Active in the Midlands and from a working class background, she became Wolverhampton's first female councillor, gaining the nickname "Red Emma" in the process.

She was one of seven children of Ann, née Johnson, and her husband, John, a builder of canal boats; he was a heavy drinker, and the family lived in extreme poverty.

In the mid-1870s the family moved to Wolverhampton and, at around the same time, Emma began to work part-time, running errands or picking coal off the local tips and slag heaps.

[1] In October 1906 Frank Sproson invited Emmeline Pankhurst of the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) to speak at an ILP meeting.

[3] In late-1907 or early-1908 Sproson, growing increasingly unhappy with the authoritarian manner in which the Pankhursts ran the WSPU, left the organisation and joined the Women's Freedom League (WFL), a non-violent suffrage group.

In late 1922 she exposed financial corruption at the local fever hospital, although the subsequent investigation rejected the allegations; she was censured by the Labour Party as a result.

[1] Sproson successfully defended herself at the local by-election in 1924, but left the Labour Party before the next election in 1927; she stood as an independent candidate but lost.

Jane Martin concludes that "Sproson's working-class, midlands-based career provides a vivid counterbalance to the view of the women's suffrage movement which portrays it as predominantly bourgeois and London-centred".