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By Root 1116 0

loomed. Until now, England had known Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst as the most radical of firebrands. Some weeks after the war began, however, the two of them called a large WSPU rally at the London Opera House on "The Great Need of Vigorous National Defence Against the German Peril." The theater was decorated with the flags of the Allies, including that anathema to the left, the double-headed eagle of tsarist Russia. For Christabel, it was her first public appearance since fleeing the country several years before, and the enthusiastic crowd sang "For She's a Jolly Good Fellow." Sylvia, torn and dismayed by the widening political gulf between them, was in the audience: "The empty stage was hung with dark green velvet. She appeared there alone, lit by a shaft of lime-light, clad in her favourite pale green, graceful and slender. Her W.S.P.U. adorers filed up and presented her with wreaths. She laid them in a semicircle at her feet." Militant women, Christabel told the crowd, should now turn their energy to arousing the spirit of militance in men. When someone shouted "Votes for women!" she retorted, "We cannot discuss that now." She called on the government to mobilize women for the economy in order to free men for the front.

"I listened to her with grief," Sylvia wrote, "resolving to write and speak more urgently for peace." Afterward, she gingerly went backstage to see her sister, but it felt as if "an impenetrable barrier lay between us." When their mother joined them, Emmeline and Sylvia "exchanged a brief greeting, distant as through a veil," before parting ways. From the crowd waiting outside the opera house, as divided as the Pankhurst family, rose competing cheers of "Christabel!" or "Emmeline!" and "Sylvia!"

Before an audience in Glasgow a few weeks later, Sylvia became one of the first suffragettes to speak out against the war. She also published in Woman's Dreadnought, the newspaper she had been putting out in the East End in competition with Christabel's WSPU paper, a proposal for a thousand-strong "Women's Peace Expeditionary Force" that would march under a white banner with a dove on it into the no man's land between rival male armies. She also reprinted part of a speech by the antiwar German socialist Karl Liebknecht on how imperialist rivalry had caused the war. And she was one of more than 100 British women who signed an open letter, circulated by Emily Hobhouse, addressed to German and Austrian women. "Do not let us forget our very anguish unites us.... We must all urge that peace be made.... We are yours in this sisterhood of sorrow."

The other two Pankhursts took quite a different path. With the full blessing of the British government, Christabel set off on a six-month lecture tour of the United States, aimed at persuading Americans to join the war on the Allied side. Emmeline, meanwhile, took to the lecture circuit in England, putting the power of her commanding presence behind the war effort. "I want men to go to battle like the knight of old," she demanded, "who knelt before the altar and vowed that he would keep his sword stainless and with absolute honour to his nation." In Plymouth she told a cheering crowd, "If you go to this war and give your life, you could not end your life in a better way—for to give one's life for one's country, for a great cause, is a splendid thing."

For someone who, only two years before, had thrown rocks through the windows of 10 Downing Street and talked contemptuously of war as something male, this was the most dramatic of transformations. Scarcely less astonishing was the ferocity of the split within a family that for years had campaigned and gone to jail together and, in the case of Emmeline and Sylvia, shared the excruciating hardships of prison hunger strikes. What accounts for it?

Sylvia's antiwar stance was certainly of a piece with her socialist politics and with the beliefs of her former lover, Hardie, but her mother's newfound ardor as a British patriot was more mysterious—and, indeed, it shocked many of her WSPU followers. One reason for Emmeline's