Edith Morley: the first female professor in Britain Edith Morley’s 1944 memoir, Before and After, was written a few years after retiring as the first female professor at an English university. This absorbing story, now published in book…
Tag: WSPU
Women as Renegades – Fighting for Peace during War
The challenge women made to the establishment in rejecting the call to support the war is an area rich in history. It confirms that exploration of the reasons for women to take a stand that put them at odds not only with government but with women who sided with the war effort is esential for undertanding women’s activism during wartime.
Jessie Kenney and women seafarers
Jessie battled on but to no avail. ‘These gentlemen … had dark and impenetrable notions on the subject.’ Instead she ‘decided to go to sea as a stewardess in the hopes that later I may be allowed to practice as a wireless operator.’
(Victoria Drummond had similarly been advised to give up and become a stewardess, but refused.)
By autumn 1926, Jessie was working on the Otranto – as a stewardess. She sailed for ten years with Furness and Orient line, and kept her dream fed by reading science and philosophy books when she could, as the lists in her diaries show.
But ‘How often I looked up at the wireless cabin … afterwards. How I had longed for the peace and solitude of the wireless cabin where after my labours I could study in peace.’ She wasn’t even accepted in WW2.
Suffragettes and Tea Rooms
Even as late as 1911 a woman’s presence still caused consternation in some places of public refreshment. Kate Frye, staying in a hotel in a small Norfolk market town while organizing suffrage meetings, notes in her diary:
22 March 1911 ‘Had my lunch [in the hotel dining room] in company with four motorists. It is funny the way men come in here and, seeing me, shoot out again and I hear whispered conversations outside on the landing with the waitress. Then they come in very subdued and make conversation one to another and try not to look at me. Awfully funny – they might never have seen a woman before – but I suppose it does seem a strange place to find one.’
“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.
Bristol Suffragette Project
The Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), founded by Mrs Pankhurst in Manchester in 1903 with the aim of winning votes for women, became a national movement which gave birth to a new type of woman: the suffragette. She made…
Women’s History Month: Ethel Smyth
On 11 March 1903 Ethel Smyth became the first woman composer to have her work performed at the Metropolitan Opera House, New York, when the Met put on her second opera, Der Wald. Music, like literature, has historically been divided…
Women’s History Month: March 15 1912. Christabel Pankhurst and the Lusitania’s portholes
Frenzied by media spin, some people were so exercised by the arson and window-smashing tactics of the Women’s Social and Political Union that they suspected militant suffragettes were lurking everywhere. News-seekers were as avid as reactionaries later seeking Reds under…
Alice Hawkins (1863-1946)
Alice Hawkins was the leader of the women’s suffrage movement in Leicester. Born in 1863 to a working-class family, she left school and thirteen to work as a shoe machinist. In 1884, she married Alfred Hawkins and she went on…