Edith New

With savage government spending cuts and the MPs expenses scandal it’s all too easy to be cynical about politics – there’s no point in voting, nothing changes, politicians are all the same.

A hundred years ago the suffragettes felt very differently and in 1911 racked up a notch their campaign for votes for women. Historian and former Labour politician Roy Hattersley has described the suffragettes as the only protest movement in the history of Great Britain that actually succeeded by violence.

The suffragettes set fire to buildings, defaced golf courses and destroyed works of art to keep their campaign constantly in the public eye. But no member of the public ever died as a result of their protests and their attack was always on property not people.

The suffragettes boycotted the 1911 census refusing to be counted without political representation. Emily Wilding Davison even managed to hide herself in a broom cupboard in the Houses of Parliament where she spent the night. This enabled her to place the House of Commons as her address on the census form.

When a listener phoned Jeremy Vine’s radio programme today to label the women as terrorists Diane Atkinson, author and leading authority on the suffragette movement, explained that the rise in militant action was somewhat of a slow burn, fuelled by the barbarism of forcible feeding.

But of course the women were fighting for not just the vote but for so much more as well. Another guest on the programme was Peter Barrett, a great grandson of working class suffragette Alice Hawkins. A shoe machinist from Leicester, Alice had spent 25 years campaigning for equal pay for women in the shoe industry. Frustrated with her lack of success, Alice joined the women’s suffrage movement in 1907 and at the age of 43 was arrested for disorderly conduct outside the Houses of Parliament.

Women like Edith New sacrificed a lot; some their reputation, many their health, like Lady Constance Lytton who died at the age of 54 following a stroke and then a heart attack attributed to her treatment in prison where she was repeatedly forcibly fed.

With local elections just around the corner and the number of disaffected voters at an all time high, please don’t let the tremendous effort and achievement of these women go to waste.

Visit the Swindon Collection to learn more about Edith New www.flickr.com/photos/swindonlocal/

Readers who submit articles must agree to our terms of use. The content is the sole responsibility of the contributor and is unmoderated. But we will react if anything that breaks the rules comes to our attention. If you wish to complain about this article, contact us here