Suffragettes! Who was your favourite one?

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Thinking about the fact some women became able to vote 100 years ago today, who are your most notable suffragettes and suffragists?

I would want to attend a party with Sophia Duleep Singh inews.co.uk/news/long-reads/sophia-duleep-singh-indian-princess-rockstar-suffragette-forgotten-history/

I would have idolised Annie Kenney en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annie_Kenney who was active for working class women, and who was a lesbian.

I'd hang out with Ethel Moorhead www.dundeewomenstrail.org.uk/womens-trail/ethel-moorhead/ as she was active close to me, was arty and a trouble-maker.

The quiz says I'm Dame Millicent Garrett Fawcett.

I read about this letter yesterday, which has fascinated me. I love the fact that "C.S.C.," was 26-year-old Clementine Churchill.

March 30th, 1912

To the Editor of The Times.

Sir,

After reading Sir Almroth Wright's able and weighty exposition of women as he knows them the question seems no longer to be "Should women have votes?" but "Ought women not to be abolished altogether?"

I have been so much impressed by Sir Almroth Wright's disquisition, backed as it is by so much scientific and personal experience, that I have come to the conclusion that women should be put a stop to.

We learn from him that in their youth they are unbalanced, that from time to time they suffer from unreasonableness and hypersensitiveness, and that their presence is distracting and irritating to men in their daily lives and pursuits. If they take up a profession, the indelicacy of their minds makes them undesirable partners for their male colleagues. Later on in life they are subject to grave and long-continued mental disorders, and, if not quite insane, many of them have to be shut up.

Now this being so, how much happier and better would the world not be if only it could be purged of women? It is here that we look to the great scientists. Is the case really hopeless? Women no doubt have had their uses in the past, else how could this detestable tribe have been tolerated till now? But is it quite certain that they will be indispensable in the future? Cannot science give us some assurance, or at least some ground of hope, that we are on the eve of the greatest discovery of all—i.e., how to maintain a race of males by purely scientific means?

And may we not look to Sir Almroth Wright to crown his many achievements by delivering mankind from the parasitic, demented, and immoral species which has infested the world for so long?

Yours obediently,

C.S.C. ("One of the Doomed")

I was talking about it with my very politically aware Nan this morning who said she had learnt a lot the last few days about the Sufferage movement, and how much had been achieved for society as a whole. She then said she couldn't imagine what life was like 100 years ago, I had to laugh as at 96 she is only 4 years out!

Constance Georgine Markievicz

That said suffragette Dr Kathleen Lynn was my grandmother's childhood doctor.

I got Emmeline Pankhurst as well, which I didn't think I would from the questions and the answers I chose.

Probably Ethel Moorhead.

Also not a suffragette but worth a notable mention - Victoria Drummond.
God daughter to Queen Victoria, raised in a castle and thought "sod it I'm going to be an engineer".
The establishment would fail a room full of otherwise male exam candidates for A chief engineer qualification rather than let her pass - she failed 37 times.
She ended up qualifying in Panama and was honoured for her duty in WW2.

I thought that letter by Clementine Churchill was excellent. I got Millicent Garrett Fawcett in the quiz which I’m delighted by. I used a lot of Fawcett Society research for my undergraduate dissertation.

Mary Richardson, aka Polly Dick, who was notorious for slashing the Rokeby Venus. Because of her lone women were banned from all art galleries.

She died in Hastings, as did other famous suffragettes such as Muriel Matters and Mabel Capper. I know cos I live there!

I got Emily Wilding Davison!! Not sure I could do what she did though.

broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/9kz54p/uk-suffrage-centenary-anniversary-women-color-queer-disabled-activists

I got Fawcett on the quiz too.

I got Edith New, an interesting woman, played by Helena BC in the film.

I've always had a soft spot for Annie Besant. She was committed to improving the lives of working class women and furthering their rights, and had very strong views on secularism. As a former member of one of the children's groups set up under her theosophical society, I grew up knowing about her.

I've been trying to think of my favourite since this thread started.

I really can't pick a favourite public person, although Emily Wilding Davison hiding in a cupboard in the House of Commons to be counted there for census night is still one of my favourite suffragette acts.

In my own family, two women of my grandmother's generation were heavily involved in politics all their lives, and one helped found a political party (certainly not a facist one).

They both turned 21 between 1918 and 1928, so I'm sure would have been heavily involved in campaigning for the full franchise.

And thank you for this thread, because it's made me think about what my great-aunts were up to in their youth.

I only knew Auntie L's (very brave) political work in her old age: it's only now dawned on me that, of course, she cut her teeth on the fight for suffrage as a young woman.

Not actually a suffragette at all, seeing as, being radically internally consistent as she would have seen it, she actually opposed the idea, but: Emma Goldman!

I may not agree with her conclusion, but her analysis on the question of female suffrage was spot-on. She's the reason I still wish there were fewer arseholes in the anarchist movement; hers I'd want to be part of!

I don't know if I can call it a favourite but I would like to know everything about Countess Markievicz and for others to know more about her.
I knew of her mostly as one of only a couple leaders of the Easter Rising to have not been executed. It was only more recently that I learnt about her as a Suffragette. She was the first woman elected to Parliament, but I doubt this will get as much press as it should in December as she never took her seat - in line with the Sinn Fein abstentionist policies. I think she might have been in prison at the time too. She, and a lot of Cumann na mBan, seem to have been faded out of a lot of Irish history discourse.
Her sister, Eva Gore Booth seemed very interesting too.

There was a show on... I think Netflix... that she featured in.

I had a socialist history teacher and I think about age 14 or thereabouts I knew that fact about the first woman elected to Westminster not taking up her seat. He talked a lot about how the rest of them were executed quite brutally, as well. I realise now he wasn't a conventional history teacher. He'd originally qualified in P.E.

We talked loads about suffrage though!

My great-aunt was a wee bit younger but her and her partner lived as lesbians from the 40s and they'd both struggled to access university - hardly any girls got scholarships. She rescued women from abusive relationships.
I think it affected her a lot though - when she had dementia, male violence preyed on her mind.
All I could do was take her to a lot of castles and feed her nice cakes.

That's a really interesting post about Rotha Lintorn Orman, because it's a reminder that single-issue politics... is what it is.

It's so easy to slip into feeling that groups supporting a single issue will be allies on other issues, but of course it isn't true.

Orman and the female facists of the 1920s and 30s weren't working for all women. They were profoundly anti-semitic. Not only did British Jewish women suffer under this anti-semitism, they were hardly even deemed to exist:
"In the feminine facist imagination, the Jew was always male and in a position of authority over British women."

(Julie V. Gottlieb "Feminine Fascism: Women in Britain's Fascist Movement, 1923-45", p131)