that the social problem can be justly settled. ... May the time soon
arrive when we shall have secured the emancipation of our sex, and so
end the need for a separate women’s movement.^14At the ILP Easter Conference at Stockton-on-Tees, just over a week later,
Emmeline was chosen as a delegate (as was Isabella Ford) for the Labour Party’s
Conference to be held in Belfast the following year. But the difficulty for
Emmeline of remaining within the ILP was to become more accentuated over
the coming year as her identity as a feminist conflicted with her loyalty to the
Labour movement.
Keir Hardie had won a place to present in the Commons, on 25 April, a
Resolution expressing the view ‘That, in the opinion of this House, it is desir-
able that sex should cease to be a bar to the exercise of the Parliamentary
franchise.’ Convinced that the Resolution would be talked out, Emmeline trav-
elled down to London, determined not to let the moment pass without creating
a disturbance. She sat with her supporters in the Ladies’ Gallery, behind the
heavy brass grille that screened them from the debating chamber. When Samuel
Evans, an anti-suffragist MP, began to talk out the Resolution, Emmeline gave a
signal to the small group of women who shouted out ‘We will not have this talk
any longer’, ‘Divide! divide!’ and ‘We refuse to have our Bill [sic] talked out’, as
they pushed flags bearing the words ‘Vote for justice to women’ through the
grille.^15 MPs, including Hardie, were angered by the breach in decorum as the
police hastily cleared the gallery. Outside in the Lobby, WSPU members met a
hostile reception from ILP supporters, such as Ethel Snowden, who believed
they had wrecked all chance of ever winning the support of MPs; Isabella Ford
later wrote that it was over this incident that she and Emmeline Pankhurst
‘parted company in the ILP’.^16 Despite such disapproval, the militants
continued to press their case throwing away, noted Emmeline, ‘all our conven-
tional notions of what was “ladylike” and “good form” ’.^17 Determined to make
the deputation planned for the 19th ‘as public as possible’, plans were soon
underway for a WSPU procession and demonstration.^18 On the appointed day,
the women marched from the statue of Boadicea, the warrior queen, at the
entrance to Westminster Bridge, to the Foreign Office. Here the Prime Minister
met Emmeline Pankhurst and Keir Hardie, as spokespersons for the WSPU and
a group of suffragist MPs, as well as representatives from groups of suffragists, co-
operators, temperance workers and trade unionists. With passion and dignity,
Emmeline pleaded that the WSPU members felt the question of votes for
women so keenly that they were prepared to sacrifice for it ‘life itself, or what is
perhaps even harder, the means by which we live’.^19 This note of personal sacri-
fice for the women’s cause, which the non-militants regarded as bad form, was
spoken from the heart. Emmeline relied upon her sister, Mary, to act as her
deputy when she was away campaigning and thus unable to fulfil her duties as
Registrar for Births and Deaths. The government had written to her on a
number of occasions, complaining about her frequent visits to London in order
TO LONDON