While searching the Senatus papers for information about the University’s higher certificate for women, I was astounded to come across what must be the very letter Jex-Blake wrote, so far unlisted. It was dated 17 July 1873 and signed by herself and 10 other ladies: Edith Pechey, A.R. Barker, Alice J.S. Ker, Elizabeth J. Walker, Agnes McLaren, Isa Foggo, Jane R. Robison, Elizabeth Vinson, Jane Massingberd-Mundy – all who are also known to have been prominent in the movement for female higher education and several in the female suffrage campaign.
Category: Biography
East End Campaigner – Edna Henry, Factory Worker
Edna was one of the first black women to work at the factory, and from her earliest days at Tate & Lyle she learned that she would need to fight in order to be treated fairly. When a promotion went to the sister-in-law of a supervisor, even though Edna had longer service and better time-keeping than the other girl, she bravely knocked on the door of the forelady’s office and demanded that the managers reconsider their decision. After checking her service record, they were forced to acknowledge that the job should have been hers, and reluctantly gave her the promotion.
Ellen Wilkinson – Minister of Education
Ellen’s main concern was to raise the school leaving age to 15 … [She] had to find 5,000 extra classrooms and train 13,000 more teachers for the expected extra 390,000 pupils. The Labour Cabinet, hard-pressed by post-war financial limitations, were disinclined to allocate sufficient money … And when she realised there was no money to build new schools she devised special pre-fabricated huts to accommodate the new pupils. A one-year Emergency Training Scheme provided the teachers. Ellen faced complaints from Labour MPs and others that [this] would dump hordes of ill-trained teachers on the schools.
Alice Suter – A Woman We Forgot
So, perhaps Englishness wins out over local colour. English origins and activist past trumps home-grown rebel. For Adela Pankhurst, Jennie Baines and Alice Suter, notions of importance infused with dominant cultural perceptions, assertions and demands dictate what is ‘true’, what truly memorable, important and worthy of record. Alice Suter lost.
Naomi Jacob – Novelist Conventional & Extraordinary
She wore men’s clothes; her future biographer mistook her, on first sight, for J. B. Priestley. She boasted (to friends but never in print) that she had served under fire on a destroyer during the second world war, without any of her shipmates suspecting that she was a woman. She once got married, but this proved a temporary aberration: the marriage was over within weeks and her husband’s name is not recorded.
“You are supposed to be educated”
Hertha Ayerton’s experiences – the struggle against poverty and family responsibility, the limitations on her education, and the blocks to her career development – were shared by other WSPU women. Florence Macauley was forced to leave Somerville College, Oxford when her father died because she could not live on her scholarship. Emily Wilding Davison gave up her studies at Holloway College when her father died and the money ran out. Teresa Billington-Greig had to leave school at thirteen to work. She later trained as a teacher, taking her BA through extension studies.
Constance Smedley – Renaissance Woman
The Cotswolds caused Smedley, hitherto a Tory by inheritance, to move sharply to the left in her politics. She carried her idealism and activism back to London to run the Greenleaf Theatre and theatre school, to the USA for the years 1915-22, where she and Armfield left their impress on theatre movements in New York and California, and she was no less active in her late years back in England.
Lady Lucy Herbert – Prioress
… since Roman Catholic institutions were for generations illegal in Britain, parents who wanted their daughters brought up as Catholics, and who could afford it, often shipped them off to convents in France or the Low Countries. These flourishing female communities were hotbeds of talent and ability, and they recorded their own lives and those of their convents in a range of valuable historical texts. Distinctions of social rank were not quite obliterated among them, and women who rose to be leaders in the religious life were often aristocrats.
Katherine Cecil Thurston – From a Will to a Death
If middle-class women lived humdrum lives, it was clearly a relief to read about the sensational. But the one among Thurston’s novels that became notorious in the light of its author’s end was The Fly on the Wheel, whose Irish heroine, torn between two men and hemmed in by the restrictions of being a woman, commits suicide by poison.