Emmeline Pankhurst – Women's History Network (original) (raw)
Margaret Schencke (Gretel in Germany, Margot in Britain) was born in 1888 in Zwickau in Saxony, Germany. She was the only child of her father’s second marriage, but she had several half-brothers and sisters from her father’s previous marriage. Margot…
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.
Mary Quaile Early in the 1900s, Mary Quaile arrived with her family in Manchester. They had come from Dublin, and Mary became a stalwart in the labour movement in Manchester. She led a café waitresses’ strike, going on to work…
In 1907 she was featured as the protagonist in a short film entitled Jiu-Jitsu Downs the Footpads, which was produced by the Pathé Film Company and by 1908 Edith and William were running the Golden Square School. In the 1911 census Edith and William were both listed as a ‘teacher of Jiujutsu, the Japanese art of self-defence’.
Introduction It is commonly asserted that women retired into their homes after the vote was won. This is nonsense. Around the world, whenever the vote was won by women, women continued to agitate, demonstrate, demand and declare that women’s rights…
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.
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