I'm going to be controversial here and risk the brickbats - but what the hell.
Not a favourite – when it comes to historical figures I don’t do favourites - but, these two, though thought of as important at the time, are now forgotten.
Nowadays we are often given the impression that there is something inherently left wing about womens' rights – despite the brocialism currently so dominant in some sections of the left, so I’d put forward Mary Sophia Allen who was one of Britain’s first policewomen, and became the leader of the Women’s Police Division. For her work in policing she was awarded an OBE. As a suffragette she was jailed 3 times and was one of those force fed in Holloway Prison. She was also an out and proud lesbian at a time when this wasn’t socially acceptable. She was also a fascist, first in Rotha Lintorn Orman’s British Fascist Party, later in BUF.
Also let’s not forget Rotha Lintorn-Orman. She was in the very first Girl Guide troup – they joined the Boy Scouts by using their initial rather than their first names on the application form at a time when the Scouts didn’t allow females to join. She served in the army in France as a nurse in WW1 and was decorated for bravery not once but twice. She was the first woman to found a political party in Britain – The British Fascists. Over 50% of the membership was female – the total membership was over 200,000. This was a time of great strife in Britain, and the women in her party were trained to deal with trouble in the same way as the men. When the general strike was called in 1926, the public were surprised to see squads of well drilled and armed women taking to the streets prepared to take on what they saw as the Bolshevik threat. The party manifesto also called for women to have the vote on the same franchise as men, rather that the unequal franchise which was granted by postwar government whereby women only received the vote after the age of 30 and with other restrictions added.
Rotha too was also a lesbian and was the basis for one of the lead characters in Radclyffe Hall’s lesbian classic “The Well of Loneliness”.
When Rotha’s party was supecceded by Oswald Moseley’s British Union of Fascists, that too attracted huge support among women – so much in fact that he had to tell women members not to wear black skirts for fear that the British press would label his party “the Black Skirts”.
It’s important to remember these women today when we live in a world where history is rewritten to create a narrative with which we feel comfortable. The truth though is that history is complex, and narratives a rarely what they appear to be on the surface. Many of us will have great-grandmothers, grandmothers, and mothers who were on the far right, and who saw themselves as fighting for womens' rights too. For them the two were not incompatible.
Since WW2 however most have sought to paper over this period in their lives – for quite understandable reasons - but if we are honest, how many of us know what our forebears really got up too? Though feminism certainly had many left wing women in its numbers, feminism itself was not historiclly a left wing movement, but rather a movement for all women.