Virago Press

What made you decide you wanted to write a book on Rebel Girls: their fight for the vote?

Well, at a time when everyone thought ‘Oh, we know all about that. It was the Pankhursts who won us the vote’, Jill Norris and I had tracked the radical suffragists in Lancashire. One Hand Tied Behind Us (Virago Press, 1978) uncovered a truly fresh story.

So when I moved across the Pennines into West Yorkshire two years later, I thought ‘OK, let’s see if I can write a One Hand history across this region. But I rapidly found there was precious little to go on. Just a few disconnected fragments. A bit about Isabella Ford, Leeds suffragist, but nothing really to bring her alive. There was Leonora Cohen, a Leeds suffragette who was impossibly ancient and had done something extraordinarily dangerous. But it was just a few unconnected jigsaw pieces, refusing to be joined together. So I left women’s suffrage and went off to do other things (1). Like earning a living.

Years passed. Almost a decade. I stumbled across an obscure autobiography of a Colne Valley suffragist, Florence Lockwood, who mentioned embroidering a banner. But how to place this? I let it lie.

Then, on a New Opportunities for Women class in Halifax, I encouraged students to investigate the local past. Surprisingly, they turned up intriguing press reports of Halifax suffragettes, and one even brought into the class a local suffragette’s elderly daughter - who hinted at another local suffragette with the unlikely name of Lavena Saltonstall. But the pieces still did not seem to form a broader pattern. Once again, I turned away to do other things. And the 1990s passed.

It wasn’t till after the millennium that a number of unexpected discoveries suddenly tumbled into my lap. With each new find I grew more and more excited. The evidence is so compelling, I decided, I really must write this story.

In 2003, once I determined to go for it, (2) I did the intensive research fairly fast – in about a year, at full tilt, with another year of writing. This may sound a long time, but is not - for serious history research using original sources.

(1) Writing book on Anne Lister, diarist, of Shibden Hall, Halifax: Female Fortunes published 1998 (Rivers Oram Press).
(2) My final Anne Lister book/let: Nature’s Domain: Anne Lister and the Landscape of Desire (Pennine Pens, 2003).

So what were the most fascinating pieces of evidence that you uncovered about the rebel girls?

The heart-stopping moments, that made me gasp? Well, there were quite a few. Usually they were unexpected discoveries that took the conventional Votes for Women story out of the familiar ‘celebrity suffrage’ box, and thrust it back where it sprang from: the everyday experiences of ordinary women.

Such as Mary Gawthorpe, Leeds suffragette. I’d tracked down a forlorn copy of her out-of-print autobiography. But Mary had emigrated to the United States in 1916, had had no children, and had died in 1973. So that was that – or so I thought.

Then thrilling news blew in unexpectedly. Mary’s great-nieces, having spent three decades wondering what to do with aunt Mary’s papers they had stored up in their New England attic – had decided to deposit them.. Which library? More discussion.. Eventually, they agreed upon a labour movement and feminist library at New York University. So suddenly this gave us, not just Mary’s words about growing up in turn-of-the century Leeds, but also early suffrage snapshots, some included in Rebel Girls.

Other discoveries sprang from new electronic research techniques. The hand-written 1901 census had become available in 2002 and, most excitingly, for the first time, such family history documents could be searched on-line.

So I tracked for the many house moves of the family of Dora Thewlis, ‘Baby Suffragette’, whose dramatic arrest picture forms the front cover. Like so many other working-class families, the Thewlises were economic migrants, constantly on the move. I traced Dora’s successive removals from her birth in 1890 to 1907. By then she was working as a 16-year-old weaver in Huddersfield, with a wage of almost £1 a week. Her arrest at a suffragette march on Parliament propelled her photograph onto the front pages of the tabloid press. All this changed Dora’s life - for ever.

I’d never found Florence Lockwood’s suffrage banner.. It was supposed to be in the Tolson Museum in Huddersfield, but whenever I visited it never seemed to be there. In the end, I plucked up courage and just asked for it. A textiles conservationist, clad in white gloves, ceremoniously produced a big box, unwrapped layers of billowing tissue paper – and there it was, at last! Stunning, beautiful – and now on the back cover of Rebel Girls!

There were many more heart-stop moments. Just one more. Violet Key-Jones from York had remained elusive, a shadowy figure. In 1913 Violet rented a house on Osborne Road, Doncaster, and apparently here sheltered fugitive suffragettes on the run. I decided to visit Doncaster, bought myself an A-Z, and began pacing the town. Violet’s hidey-hole house in Osborne Road, not far from the race course, was a surprise. It was so wonderfully ordinary and unremarkably suburban! What would neighbours think now, knowing it offered refuge to arsonists?

Were you drawn to any of the Rebel Girls’ stories in particular?

I’ve often been asked if I have a ‘favourite’. That’s tricky. They’re all such amazing women. But let me pick two.

Dora Thewlis, ‘baby suffragette’, because she was so very young at the time – just sixteen.

