ABSTRACT
The months spent at the sleepy seaside resort of Southport, in a rented furnished apartment, were ‘the most reposeful time’ of Emmeline’s life, claimed Christabel, with the exception of a year spent long afterwards in Bermuda.1
Emmeline had no more worries about the lack of customers in her shop nor about how to organise political gatherings in her home on a limited income; she became what she never wanted to be, a full-time wife and mother. Emmeline and Richard, like many middle-class parents of their time, now decided that their two eldest daughters were of the age when they should have formal schooling. And as ‘progressive’ radicals, they decided to send the twelve-yearold Christabel and ten-year-old Sylvia not to a select, finishing school where they might be schooled in those accomplishments that would attract a suitor, but to the local high school, one of the more academic institutions for middleclass girls that were established during the late Victorian era.2 When Adela heard that her sisters were to attend Southport High School for Girls, she begged to be allowed to be a pupil there too. Eventually Emmeline gave way, despite her misgivings that her eight-year-old daughter was too young for such formal instruction.3 Now a housewife at home with her young son Harry and the loyal servant Susannah, without her shop and political meetings, and without the company of her sister, Mary, who had left to marry, Emmeline became ‘utterly languid and depressed’.4 Full-time motherhood had never fitted easily on her shoulders and more so now that it was thrust upon her in a quiet seaside town. Desiring a change of scene, the family moved for the summer of 1893 to rooms in a farmhouse in the pretty village of Disley, in Cheshire, some sixteen miles from Manchester. Here Emmeline seemed to regain some of her old vitality as she took the children on picnics, drove them around the countryside in a trap pulled by a temperamental donkey, named Jack, and helped with the haymaking. ‘She seemed as young as ourselves’, Sylvia recollected, urging the youngsters to collect the big berries almost out of reach, ‘reckless of torn stockings and scratched arms.’5
