and its first secretary, Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy, were old acquaintances of
the Pankhursts. Harriet McIlquham, the first chair of its Executive Committee,
had established the right of married women to be elected Poor Law Guardians,
and to vote at parish meetings, thus proving ‘in her own person, that marriage is
no legal bar to the enjoyment and exercise of electorate and elective rights, at
any rate in matters parochial’.^34 Emmeline also claimed that she was ‘one of the
[League’s] founders’^35 and was probably present at a League meeting held at her
house on 23 July 1889, just two weeks after Harry was born. However, she was
not present at the League’s inaugural meeting held two days later although her
name does appear as a member of the first provisional committee. Amongst the
early recruits to membership, which probably never numbered more than a
couple of hundred, were Florence Fenwick Miller, Josephine and George Butler
and Harriot Stanton Blatch, daughter of the American suffragist Elizabeth Cady
Stanton. Harriot, living in England since her marriage to an Englishman, was
soon to become a friend of Emmeline’s, inviting Sylvia and Christabel to stay at
her home in Basingstoke, a provincial market town in Hampshire.^36 In these
early years, the League drew upon the transatlantic network formed by Harriot’s
mother who became a corresponding member. It also had links with the earlier
abolitionist movement in the States since William Lloyd Garrison, the younger,
spoke at the inaugural meeting, warning that the key obstacle that the aboli-
tionists had faced was support from those who urged moderation and
gradualism. His emphasis upon a firm approach that rejected ‘compromise and
the pragmatic manoeuvring of parliamentary and party politics’^37 would appeal
to Emmeline, as would the links, advocated by some of the League’s leadership,
to the emerging socialist and labour movements. In particular, it is within the
League that Emmeline served her political apprenticeship as a future women’s
suffrage leader.
The League often disparagingly referred to its rivals as ‘the Spinster Suffrage
party’ while the more moderate groups, in their turn, argued ‘Half a loaf is better
than no bread!’ against what they saw as the League’s wild and impractical
proposals.^38 But overall, the League saw itself, in Holton’s phrase, as ‘the voice of
Radical suffragism’, the group that put forward an advanced programme for all
women – unmarried, married or widowed – that aimed to obtain not just the vote
but eradicate women’s civil disabilities.^39 Alice Scatcherd, speaking at the inau-
gural meeting, proudly proclaimed that the League wanted to obtain ‘full and
equal justice for women with men’ and elaborated on how women were in revolt
against that most Victorian of feminine virtues the ‘complete self-effacement ...
the complete abnegation of self ’.^40 Such a broad programme of social reform,
dear to Emmeline’s heart, must have been frequently discussed at League gather-
ings, often held in her home.
During these years, Emmeline and Richard were friendly with other radical
liberals such as Sir Charles and Lady Dilke but they were especially close to
Jacob and Ursula Bright. When the Brights were suddenly recruited to the
League’s leadership in early 1890, Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy feared that
POLITICAL HOSTESS