Pioneering Women

Millicent Garrett Fawcett is not the only pioneering woman to be honoured by the statue in Parliament Square. She is remembered alongside celebrated suffrage heroes like the Pankhurst family and Emily Wilding Davison, as well as less well-known pioneers like Rosa May Billinghurst, Lydia Becker and Louisa Garrett Anderson.

Emily Wilding Davison was an itinerant WSPU organiser, and also worked in the union’s London office. To avoid being listed in the 1911 census, Emily spent the night of the census hidden in a cupboard at the Palace of Westminster, which is today commemorated by a plaque.

Manchester-born Lydia Becker was an early suffrage campaigner, becoming secretary of the Manchester Committee for Women’s Suffrage. She founded and published the Women's Suffrage Journal between 1870 and her death in 1890, and was an early advocate of voting rights for unmarried women and widows.

In 1868, Agnes Pochin was the first woman to speak about suffrage on a public platform, at the first public meeting of the Manchester National Society for Women’s Suffrage. Previously – in 1855 – she had written The Right of Women to Exercise the Elective Franchise, calling for women to have equal rights in voting, education, divorce, and ambition. Agnes died in 1908, ten years before The Representation of the People Act.

Eleanor Rathbone was Liverpool’s first female city councillor, elected in 1909. She was honorary secretary of the Liverpool Women’s Suffrage Society, and later co-founded the Liverpool Women Citizen’s Association. In 1919, after Millicent Garrett Fawcett’s retirement, Eleanor took over the presidency of the NUWSS – which by then had been renamed the National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship. She was elected MP for Combined English Universities in 1929, remaining in Parliament until 1946.

Ada Nield Chew was one of the first speakers on the Clarion Van – used by the Independent Labour Party (ILP) to canvas support for the party around the UK. She attracted the ILP’s attention after writing a series of anonymous letters, signed “A Crewe factory girl”, calling on her fellow factory workers to demand a “living wage”.

Minnie Baldock was a member of the ILP, and one of the first Londoners to join the WSPU. In 1906, she was involved in setting up the WSPU’s first London branch, in Canning Town, east London – where she went on to work as its chair. Minnie withdrew from militant activism in 1911, for health reasons, but remained a member of the Church League for Women’s Suffrage.

Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy was a founding member of the Women's Franchise League and the Women's Emancipation Union, and an early member of the WSPU, who marched in many of their large demonstrations. She was a secularist and sexual radical, who lived in a ‘free love’ union with Ben Elmy, a silk mill owner, secularist and feminist. The couple reluctantly married when her pregnancy scandalised other feminists.