The upcoming generation of male birders dismissed the RSPB’s female founders as elderly, unscientific do-gooders. Lemon died at Redhill on 8 July 1953 aged 92, and was buried next to her husband at St Mary's Church Cemetery, Reigate. Lemon soon came under scrutiny in The Field where an editorial in 1936 questioned the Society's inaction on cage birds, its gambling on real estate investment, its high expenditure, and its elderly management. Every year she visited them, from Hascosay in the Shetlands to Breydon Water on the Norfolk Broads, listening to their concerns.

Smith was inspired by Scottish naturalist Eliza Brightwen's Wild Nature Won by Kindness (1890) on the killing of birds for the plume trade. Bringing her story to life has convinced me that every campaigning group needs an Etta, and that characters like Etta will always earn themselves enemies.She saw professional ornithologists as largely unsupportive of her cause, and since much BOU activity at the time involved egg-collecting and killing birds for study and for their skins, she saw them as part of the problem she was trying to solve.

La Royal Society for the Protection of Birds : acteurs et stratégies pour une protection des oiseaux en Grande-Bretagne, 1891–1930".

Etta’s long battle against ‘murderous millinery’ triumphed with the Plumage Act of 1921 – but her legacy has been eclipsed by the more glamorous campaign for the vote, led by the elegantly plumed Emmeline Pankhurst. Politics reared its head at other times too, in Mrs Lemon’s later days when she was pushed out of the society she cared about so much. But the fact remains, these were women in a world of men—and were not spared slights or derision but still persisted with their campaign. The other half of the story follows the suffrage movement, especially Mrs Pankhurst's militant suffragettes who used fashion to further their cause - whether through their symbolic colour code, their expensive dresses used to denote respectability, or their penchant for a nice feathered hat.