Adela was convalescing, although she would have to be sent away for a short
time while the house was disinfected. ‘All this is a great worry’, she wrote, ‘as I
have so much other work to do (as the man as well as the mother of the family)
& I feel rather run down & fretful about things especially as, however careful I
am, I cannot help spending money freely at a time like this.’^65 If the Committee
did not agree to the proposals to resume the level of payments originally agreed,
then the balance should be used to found a municipal scholarship bearing her
husband’s name. She had always intended to do this, when she could afford to
do so, and if the children approved. ‘If we cannot have the money for their
immediate needs without humiliation we had better do without it altogether’,
Emmeline insisted. ‘I shall have to work harder & we must learn to do without
some things but better that than lose our sense of independence.’^66
Emmeline’s stubbornness and refusal to compromise paid off. By the end of
January 1903 the matter was settled according to her wishes; the old level of
payments was to be resumed. ‘I shudder to think what would be our plight had I
not had sufficient energy & courage to work & earn money independently’, she
confided in gratitude to Nodal, who had worked on her behalf. ‘I am very hard
worked just now & what I want most of all is quiet & peace of mind.’ She also
told him the good news about Adela. ‘You will I am sure be pleased to know
that my girl is nearly well again. She goes to her Grandmother on the Isle of
Man at the end of next week.’^67 By early February, when the cheque from the
fund had still not arrived, Emmeline was sick with anxiety. ‘I have counted on
the money for January & February to pay some of the expenses incident to my
daughter’s illness & I really need it for apart from illness this is a time of the
year when I have heavy charges to meet insurance premiums etc. What must I
do?’ While afraid that Nodal would think her ‘an intolerable nuisance’,
Emmeline ended her letter by pointing out that ‘this wholly unnecessary worry
added to my usual hard work & my anxiety during my girl’s serious illness is
really making me ill.’^68
As no further letters to and from Emmeline to Nodal are extant about
payment from the Dr. Pankhurst Fund we may, perhaps, assume that the
contentious matter was finally settled. The struggle to be paid the monies from
the Fund on terms that Emmeline wanted was a formative experience in her
life. That the personal is political became painfully obvious to her as she
disagreed with the male administrators of the monies and firmly stood her
ground. No longer the ‘wife’ of a public man, but an impoverished ‘widow’, who
had to earn a living, she resisted the attempt to force her into such a low status
position and insisted on her right to be heard with dignity. The struggle sharp-
ened her sense of her own identity as an individual and as a feminist. In
particular, the preference that the male administrators wanted to give to the
education of her son, Harry, in comparison with that of her daughters,
confirmed her feminist world-view that men saw women as a subordinate class.
WIDOWHOOD AND EMPLOYMENT