the past, seeing imperialism and militarism as incompatible with feminism
when this was not so for many women in the First World War.^7 Neither have
historians given sufficient weight to Emmeline’s passion for France, a country
invaded by a German aggressor. Not only was Emmeline a Francophile, she saw
France as ‘the Mother of European Democracy’; the Allied defence of France,
therefore, would preserve that democracy which France had given to the world
and which would perish, if France were destroyed.^8 Further, as de Vries points
out, a more nuanced reading of the Pankhurst war position reveals a consistency
of thought.^9 Emmeline had always emphasised that the struggle for the vote,
based on the principles of self-sacrifice, was part of a wider movement for
national reform and regeneration. During the war years she insisted, ‘I am a
patriot when my country is attacked. I believe in working through Nationalism
to Internationalism.’^10 Nations, it was now argued, would continue to degen-
erate until women were granted the vote, and the power that accompanied it,
to influence national and international policies. That such a merging of ‘femi-
nist’ and ‘British’ viewpoints was possible should come as no surprise.
Antoinette Burton has argued powerfully that when researching feminists in the
past, we must examine the historical circumstances in which they thought,
lived and worked for change. Adapting her analysis, it can be argued that
Emmeline and Christabel were embedded in a ‘British’ culture which was now
under threat and were not ‘feminists first and British second and bourgeois
third’ but at the ‘crossroads of several interlocking identities’.^11 Mother and
daughter skilfully presented themselves as British patriotic feminists as they
wove into their speeches themes about the nation, patriotism, imperialism,
democracy, internationalism, men’s and women’s contribution to the war, the
benefits of women’s war service, and women’s enfranchisement. In so doing,
they were still challenging well-established definitions of femininity, but in a
context that was no longer subversive.^12 In particular, Emmeline, through her
emphasis upon the importance of women’s right to war service, helped to bring
about a blurring of traditional gender roles as women entered the jobs men at
the war front had vacated. Yet, at the same time, she also helped to reinforce
the traditional differences between the sexes since she spoke at a number of
rallies to encourage men to sign up for soldiering at the war front. In this
emphasis upon soldiering as men’s work, Emmeline was echoing the common
view of the time. It was not necessary for women to go to ‘the trenches’, she
insisted, since it was women who brought children into the world and thus
perpetuated the race; it was the ‘highest duty of woman as the mother’ to build
up the race ‘physically, mentally and morally’.^13 In Emmeline’s war discourse,
therefore, women were to be both paid workers and mothers, although the
emphasis was decidedly on the former.
The first of the WSPU rallies around such themes was held on 8 September
at the London Opera House. In the large auditorium, decorated with flags of the
Allies, Christabel addressed a crowded meeting on the subject of the ‘German
Peril’. A proud Emmeline sat as a spectator in one of the boxes as Christabel,
WAR WORK AND A SECOND FAMILY