quarterly.’^49 Emmeline felt particularly upset about the manner in which
members of the committee, especially the Honorary Secretary and Honorary
Treasurer, had asked for information about the ages of her children and what
they were doing, and had refused to communicate with them; instead she
included the necessary information in her letter to Mr. Nodal. Two days later,
she wrote again to Mr. Nodal, thanking him for his reply and suggesting it
would be fine if she received the cheque before the end of the month. ‘All I
want’, she stated wearily, ‘is that the children’s money shall be regularly paid &
the original arrangement carried out.’^50
Such matters, although of utmost importance for the welfare of her children,
paled into insignificance in regard to the larger social reforms for which
Emmeline had campaigned in the past. And now it was Christabel who spurred
her mother on again. Christabel, a studious young woman, hated working at
Emerson’s; her able mind was not stretched by the monotonous tasks she had to
do.^51 Seeing her unhappiness, Emmeline had suggested that she attended some
classes at Owens College, part of Victoria (later Manchester) University. It was
after one lecture there that she met Esther Roper, secretary of the North of
England Society for Women’s Suffrage and also a committee member of the
NUWSS. Christabel had soon developed a friendship with Esther Roper and
her companion Eva Gore-Booth, secretary of the Manchester Women’s Trade
Council, and was drawn into their campaigns to win the vote for working
women. The latter cause held a particular appeal for Emmeline. Since Richard’s
death she had been a working woman herself and a single parent, struggling
financially to bring up a family; she also knew, only too well, through her work
as a Poor Law Guardian and as a Registrar, about the wretchedness of life for
poor working-class women, eking out a miserable existence on wages that were
much lower than those paid to their menfolk. By late November 1901,
Emmeline, like Christabel, was a subscriber to the North of England Society for
Women’s Suffrage and by the summer of 1902 she was speaking alongside Eva
Gore-Booth, Esther Roper and Christabel at meetings in Lancashire, organised
under its auspices.^52 This was part of a successful campaign, sponsored by the
Labour Representation Committee, to get David Shackleton elected to parlia-
ment in the hope that he would continue the fight for women’s suffrage in the
House of Commons. Shackleton was returned as the MP for the Clitheroe divi-
sion in early August.^53
Following on from this success, Emmeline was soon involved in family
matters again, a pattern that had characterised her life in the past and would
continue to do so, in the future. She had felt ‘triumphant’ when, earlier in the
year, Sylvia had won a National Silver Medal for designs for mosaic, a Primrose
Medal, and the highest prize open to students at her college, namely the Proctor
Travelling Studentship, a vacation scholarship that enabled its holder to make a
short trip abroad.^54 After some deliberation, Sylvia decided to study mosaics in
Venice and frescoes in Florence, and Emmeline accompanied her that August as
far as Geneva where the two would spend a month with Noémie Dufaux. En
WIDOWHOOD AND EMPLOYMENT