family stayed temporarily at 173 High Street, Oxford Road, Manchester where
an Executive Committee meeting of the Women’s Franchise League was held
on 17 November 1893. At the small gathering, Emmeline, Richard, Alice
Scatcherd and Ursula Bright eagerly endorsed the congratulations that had
been sent to Walter McLaren and Charles Dilke, amongst others, who had
helped to secure the passing of instructions to the Committee on Local
Government that it had the power to insert provision for the enfranchisement
of married women with appropriate qualifications, on the same basis as that for
single women, for the purposes of the forthcoming Local Government Bill of
1894.^6 Ursula Bright had travelled up from London to attend this celebratory
meeting, staying with the Pankhursts in their home. Although she and the
other League members were jubilant at what they saw as ‘their’ victory for
married women, she was soon expressing doubts to Emmeline that all their
efforts might be in vain.^7 Such anxieties were later laid to rest; the Local
Government Act, passed the following year, admitted married women to the
local franchises on the same terms as single women.
Within the cosmopolitan life of the thriving city of Manchester, Emmeline
found plenty of outlets for her renewed enthusiasm for political life. She became
a member of the Executive Committee of the Manchester National Society for
Women’s Suffrage^8 which, since the death of Lydia Becker in 1890, no longer
opposed the inclusion of married women in suffrage measures and was reinvigo-
rated with the appointment of Esther Roper as the new secretary. In June 1894,
as a leading member of this Society and also of the Women’s Franchise League,
she helped to organise a demonstration in the Manchester Free Trade Hall to
support the women textile workers of Cheshire and Lancashire who were
campaigning on behalf of the ‘Special Appeal’, a statement supported by a
range of women who, despite their differing opinions on other political issues,
were ‘of one mind that the continued denial of the franchise to women, while it
is at the same time being gradually extended amongst men, is at once unjust
and expedient’.^9 During June, Emmeline also spoke for the Manchester Society
at both open-air and indoor meetings alongside her husband and other enthusi-
asts.^10 And undoubtedly, although she lived in faraway Manchester, she
responded to Ursula Bright’s request to help all she could in mobilising support
for a major suffrage meeting held in early June in the Queen’s Hall, Langham
Place, London.^11 ‘Don’t you come unless other business brings you’, advised the
older woman, affectionately. ‘Save your poor strength as much as you can.’
Ursula Bright also chided Emmeline for being fearful about financial losses she
could face for a League meeting she was organising herself. ‘Courage dear little
woman– & don’t kill yourself – and don’t hesitate to use my cheque if
required.’^12
Emmeline’s work with the Manchester Society and the Women’s Franchise
League were not her only political outlets however. Both Emmeline and her
husband were being increasingly drawn into socialist politics, especially through
the warm, close friendship they had developed with Keir Hardie, a Scot of
SOCIALIST AND PUBLIC REPRESENTATIVE