#womens suffrage
The Scottish Suffragette Agnes Henderson Brown was born on April 12th 1866 in Edinburgh.
The term ‘suffragette’ was invented in 1906 by that bastion of everything bad, the Daily Mail, as meant to be a belittling epithet, but the women turned it around and adopted it as a badge of honour.
Nannie Brown, as she later became known as was born at 125 Princes Street, which is slap bang opposite the Castle. The street in those days would have been mainly a residential one, as it was meant to be in the plans for the New Town, George Street was meant to be the main shopping area.
Their father was interested in social and political reform and the house became a centre of cultural activity. The Dad ran a number of fruit shops under the title of William Brown & Sons he trained his daughters, Agnes and Jessie, well and refused to submit to laws that he objected to, he was an activist for women’s rights. His opposition to taxes that differentiated between genders caused him to end up in the notorious Calton Gaol in Edinburgh.
Agnes and her sister Jessie were among the first women to be seen on bicycles in Scotland. The safety bicycle was the direct ancestor of today’s machines. With a slight adaptation they attracted thousands of women to cycling and some historians point to the safety bicycle as the beginnings of suffrage, women’s rights and feminism.
Nannie and Jessie were known to heckle parliamentary candidates at meetings, Nannie was also a writer of stories, lectures, plays and articles. She was a member of The Scottish Women’s Rural Institute, as she grew older and unable to participate as much in demonstrations, her house in Castle Street became a haven for the SWRI who would seek out advice from her. They would hold ‘Scots evenings’ or ‘Dickens evenings’, at which stories, songs, and sketches were performed.
She also participated in societies such as the Edinburgh Dickens Fellowship, learned to type, this might seem trivial, but women were marginalised back then, hence the suffrage movement sprung up to right these things, it was said in an obituary the Nannie was the first woman to learn to type in all of Scotland.
Nannie Brown died on 1st December 1943 at 3 Blackford Road, Edinburgh and is buried beside her parents at The Dean Cemetery, sadly Wiki reports that the grave has been vandalised and is not the easiest to locate, I must try and seek it out the next time I am on a wander down that way.
The first two pics are from a newspaper reporting on their march to Selby, they also marched to John O’Groats to spread the word about women’s rights.
The third pic is from Ste[hen Dickson at Chaos Project who seek to remember unsung or undersung heroes and especially heroines whose graves are lost or forgotten. Go have a look at the page, it’s not been updated for a while, but has some interesting posts, they don’t go into detail, but one that caught my eye was “ Remembering the 115,000 unmarked graves in St Cuthbert’s Churchyard “
https://www.facebook.com/Chaos-Project-396319260884649/
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The Scottish Suffragette and campaigner Arabella Scott was born on May 7th 1886 in Dunoon.
Arabella’s mother was a teacher and her father served as a captain in the army for more than 25 years, she attended The University of Edinburgh and gained a Master of Arts degree and went on to become a schoolteacher.
Both Arabella and her sister Muriel were advocates for women’s suffrage and were active speakers in Scotland for the cause and in 1909, were both arrested on the charge of obstruction in London after they tried to hand a petition to the British Prime Minister Asquith. They served 21 days at H M Prison Holloway.
Arabella was arrested and released several times over the following years, under the Cat and Mouse Act, and Act put into place so that suffragettes could not kill themselves in prison due to hunger strikes, instead when they became too weak they were released and then re-arrested at a later time.
In May 1913 Arabella was arrested with three other women and one man after an unsuccessful attempt to burn down Kelso Racecourse. She was sentenced to nine months imprisonment – as was the man whose crime was to drive them there. Janie Allen a suffragette journalist, bitterly compared his sentence with those who assaulted children and often got less than that.
She went on hunger strike and was released under the Cat and Mouse Act. Unlike others who went to ground once they were released Arabella stayed public. She had promised her employers, Leith School Board, that she would not take part in any more militant activity so she was kept on their list. She was arrested, went on hunger strike released and disappeared for 2 months. She was ‘found’ on a WSPU protest and returned to jail. She went on hunger strike again and was released again..
It took many months to ‘find’ her again, this time working as a WSPU organiser in Brighton. She was arrested and forcibly brought back to Edinburgh and jail. Again the same scenario ensued and she took the train to London before she was due back. She was ‘found’ accidentally while the house she was staying in was being searched for someone else. So, once again she was forcibly brought back but this time sent to Perth prison to be force fed and was “the longest force-fed prisoner in Scotland” for 5 weeks, a visible legacy of this remained in her chipped teeth. These were her battle scars, sustained when she tried to resist being force fed, her mouth held open and a mixture of eggs flour and milk were poured down her throat through a tube attached to a funnel, this happened twice a day every day during her incarceration
Outside the prison gates, 3,000 people kept a vigil, although they were not even told what exactly was going in inside.
She emerged feeling more militant than ever.
All her life Arabella Scott upheld a passionate commitment to women’s rights, under her married name Colville-Reeves emigrated to Australia.
She died on 27 August 1980, and her memorial is in the Palmdale Lawn Cemetery on the Central Coast of New South Wales.
Isn’t it atrocious what society inflicted on these women, to me it amounts to torture.
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Fear is the mind killer.
“You’re under attack!” “They’re coming for your family!”
