later, haltingly said, ‘Father says I ought to talk to you.’ But the girls were told
nothing and the subject was never raised again.^63 Emmeline also held conven-
tional middle-class views about the education of her daughters, arguing against
sending them to school, where she feared that they would ‘lose all originality’;
in particular, she strongly disagreed with Richard’s idealistic suggestions that
they should be sent to an international Marxist school for child refugees and
destitute children from all over the world or to the state-supported local Board
School that largely drew upon a working-class clientele.^64 Instead, Christabel,
Sylvia and Adela had a home-based, unsystematic education where they had
access to their father’s book-lined study, often gave each other lessons or were
tutored by a governess. But in other ways, Emmeline and Richard were very
unconventional parents.
Their joint interest in politics was the central issue around which family life
revolved so that their children were not segregated from adult life but ‘bobbed
like corks’ on its tide, rarely playing games but more commonly participating in
the political gatherings held in their home.^65 They joined in the serious talk of
political discussions and generally helped by giving out leaflets, collecting
money in small brocade bags and printing notices, such as ‘To the Tea Room’.^66
The two eldest daughters, Christabel and Sylvia, were treated from an early age
as if they were grown up so that they became confident young people who could
argue with their mother and impress their views upon her.^67 The two younger
children, Adela and Harry, fared less well. ‘We lived too much together and
within ourselves to be healthy-minded’, Adela recollected, ‘and brooded over
troubles that other children in more healthy surroundings would have forgotten
in five minutes.’^68 While Adela viewed her mother with a mixture of both love
and fear, her father was a more distant figure of authority; both Adela and Harry
were terrified of him, unable to comprehend his lectures on socialism, capi-
talism, religion and suffrage.^69
Firm in her desire to see married women explicitly included in any new
women’s suffrage measure, Emmeline, with Richard, was rumoured to be
involved in a plan, in April 1892, to break up a meeting organised to support a
bill introduced by Sir Albert Rollit, a Conservative MP. This bill proposed to
give the parliamentary vote only to those propertied widowed and single
women who were eligible to vote in local elections. Although all the other
suffrage societies, including the Women’s Emancipation Union led by Elizabeth
Wolstenholme Elmy, supported Rollit’s bill, the Women’s Franchise League
vehemently opposed it. Without the authority of the League’s Executive
Committee, some of the League’s leadership – including Emmeline and Richard,
Ursula Bright, Alice Scatcherd, Helen Taylor, the socialist George Lansbury,
and two members of the Marxist Social Democratic Federation, Herbert
Burrows and H. M. Hyndman – signed and circulated a leaflet urging working
men and women to attend a meeting that was being held in support of the bill,
on 26 April 1892 in St. James’s Hall, London. The leaflet claimed that the bill
was ‘class legislation’ which aimed to enfranchise ‘middle-class women and
POLITICAL HOSTESS