Rebel Girls: Their Fight for the Vote

Rejecting the deadening conventions of their Victorian elders, the rebel girls demanded new freedoms and new rights. They took their suffrage message out to the remotest Yorkshire dales and fishing harbours, to win Edwardian hearts and minds.

Right: NUWSS caravan at Whitby harbour, August 1908, suffragists speaking.
© Women's Library, London.
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16-year-old Huddersfield weaver Dora Thewlis on arrest was catapulted on to the tabloid front-pages as 'Baby Suffragette'. Her life was transformed.

Right: Dora Thewlis arrest, March 1907, was later turned into a picture postcard by Shamrock postcards.
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Suffrage campaigners addressed great meetings in cities, towns and villages.

Right: Adela Pankhurst, the youngest of the three sisters, speaking at Grassington, upper Wharfedale, probably spring 1910.
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To publicize the demand for the vote, suffragists staged magnificent processions through London, their silken banners fluttering in the breeze.

Right: Suffragist Florence Lockwood's embroidered Huddersfield NUWSS banner.
© Tolson Museum, Huddersfield.

Dancer Lilian Lenton waited till her twenty-first birthday - then determined to burn two buildings a week until the Liberal government granted women the vote.

Go to Radio 4 Woman's Hour page and listen to a rivetting interview recorded with Lilian shortly before she died.
 

Rebel Girls shows how this daring campaigning shifted from community suffragettes to militant mavericks, like Leonora Cohen of Leeds. Leonora, who died in 1978 aged 105, lived long enough to see new fascination with suffrage history.

Right: Leonora Cohen, aged 100, on front cover of Radio Times, 1974, for BBC TV drama Shoulder to Shoulder.
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