Take a look at how fear has been used as a tool to inspire both action and inaction through “The Rhetoric of Fear” on VCU Libraries Image Portal.
[Image Description: Anti-woman suffrage handbill warns that Socialists will gain power while New York rural voters will lose if woman vote. “SOCIALIST INCREASE 220%” is highlighted in bright red.]
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The Sun Front Page: August 19, 1920
Click on the newspaper above to get a closer view of the front page.
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In 1930, Eastern Air Transport’s inaugural New York-to-Richmond, Va., air service touched down in Baltimore. The drop off was at Logan Field, shown above, which today is the location of a shopping center. The first day of service transported 21 passengers to stops that also included Philadelphia and Washington. (Robert Kniesche, Baltimore Sun photo, 1939)
1587: Virginia Dare became the first child of English parents to be born on American soil, on what is now Roanoke Island, N.C.
1920: Tennessee became the 36th state to ratify the 19th Amendment, which guaranteed the right of American women to vote.
1958: The novel “Lolita” by Vladimir Nabokov was published.
1963: James Meredith became the first African-American to graduate from the University of Mississippi.
Compiled by Jessica D. Evans and Paul McCardell.
MS Jernigan, MS Ochoa and MS Payette with National Women’s Party banner, STS-96 Space Shuttle Discovery, 1999. NARA ID 23209923.
#OTD 1993: Ellen Ochoa is 1st Hispanic Woman in Space!
The three astronauts hold in space an original gold, white and purple suffrage banner from the National Woman’s Party, borrowed from the Sewall-Belmont House in DC. Ochoa used it in a PSA from space!
Last chance to see THAT BANNER in our related exhibit in DC - Rightfully Hers: American Women and the Votecloses this Sunday, April 10. Can’t make it? Check it out online! See related press release.
Archives Curator Corinne Porter, U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and Archivist of the United States David S. Ferriero view original 19th Amendment. (Photo by Paul Morigi/Getty Images for the National Archives).
Cartoon: ‘The Steadfast Suffragette’. Puck Magazine, US, c.1913. A suffragette on hunger strike in prison becomes so thin, that she manages to squeeze through the bars and escape.
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Emily Dickinson was born in 1830 in Amherst, Massachusetts and is regarded as one of the most important American poets. At the end of her life, Emily spent most of her days at home living mainly as a recluse. When she died at the age of 55 in 1886, she left behind 1,800 poems.
"Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,
And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.
I’ve heard it in the chilliest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.“
Author, Kate Chopin, “The Awakening”, 1899
Kate Chopin was born Katherine O’Flaherty on February 8, 1850, in Louisiana. She was a novelist and short story writer, and is considered the first Southern feminist writer of the 20th-century. Her book, “The Awakening”, was considered ahead of its time and caused such controversy, that it ended Chopin’s writing career. After being banned several times, it remained out of print until the 1970’s. Today, the book is considered a classic in feminist fiction.
“Despondency had come upon her there in the wakeful night, and had never lifted. There was no one thing in the world that she desired…The children appeared before her like antagonists who had overcome her, who had overpowered and sought to drag her into the soul’s slavery for the rest of her days. But she knew a way to elude them. She was not thinking of these things when she walked down to the beach.
The water of the Gulf stretched out before her, gleaming with the million lights of the sun. The voice of the sea is seductive, never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander in abysses of solitude. All along the white beach, up and down, there was no living thing in sight.”
–“The Awakening”, 1899
Constance Markievicz - Irish politician, revolutionary, nationalist, suffragist, socialist, the first woman elected to the Westminster Parliament and the first female cabinet minister in Europe, early 1900s.
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On This Day In History
May 16th, 2005: A 35-23 National Assembly vote permits women’s suffrage in Kuwait.
Bullet through the sleeve? No problem for this push girl nicknamed “The Angel of the Battlefield”. Clara Barton led a life that few others can match. She founded a school, held government posts in a male dominated era, fought for women’s suffrage, pushed for civil rights, bravely risked her life in giving medical treatment to soldiers, consulted foreign governments, and founded the American Red Cross. Phew! We’re tired just writing all that. Clara Barton, we dub you a Push Girl.
Tell your friend she’s got a little Clara Barton in her. Reblog now to give her a little push.
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“DONNE | Women in Music | ETHEL SMYTH (1858 - 1944)”
“In prison, she conducted her fellow prisoners performing The March of the Women with a toothbrush through the cell window”
Portrait photograph of feminist activist Ana de Castro Osório (1872–1935) — Unknown photographer, 1913 (Museum of the Presidency of the Republic)
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Votes for women-historical cartoons(4/?)
Postcard made by Katherine Milhous in 1915.
On 1 February 1913, Leonora Cohen made history when she threw an iron bar at the Crown Jewels in protest at the Government. Becoming known as the ‘Tower Suffragette’, Leonora dedicated her life to fighting for women’s suffrage and equality. Not only did she campaign for women’s right to vote in 1918 and 1928, but incredibly she fought again in her late nineties for the passing of the Equal Pay Act in 1970. This gave men and women equal pay for equal work, something that she had been fighting for from the very beginning.
Discover Leonora Cohen’s remarkable story in our film (http://bit.ly/LeonoraCohen) and find out how you can get involved in our programme of events marking the 100th anniversary of the Representation of the People Act 1918 here: http://bit.ly/VotesandVoices
