of inspiration. We are mourning for her to-day, but with a grief which
has in it the balm of pride and triumph: for we are consoled by the
certain belief that time will give to her the honoured niche in history
which is her due.^4Kitty Marshall was determined that the great militant leader should be
commemorated in some way and together with Rosamund Massy as joint
honorary secretary and Lady Rhondda as honorary treasurer, set up a Memorial
Fund. The plan was to raise £2,500 which would pay for a headstone for
Emmeline’s grave in Brompton Cemetery, the purchase of a portrait that had
been painted by Georgina Brackenbury for presentation to the National Portrait
Gallery, and a statue to be erected in Victoria Tower Gardens, adjacent to the
House of Commons. ‘[M]en commemorate their heroes and liberators by
erecting statues’, it was claimed. ‘Shall not women claim equal honour for her
who led them to victory?’^5 Rachel Barrett, knowing of Emmeline’s ‘devotion to
Canada’, wrote to Margaret Bates in Toronto, asking her to help organise a
collection in that city and also invited Mrs. Kennedy in Ottawa and Mrs.
Murphy in Edmonton to do the same in their part of the world.^6 Similar
requests were also sent to the USA.^7
Meanwhile, Emmeline’s daughters were remembering their mother, each in
her own way. Adela was telling her children stories about how their grand-
mother had won the vote for women while Christabel announced that she was
going to write a memoir of her mother.^8 Sylvia had a book contract too, for The
suffragette movement, but was finding that the constant demands of a small baby
interrupted the time she tried to put aside for writing. In desperation, she wrote
to Norah Walshe, a former suffrage colleague, seeking her help.^9 Although
Norah was unable to look after Richard, other old friends offered their services.
Aware that she was despised by those close to her mother, who blamed her for
Emmeline’s death, Sylvia was determined to record her own version of events. It
would be very different from Christabel’s and also from Ray Strachey’s history of
the women’s movement in Britain, ‘The cause’, published in the autumn of
- Strachey, a former member of the NUWSS and a great admirer of
Millicent Garrett Fawcett’s liberal reformist approach to the suffrage issue, was
very critical of the WSPU leaders and their militant tactics. Emmeline and
Christabel Pankhurst, she claims, brushed aside ‘the ordinary niceties of proce-
dure’ and did not care whom they ‘shocked and antagonised ... nor was
democracy much to their taste’. They laughed at all talk of persuasion since
they believed in ‘moral violence’. By this force, and the driving power of their
own determination, they hoped to ‘coerce’ the government into granting their
demand. With such an ‘aggressive and headlong’ approach, they ‘deliberately
put themselves in the position of outlaws dogged by the police’. The organisa-
tion of the WSPU was inadequate too, since no thorough membership or
financial records were kept.^10 As Kathryn Dodd persuasively argued many years
later, Strachey uses the political vocabulary of liberalism to position Millicent
NICHE IN HISTORY