article in which she warned that workers in the Labour Party must make it
impossible to betray women again, as they had been betrayed in the past. ‘If we
obtain the enactment of the Women’s Enfranchisement Bill it will ensure that
an Adult Suffrage Bill, which we all desire and strive for, must apply to
women.’^32 At the LRC Conference in Liverpool, towards the end of January,
Emmeline again argued her case, claiming this time that 90 per cent of the
women who would be enfranchised under a women’s suffrage measure would be
‘working women’. But her words failed to persuade her listeners, 483,000 voting
in favour of adult suffrage with 270,000 against.^33 A disappointed Emmeline
wrote to Selina Jane Cooper, an ILP working-class delegate, commiserating with
her and offering practical advice and help:
I hope you feel more cheerful than when we parted at Liverpool &
ready to renew the fight. ... Can you not work to get women on the
executive of the [Textile] Union & begin to agitate to get women sent
as delegates to next year’s Conference. ... If I can be of any use to you
in getting the textile women to assert themselves let me know & I will
do all I can.^34Emmeline was consoled by Keir Hardie who told her that he would intro-
duce in parliament the Women’s Enfranchisement Bill as a private member’s
bill. The ballot for private members’ bills did not take place until 21 February
and so eight days beforehand Emmeline travelled to London in order to plead
with MPs to give a place for the measure. She stayed with Sylvia who had
taken rooms at 45 Park Walk, Chelsea, in order to take up her national scholar-
ship at the Royal College of Art. Crawford observes that although Sylvia, in
The suffragette movement, gives the impression that she and her mother worked
alone in this task, a few other women also lobbied MPs on behalf of the
WSPU, including Isabella Ford, Harriet McIlquham, with whom Emmeline had
been associated in the early days of the Women’s Franchise League, and Mrs. J.
G. Grenfell, who had been a member of the Women’s Emancipation Union.
The aged Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy, another WSPU supporter and a friend
of the Pankhursts, was also active in writing to MPs from her home in
Congleton.^35 Each day Emmeline and Sylvia stood in the lobby of the House of
Commons, interviewing MPs who had pledged themselves to support a
women’s suffrage bill but not one member agreed to give his chance in the
ballot, if he drew such a chance, to such a measure. Returning home each
evening, often after midnight, a dispirited Emmeline spelt out her anxieties.
Her life’s work, her husband’s long struggle, the efforts of all those who had
fought for women’s suffrage for so long would be wasted unless votes for women
came now. The Liberals would be returned in the next election and introduce
manhood suffrage, and then all would be lost. Once all men had the vote, men
would not agree to bring in womanhood suffrage. ‘Far into the night’, Sylvia
recollected, ‘she railed against the treachery of men and bemoaned the impo-
FOUNDATION AND EARLY YEARS OF THE WSPU