Lavena Saltonstall, fustian tailoress in Hebden Bridge, because she lived not far from me. Lavena’s family were also economic migrants, and moved around rented accommodation with the regularity of the Thewlises. So I was thrilled to discover Lavena’s birthplace, an idyllic rural hamlet above Hebden Water, yet within walking distance of a fustian dye works. And to find Lavena and family on the 1901 census, living in a Victorian terraced street, its co-operative shop at one end opposite a non-conformist ‘tin tabernacle’, with fustian clothing factories below.

Does the book tell just the story of the ‘rebel girls'?

No. For alongside rebel girls - such as Mary Gawthorpe and Dora Thewlis, Violet Key-Jones and Lavena Saltonstall - worked other more experienced women, often with established reputations. Isabella Ford, Leeds suffragist, was one. Other suffragists, like Mary Murdoch of Hull, worked as pioneer doctors.

Florence Lockwood herself had trained as an artist at Slade in Bloomsbury in 1880s. Later she married a Colne Valley manufacturer, Josiah Lockwood. The extensive Lockwood family was the Liberal Party in their part of Colne Valley. So what could be braver than Florence at home quietly picking up her needle and embroidering her demand of the Liberal government: to grant ‘Votes for Women’.

So how hard was it to track their pasts?

Very, sometimes.

Take Adela Pankhurst, youngest and most forgotten of the three daughters. Middle sister Sylvia Pankhurst’s history The Suffragette Movement (1931) tells us oddly little of what Adela did. Yet Adela worked as WSPU organizer across the Yorkshire region. Then, in 1914, she was ‘banished’ to Australia, and here she started a new life.

I was lucky enough to go to Australia on a family visit, and so consult Adela ‘s papers in Canberra. They are vividly evocative: an elderly woman looks back 30 years earlier. But what struck me is that Adela seemingly took nothing with on her journey to Australia. Perhaps just the clothes she stood up in and a small suitcase? Certainly no document pre-dates her ‘banishment’. That’s enormously frustrating, for primary evidence, recorded at the time, is so much more telling (and usually reliable) than later reminiscence. Luckily, I could consult newspapers across Yorkshire, to piece together Adela’s suffrage story. But it remains frustrating.

And some figures remain obstinately obscure, their lives all but forgotten. Lavena Saltonstall lived five shadowy years (1901-06) when she just fades away from view.

What made you focus on these girls specifically? How did you select them?

Well, certain ‘rebel girls’ are well recorded and so lend themselves to suffrage historians:

Adela Pankhurst, partly because of her family name, partly because she was such an energetic suffragette organizer, and partly because of her later autobiographical writings.

Mary Gawthorpe, because of her autobiography, and now – at last – because of access to her papers in the New York University library.

Lavena Saltonstall, because - despite the obscurity of her beginnings - her pithy writings on suffrage have survived – and read as freshly as the day they were written.

Leonora Cohen, because of the wonderful collection of her suffrage papers in Leeds at Abbey House museum, including photographs and a cuttings book.

So how did the title of the book come about?

I was sharing my enthusiasm about these discoveries with my editor at Virago, Lennie Goodings, and we mused on a possible title for the book. ‘Rebel with a cause’, we wondered? No? I expounded to her further about how young they all were. ‘Rebel Girls’, she suggested. And we knew we had our title.

How did you set about writing the book?

I was determined to write a book that would make suffrage history accessible to as wide a readership as possible. Working within a university, you are encouraged to write for your peers – that is, professional historians and other academics. But I felt this story was too important for such a specialist readership, and so I have tried to write it in a way that makes it as readable as possible – while providing for students and scholars the detailed references to allow them to track back the evidence I cite.

I had originally thought of the book shaped around broad themes. But as the strength of individual stories shone through increasingly vividly, I realized I wanted to structure the writing around the stories of about eight ‘rebel girls’: pupil teachers Adela Pankhurst and Mary Gawthorpe, tailoress Lavena Saltonstall and weaver Dora Thewlis, milliner Leonora Cohen and others.

I also wanted to help readers understand how and why the Liberal government could for so long and so persistently refuse to enfranchise women. And this meant ensuring the dramatic narrative was always sited within the broader historical context. I’ve included a clear chronology at the beginning of the book, so that readers can see how the story of one suffragette here, one suffragist there, interwove against a fast-changing political backdrop.

Can we turn from the book, to you now? How would you most like to be remembered?

I’d like to be remembered as fair. That in this book my handling of the evidence is transparent, and my scholarship scrupulous.

I’d also hope my writing was remembered as inspirational. I was touched recently when a work colleague, explaining who I was said out of the blue: ‘I remember the impact reading One Hand Tied Behind Us had on me; it was a book that inspired a generation’.

So, for Rebel Girls, I was equally delighted that one of the statements on the cover states, ‘A huge achievement, it will certainly inspire others’.

It’s only too easy to forget what’s gone before. So I hope Rebel Girls engages a new generation of readers – most especially first-time voters.