Diane Atkinson

Almost one hundred years ago, British women led a hard-fought campaign to gain the right to vote--and this is their story. Britain's women's suffrage campaign began in the nineteenth century, but the twentieth century ushered in a more militant campaign. On June 30, 1908, two schoolteachers broke windows at 10 Downing Street to protest being turned away from Parliament, and when Parliament dissolved without passing the Conciliation Bill, the Women's Social and Political Union (W.S.P.U.) led the Black Friday riot on November 18, 1910. Two years later, Ellen Pitfield set fire to a waste basket at the General Post Office and was sentenced to six months for arson. By 1913, suffragettes were winning public sympathy by citing harrowing stories of imprisoned women on hunger strikes being drugged with bromide and force fed. During the First World War women had done many of the jobs previously done by men, and their vital work was rewarded politically by the Representation of the People Act, giving the vote to all women twenty-one years or older. It was passed in the House of Lords on June 19, 1917, and became law on February 6, 1918. Perhaps the ultimate victory was a law passed on November 21, 1918, that allowed women to stand as Members of Parliament in the next general election.

The Remarkable Lives of the Suffragettes

Rise Up Women!

The Suffragettes in Pictures

Caroline Norton, born in 1808, was a society beauty, poet and pamphleteer. Her good looks and wit attracted many male admirers, first her husband, the Honourable George Norton, and then the Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne. After years of simmering jealousy, George Norton accused Caroline and the Prime Minister of a âe~criminal conversationâe(tm) (adultery) resulting in a trial referred to as âe~the scandal of the centuryâe(tm). Cut off and bankrupted by George Norton, she went on to become one of the most important figures in changing the law for wives and mothers.

The Criminal Conversation of Mrs Norton

The Marriage of Arthur Munby and Hannah Cullwick

Love and Dirt

Viv Gardner

This is the npublished autobiography of Kitty Marion, an actress, music hall performer, suffragette arsonist and campaigner in the American birth control movement. Written in the 1930s, Marion’s story of activism offers a unique insight into a lifetime dedicated to the improvement of women’s lives in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

Actor and activist

Kitty Marion

Westminster, London, 22 June 1836. It is a fine, fresh morning that will become hot as the day progresses. Crowds are gathering at the Court of Common Pleas. On trial is Caroline Sheridan, a beautiful and clever young woman who had been manoeuvred into marrying the Honourable George Norton when she was just nineteen.

Two Extraordinary Women on the Western Front

Elsie and Mairi Go to War

In 1918 women in Britain finally won the vote after a long and determined fight. The struggle of these courageous women of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is examined in Atkinson's new study. The author compares and contrasts two very different campaigns: the battle waged by the militant Suffragettes and the persistent though less well-known activities of the Suffragists who campaigned peacefully but doggedly for the vote. A handful of fascinating and previously unpublished photographs from the Museum of London Collection are dispersed throughout the text.

Votes for Women

The incredible story of two courageous and spirited women who were the only female participants to serve on the western front during World War I. When they met at a motorcycle club in 1912, Elsie Knocker was a thirty year-old motorcycling divorcee dressed in bottle-green Dunhill leathers, and Mairi Chisholm was a brilliant eighteen-year old mechanic, living at home borrowing tools from her brother. Little did they know, theirs was to become one of the most extraordinary stories of World War I. In 1914, they roared off to London 'to do their bit,' and within a month they were in the thick of things in Belgium driving ambulances to distant military hospitals. Frustrated by the number of men dying of shock in the back of their vehicles, they set up their own first-aid post on the front line in the village of Pervyse, near Ypres, risking their lives working under sniper fire and heavy bombardment for months at a time. As news of their courage and expertise spread, the 'Angels of Pervyse' became celebrities, visited by journalists and photographers as well as royals and VIPs. Glamorous and influential, they were having the time of their lives, and for four years Elsie and Mairi and stayed in Pervyse until they were nearly killed by arsenic gas in the spring of 1918. But returning home and adjusting to peacetime life—and the role of women in British society—was to prove more challenging than even the war itself.

Elsie and Mairi Go to War: Two Extraordinary Women on the Western Front

The incredible story of two courageous and spirited women who were the only female participants to serve on the western front during World War I. When they met at a motorcycle club in 1912, Elsie Knocker was a thirty year-old motorcycling divorcee dressed in bottle-green Dunhill leathers, and Mairi Chisholm was a brilliant eighteen-year old mechanic, living at home borrowing tools from her brother. Little did they know, theirs was to become one of the most extraordinary stories of World War I. In 1914, they roared off to London 'to do their bit,' and within a month they were in the thick of things in Belgium driving ambulances to distant military hospitals. Frustrated by the number of men dying of shock in the back of their vehicles, they set up their own first-aid post on the front line in the village of Pervyse, near Ypres, risking their lives working under sniper fire and heavy bombardment for months at a time. As news of their courage and expertise spread, the 'Angels of Pervyse' became celebrities, visited by journalists and photographers as well as royals and VIPs. glamorous and influential, they were having the time of their lives, and for four years Elsie and Mairi and stayed in Pervyse until they were nearly killed by arsenic gas in the spring of 1918. But returning home and adjusting to peacetime life—and the role of women in British society—was to prove more challenging than even the war itself.

Diane Atkinson

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