ILP, the gathering was filled to overflowing. Emmeline glowed with pride as
Christabel and Annie were presented with bouquets; then songs of liberty were
sung and ILP men vowed support for women’s suffrage. Both young women gave
stirring speeches while Keir Hardie condemned the ‘brutal and unjustifiable’
treatment the two had received and lamented the fact that police constables in
plain clothes had been at the meeting.^64
Emmeline’s faith in Christabel’s new tactics was justified since the defiant
stand of the two protesters had become headline news. Most of the press
reporting was hostile since ‘interruption’ of male political discourse in order to
support the women’s cause, as Jane Marcus terms it, was regarded as unprece-
dented. Further photographs of ‘well-dressed women being thrown out of
meetings by burly male stewards’ were seen as shocking to a public accustomed
to Victorian forms of chivalry.^65 Yet many people wrote letters expressing
sympathy with the women, and new recruits flocked to join. As Emmeline
joyfully acknowledged, ‘the question of women’s suffrage became at once a live
topic of comment from one end of Great Britain to the other’.^66 From now on,
heckling by Union members of politicians and a willingness to go to prison
became key tactics of the campaign to force the government to give women the
parliamentary vote.
After her imprisonment, Christabel was threatened with expulsion from
Owen’s College unless she gave a pledge, in writing, not to participate in any
further disturbances. Christabel wrote the necessary letter, an action that did
nothing to undermine Emmeline’s admiration for her clever, cool-headed, eldest
daughter. Emmeline often said to Sylvia, ‘Christabel is not like other women;
not like you and me; she will never be led away by her affections!’^67 But Sylvia’s
assertion that from the day of Christabel’s first imprisonment, their mother
proudly and openly proclaimed her eldest daughter to be ‘her leader’, must be
treated with caution.^68 Christabel herself always repudiated such a claim and
deferred to her mother whom she saw as the ‘Queen of the WSPU’ with herself
in the role of ‘Prime Minister’.^69 Although the relationship between the two
was very close, with Emmeline often relying upon Christabel’s political
instincts, Christabel in her autobiography speaks of her mother with awe, rever-
ence and admiration. InUnshackled, Christabel presents herself very much in
the role of ‘daughter’ to a powerful mother who had to make hard choices
throughout the campaign for the benefit not of herself, but the cause she served.
‘In 1905 she chose, for the sake of womanhood, the ruin and ostracism and all
the suffering implicit for her in her eldest daughter’s act, which was also her own
act and but the first link in a chain of future acts.’^70 Emmeline is portrayed by
Christabel as immensely strong in spirit, a heroine. ‘How small we all look in
comparison.’^71 She is represented as a spiritual leader who is likened to
Giuseppe Garibaldi, the Italian soldier and patriot who created a united Italy.
Adapting his words, Christabel claims that her mother ‘offered to herself and to
her followers insult and abuse and pain and loneliness and loss of friends and the
anger of politicians’.^72 During the following years of militancy, there can never
FOUNDATION AND EARLY YEARS OF THE WSPU