ABSTRACT
With the war ended and the vote won, Emmeline Pankhurst was at a loss: what was she going to do with herself? ‘She was secretly bored to death when former suffragettes fell to expatiating on the brave old days of militancy. The Suffrage? Yes … but that was done with now.’ 1 In a world of happy endings she would have flourished as a much-loved national figure, dividing her time between shopping, looking after her adopted children and being consulted as an elder stateswoman. But politics is an unforgiving business and post-war England at peace had little time for the former jingoist. In Britain she had become a political embarrassment; her Women's Party had done disastrously at the polls and the Coalition Government had little use for such a propagandist now that the war was over. As Annie Kenney remarked at the end of the war: ‘We gained nothing by our patriotism. No money, no lasting position. By Armistice we were tired out, no homes, no job, no money, no cause. Forgotten.’ 2
