This chapter focuses on the influence of the SDF's assumptions about women and their potential on women's roles within the party. It also considers whether the female membership was more diverse than the stereotype of the problematic socialist's wife found in the SDF press. Women's actual role in the party was of importance whether a woman was looking for some commitment from the membership to prefigurative practice, or whether her concern was to find a means of participation which was compatible with domestic responsibilities. The roles women were expected to play within the party may well have been a factor in their assessment of the SDF.

Although the SDF claimed to be much larger, its membership seems to have been no more than 4,500 at any one time. The number of women in it could probably only be measured in hundreds. But as there are no accurate official figures for SDF membership, the numbers have to be estimated from branch dues which give no clue to the sex of the party member. There is therefore no accurate way to determine the number of SDF women members. Occasionally there are branch reports which contain figures for female membership, such as that in December 1895 when Nelson SDF claimed to have nearly forty women comrades. But these figures were never consistently reported and women's membership continued throughout to be sufficiently novel to be worthy of comment.