women’s suffrage at the ILP Conference at Cardiff. The socialist women in the
country looked to their own socialist party, she began, for a lead on women’s
suffrage. There were 100,000 women operatives in Lancashire for whom she
wanted the vote as she did for women schoolteachers, struggling widows and
deserted wives. ‘No man was excluded’, she insisted, ‘because he was a man, but
every women was precluded because she was a woman.’^26 A decision was then
made to instruct Labour members to introduce a women’s suffrage measure in
parliament, as well as the promotion of legislation for adult suffrage. Amid the
enthusiasm, Emmeline was elected again to the NAC of the ILP, a move that
did not please everyone present, especially those such as Snowden who favoured
adult suffrage rather than the enfranchisement of women on the same property
qualification that applied to men. Glasier commented in his diary, ‘I have to
urge Snowden to display some grace towards Mrs. Pankhurst.’^27
Whether such grace was extended is debatable since Snowden now became
involved in a bitter exchange in the Labour Leaderwith Christabel which high-
lighted not only different approaches to tactics but also different world-views in
regard to class and gender politics. Christabel held to her view that sex
inequality in the existing franchise arrangements was the key inequality, over-
riding inequalities of class. Snowden continually challenged her on this point,
reiterating that extending the existing franchise to women would not serve the
interests of the working class since a disproportionate number of the enfran-
chised would be wealthy and propertied women who would not support Labour
candidates; he also asserted that the ILP could not promote both an adult
suffrage bill and a women’s enfranchisement bill at the same time.^28 An angry
Christabel, questioning Snowden’s assumption of the shared class interests of
working women and men, replied that while the basis of the parliamentary fran-
chise was not satisfactory, ‘by far the most serious defect ... is that according to
which a person, simply because she is a woman, is for ever deprived of political
existence’. While the extension of the franchise on the present basis to women
will leave many women without votes, it will ‘put an end to the rule of one sex
by the other; it will strike the death-blow of the aristocracy of sex’.^29 Acutely
aware of these issues that were frequently discussed in her household, Emmeline
continued to place her hopes in the ILP, pointing out that the recent decision
to instruct Labour MPs to introduce a women’s suffrage measure in parliament
was a firm indication that ‘the Labour Party is also the Woman’s Party’.^30
Nevertheless, she also warned, in a joint statement written with Isabella Ford,
that an adult suffrage measure would not necessarily include women. The ILP
supporters of a women’s suffrage measure ‘raise this clear issue, namely that sex
must not be a disqualification for political rights, because they know that if this
is not done the claims of women to the vote will in the near future be again set
aside, as they always have been in the past, when extensions of the franchise
were being given to men’.^31
Wary of the growing support for adult suffrage in the ILP, Emmeline greeted
the New Year of 1905 by doing something that was quite rare for her, writing an
FOUNDATION AND EARLY YEARS OF THE WSPU