tion against women taking place in a hall named after a beloved husband and
father who had fought valiantly for women’s rights. Declaring that she had
wasted her time in the ILP, Emmeline agreed bitterly with Christabel’s
reproaches that she had allowed the cause of women to become effaced and that
the time had come to form a women’s organisation which ran parallel to it but
was not – as some historians have assumed – formally affiliated to the ILP.^10 On
9 October 1903, she said to a small group of women socialist suffragists,
‘Women, we must do the work ourselves. We must have an independent
women’s movement. Come to my house tomorrow and we will arrange it!’^11
The women who gathered at her home the following day voted to call the new
organisation the ‘Women’s Social and Political Union’ (WSPU), a name that
Emmeline had chosen ‘partly to emphasise its democracy, and partly to define
its object as political rather than propagandist’.^12 It was decided that the WSPU
(like the NUWSS) would campaign for the parliamentary vote for women on
the same terms as it is, or shall be, granted to men, and also keep itself free from
party affiliation. But unlike the NUWSS, the WSPU was to be a single-sex
organisation. ‘We resolved’, recollected Emmeline, ‘to limit our membership
exclusively to women ... and to be satisfied with nothing but action on our
question. Deeds, not words, was to be our permanent motto.’^13 As was charac-
teristic of Emmeline, now she had re-entered the franchise struggle, it became
for her the only cause in the world.^14 Her single-mindedness about votes for
women, fuelled by her passion to end the unjust and oppressed conditions of her
sex, was to be severely tested in the years to come.
In these early days, neither Emmeline not any of her daughters held any
office since they did not want the Union to be dismissed as ‘just’ a family
party.^15 Mrs. Rachel Scott was the first honorary secretary but her work was
primarily clerical. Weekly meetings were often held in Emmeline’s house –
described as ‘a home of love and unity and confusion’^16 – but sometimes in a
small room on the top floor of 116 Portland Street. Although members gave
what pennies they could afford, supplemented by the proceeds from jumble
sales, the largest financial burden was borne by Emmeline herself who also
received donations from sympathisers.^17 During the week, letters would be
written from Nelson Street asking for speakers at such events as ILP functions,
trade union gatherings, debating societies, Labour Churches and Clarion Clubs,
and then Emmeline or Adela would come to the weekly meeting with a list of
replies and invitations; volunteers were also sought to draw a crowd at a street
corner, park or fairground.^18 There were only five WSPU speakers – Emmeline,
her three daughters and a new recruit, Teresa Billington. All were members of
the ILP. Teresa Billington, a schoolteacher and an agnostic, had first met
Emmeline when she had been sent to see her, as a member of the Manchester
Education Authority Committee, in regard to her wish to seek exemption from
teaching religion on the basis of conscience. Soon a WSPU member, Teresa
remembered how in these early days Emmeline Pankhurst was ‘very gracious,
very persuasive. To work alongside of her day by day was to run the risk of losing
FOUNDATION AND EARLY YEARS OF THE WSPU