was withheld from the other British women delegates to board a ship to take
them to The Hague. The few British women who did attend included those
already in Holland and also Emmeline Pethick Lawrence, one-time Honorary
Treasurer of the WSPU and one-time close friend of the WSPU leader. Mrs.
Pethick Lawrence had been on a speaking tour of America and, with her
husband, had joined the American delegation.^38
Emmeline issued another call to national unity in The Suffragettewhich was
relaunched on 16 April 1915 with the slogan that it was ‘a thousand times more
the duty of the militant Suffragettes to fight the Kaiser for the sake of liberty
than it was to fight anti-Suffrage Governments’. In its pages was soon published
a long list of the jobs, hitherto occupied by men, which women now held –
railway clerk, railway porter, ticket collector, stationmaster, tram conductor,
grocers’ assistant, packer, messenger, night telephone operator, motor-van
driver, lift attendant, butcher’s assistant, railway carriage cleaner, post-girl,
news-girl, munitions and armament worker, sheep-dipper, bank clerk, van-
guard, clerk in government offices, signaller, cigar and wine department
assistant in some of the big stores, and motor agents.^39 The Suffragettesoon
endorsed the war views of prominent politicians that the WSPU had once
opposed, such as Lloyd George and Sir Edward Carson; like Emmeline and
Christabel, these two men were critical of Asquith’s leadership, especially from
May 1915 when he decided to form a coalition government with the
Conservative and Labour parties. When friends protested to Emmeline about
Christabel’s editorial line, she replied, ‘I don’t want her different or liable to her
mother’s human weaknesses. ... Thank God for her! She is the best bit of work I
have done, and I did not do her by myself.’^40
As Emmeline continued her campaigning, her oratory about nation states
was often gendered, France being the feminine state threatened by ‘the over-
sexed, that is to say over-masculine, country of Germany’. Germany denied
women the right to speak, or even think, as independent beings. ‘[T]he Kaiser
has already assigned woman’s place to the three K’s, “Kinder, Kirche, Küche”
(children, church and kitchen). This is woman’s sphere. The affairs of the
nation are no affair of hers.’^41 As Thebaud suggests, such rhetoric can be inter-
preted as expressing the hope that women might win the battle for the right to
vote,^42 and indeed this was so. Emmeline would elaborate on this, as in a speech
delivered at the London Polytechnic in June:
Votes for Women and all that Votes for Women means ... is at stake in
this country ... what we asking for and working for and longing for is
to preserve these institutions which would admit of women having the
Vote. If we lose this war then – and don’t make any mistake about it –
not only is the possibility of women voting going to disappear, but
votes for men will be a thing of the past. There will be no such thing in
this country.^43WAR WORK AND A SECOND FAMILY