Lady Constance Lytton before she threw the stone at New Castle, October 9th, 1909 440 Arrest of Miss Dora Marsden outside the Victoria University of Manchester, October 4th, 1909 444 Jessie Kenney as she tried to gain admittance to Mr. Asquith's meeting on Dec. 10, 1909, disguised as a telegraph boy 476 THE SUFFRAGETTE THE SUFFRAGETTE CHAPTER I EARLY DAYS FROM THE FORMATION OF THE WOMEN'S SOCIAL AND POLITICAL UNION TO THE SUMMER OF 1905. From her girlhood my mother, the founder of the Women's Social and Political Union, had been inspired by stories of the early reform movements, and even before this, at an age when most children have scarcely learnt their alphabet, her father, Robert Goulden, of Manchester, set her to read his newspaper to him at breakfast and thus awakened her lasting interest in politics. The Franco-German War was still a much-discussed event when Robert Goulden took his thirteen-year-old daughter to school in Paris, placing her at the Ecole Normale, where she became the room-companion of Henri Rochfort's daughter, Noémie. Noémie Rochfort told her little English schoolfellow much of her own father's adventurous career, and Emmeline Goulden soon became an ardent and enthusiastic republican. She was now delighted to discover that she had been born on the anniversary of the destruction of the Bastille and was proud to tell her friend that her own grandmother had been an earnest politician, and one of the earliest members of the Anti-Corn Law League, and that her grandfather had narrowly escaped death upon the field of Peterloo. Even before her school days in Paris she had been taken by her mother to a Women's Suffrage meeting addressed by Miss Lydia Becker. On returning home to England, Emmeline Goulden settled down at seventeen years of age to help her mother in the care of her eight younger brothers and sisters, and when she was twenty-one she married Dr. Richard Marsden Pankhurst, who was many years older than herself, and had long been well known as a public man.