the importance of her work. ‘I am glad you are so confidant’, she confided in
one letter marked ‘Private’ to Emmeline, ‘I shall leave the Manchester
Committee with joy in your hands & under your direction.’^55 But it is Sylvia’s
claim that, within the League, her mother regarded herself ‘as the helper and
understudy of her husband’ that is especially problematic, since it is a view that
does not accord with Emmeline’s own representation of herself at this time.
The Woman’s Heraldconsidered Emmeline Pankhurst prominent enough to
be interviewed for its issue of 7 February1891, introducing her as an ‘earnest
speaker’ who ‘for a long time has been known as an active and successful worker
in the cause of women, which she has so much at heart’. When the interviewer
asked Emmeline if she found her political work and the running of her business,
where she superintended her shop assistants for about eight hours a day, a bar to
her domestic duties, she replied decisively:
In no way; I enjoy to the full the happiness of home. I have four little
children, who, I might say, are quite as happy, quite as well looked
after, as any children. They are devoted to me; indeed, I think they
appreciate me all the more because they do not see too much of me. I
have an excellent nurse and governess to whom I can confidently
entrust my children. I do not think the mother is the best instructress
of her own offspring in any way; she is often too indulgent; the
constant intercourse may, in my opinion, be the reverse of beneficial.
My children look forward to my return as a treat; I have two days a
week I can devote entirely to them.^56Praising her husband as being one of the first to promote the extension of the
franchise to women, she spoke warmly of the support and encouragement he
gave her. ‘In all women’s questions I have his earnest help and sympathy’, she
boasted. When asked about her views on politics, she replied, ‘I am a Radical,
devoted to the politics of the people, and to progress, especially where the
education, emancipation, and industrial interests of women are concerned.’
Far from being ‘the helper and understudy of her husband’, Emmeline appears
as the more ambitious and active of the partnership in regard to women’s
suffrage. ‘I feel deeply’, she continued to the interviewer, ‘how much the
Suffrage and active work will do for the independence and happiness of women.’
Then in words that were to echo in future years, when she would be the most
notorious of the women suffrage leaders, advocating that her followers should
rise up and demand their rights from a repressive Liberal government, she said:
I recently wrote a letter to the Star... [appealing] to the Liberal leaders
to take up Women Suffrage, as a practical measure in the Liberal
policy. It will be a great loss to that party, and a gain to the forces of
reaction, if the Liberals neglect this call upon their principles and
allow the Conservative party to grant justice to women in giving themPOLITICAL HOSTESS