal reason for
Lydia’s reluctance to support Richard Pankhurst’s candidature as an
Independent in 1883. There were persistent rumours that she had once been
‘sweet’ on the learned doctor and greatly disappointed when he married
someone else.^15 If the rumours were true, then the sight of the visibly pregnant
Emmeline pleading for support for her husband to the woman he had slighted,
may have stiffened Lydia’s resolve. Later, she seemed to relent a little in her
stand when she wrote about Dr. Pankhurst’s candidature, praising the way in the
past he had given ‘active and valuable help to the advancement of the position
of women’; but the impact of such kind words on the earnest Emmeline was
destroyed by the calm observation that since the ‘extreme Radical’ Dr.
Pankhurst and the ‘staunch Conservative’ Mr. Houldsworth both expressed
adherence to women’s suffrage, the women’s cause would be supported, whoever
was the victor.^16
The scale of Richard’s defeat, just 6,216 votes cast for him against 18,188 for
Mr. Houldsworth, shocked Emmeline. She felt keenly her husband’s disappoint-
ment and must have been delighted when their third baby, a boy named Henry
MARRIAGE AND ENTRY INTO POLITICAL LIFE