Emmeline and Richard had deliberately ‘engineered’ the move as part of a plan
to re-establish the political career of Sir Charles whose reputation had been
ruined when he was cited as a co-respondent in a much publicised divorce case
four years earlier.^41 His supporters, she believed, hoped that he could rebuild his
parliamentary career by sponsoring measures on both women’s suffrage and the
need for independent parliamentary representation from within the labour
movement, a dual focus which she thought could lead to divided loyalties.
Whether the Pankhursts had ‘engineered’ the recruitment of the Brights to the
League inner circle for such purposes is difficult to determine. But there was a
tie of ‘strong affection’ between the two couples, Emmeline being particularly
close to the older Ursula Bright who held an ‘almost maternal love’ for the
charming hostess of 8 Russell Square.^42 At the request of Ursula Bright,
Emmeline later joined the Women’s Liberal Federation.^43
The League held resolutely to the principle of championing the cause of
married women and, unlike the other suffrage societies, refused in 1889 to
support two private members’ measures on women’s suffrage brought before
parliament since one bill included a proviso to exclude women under coverture
(the doctrine whereby women upon marriage lost their own separate legal iden-
tity which was subsumed under that of their husbands) while the other bill
would not enfranchise wives either. That married women lost the civil standing
they had once held as single women, a status that could only be regained if
widowed, was deeply offensive to League members. Coverture was seen as a
doctrine that epitomised the subordinate and slave-like status of wives, robbing
them not only of their property but also of ownership of their own bodies. The
League challenged attempts to exclude married women from suffrage measures
by adopting and adapting for its own use Richard Pankhurst’s Women’s
Disabilities Removal Bill, first introduced to the Commons in 1870 by Jacob
Bright. The three clauses of the League bill stated that in all legislation relating
to the right to vote at parliamentary, municipal, local and other elections,
‘words importing the masculine gender shall be deemed to include women’; that
no woman ‘shall be subject to legal incapacity from voting at such elections by
reason of coverture’, and that no person ‘shall be disqualified from being elected
or appointed to, or from filling or holding, any office or position, merely by
reason that such person is a woman, or, being a woman, is under coverture.’^44
With such provisions, this bill became the ‘first’ women’s suffrage bill to
expressly include married women.^45
Richard Haldane, a young, radical, Liberal MP who was a frequent speaker at
8 Russell Square, brought the bill before the Commons in 1889 and 1890, but,
much to Emmeline’s disappointment, did not advance it. With a few other
women League members, Emmeline interviewed Dilke in the Lobby of the
House of Commons, urging him to take the bill to a vote. She smouldered with
indignation when he replied that the measure was simply a declaration of prin-
ciple which could not possibly become law for fifty years.^46 Equal divorce and
inheritance rights for women were also advocated by the League, which even
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