Militant suffragette might not be a term you’d immediately associate with a disabled teacher, but militant suffragette is an accurate description for the largely overlooked Rosa May Billinghurst, or as she was to the people who knew her, May.
Billinghurst was born in Lewisham in London in 1875, at a time when women’s rights movements were growing globally. In New Zealand, all women over 21 were enfranchised in 1891, and in South Australia women received the same, as well as the right to stand for parliament in 1895. In the USA, campaigners were fighting for enfranchisement alongside black citizens, across the pond, in the UK, working-class movements for enfranchisement had been ongoing since the 1830s, women, still unable to vote even if they were landowners, were uniting to form organisations to push for the equal right to vote.
Political support was unsteady, in 1869, John Stuart Mill published an essay in support of enfranchising women, after winning election on a platform which had advocated for votes for women. Also in the 1860s, Mill presented a petition to Parliament which would allow women the vote, an act drafted by early women’s rights group The Kensington Society and signed by the likes of Florence Nightingale and Mary Somerville. However, by the time of Billinghurst’s birth and childhood, women were no closer to achieving the vote than they had been 20 years prior.
The Women’s Suffrage Committee was formed in Manchester in 1867, with meetings attended by a young Emmeline Pankhurst. In 1897 the committee joined with the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies. But the women’s suffrage movement took off as Rosa May Billinghurst would have been able to engage with the movement herself, with Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughter Christabel breaking off from the central suffrage movement to create the organisation which earned its members the name suffragette, The Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU).
To return to our protagonist: Billinghurst had suffered polio as a child, becoming paralyzed from the waist down. Her disability does not appear to have been much of a hindrance to her activism, but rather a simple fact of her existence. As a teen she became actively engaged with the Women’s Liberal Association, seemingly joining the WSPU in 1907, marking a move from any peaceful engagement to the militant actions recognisable of the movement. Billinghurst’s exact actions in protests and activism are annoyingly, often unclear. We do know that she was a very active participant involved in marches and protests following elections. Billinghurst also founded the Greenwich branch of the WSPU in 1910, acting as its first secretary and naturally taking part in its demonstrations. Regarding accessibility, she was slated to be in a wheelchair-like device, effectively a tricycle and became well known among the press as the “cripple suffragette”. Such was the militant activism that on the Greenwich branch’s first march she was arrested after being thrown out of her chair by police (although she was allegedly happy with the publicity). Police also targeted her by stranding her in her chair in an alleyway with flat tyres, even stealing the valves.
Billinghurst would go on to use her tricycle/wheelchair in further protests, hiding rocks, pamphlets and ribbons under her skirts and blankets. Her disability also worked in her favour when she was arrested and sent to Holloway prison (the first time) for breaking a window. She had been sentenced to hard labour, but her disability confused guards so much that they didn’t actually assign her any work to do!
However, she was not safe from the curse of all militant suffragettes. In 1913, sent to Holloway, this time for damaging letters in a postbox, Billinghurst went on hunger strike and was consequently force-fed via nasal tube for two weeks, this ripped her nostril and broke her tooth, leading to her being released after only two weeks.
In case you needed another example of the deplorable British police force in the early twentieth century, during protests to petition the king in May 1914 Billinghurst had like her peers, chained herself and her wheelchair to the gates of Buckingham Palace, the reaction of the police was to tip her out of her chair, leaving her stranded.
The Representation of the People Act was published in 1918 by a Government who had had to acknowledge the value of women throughout the Great War. Perhaps the passing of the Act was also a form of gratitude for the militant actions of the WSPU and suffragettes like Billinghurst putting their political freedom aside during the war. The act only enfranchised women to vote in national elections when aged 30 and over, so it wasn’t exactly successful, but it was a start.
Billinghurst retired from activism at the passing of the bill and died in July 1953.
Sources:
‘Remembering the Suffragettes: Rosa May Billinghurst (1875-1953)’, LSE Blog, (2022), < https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsehistory/2022/03/23/rosa-may-billinghurst-31-may-1875-29-july-1953/>, [26/02/2023]
‘Who were the Suffragettes?’, Museum of London, < https://www.museumoflondon.org.uk/museum-london/explore/who-were-suffragettes#:~:text=The%20Suffragettes%20were%20part%20of,in%20parliamentary%20and%20general%20elections.>, [26/02/2023]
(Youtube video)
Kellgren-Fozard, Jessica, ‘“The Crippled Suffragette”//Rosa May Billighurst’, in Historical Profiles, Jessica Kellgren-Fozard, (2021), <https://youtu.be/9RuL6Y6BcGs> [26/02/2023]
Hanlon, Sheila, ‘Rosa May Billinghurst: Suffragette on Three Wheels’, Sheila Hanlon, <http://www.sheilahanlon.com/?page_id=1314>, [26/02/2023]
“Billinghurst Letters” and “Alice Ker Letters,” The Women’s Library, Autograph Collection, Vol XXIX, 9/29, 1912-1913
Abrams, Fran Freedom’s Cause: Lives of the Suffragettes, (London: Profile Books, 2003)
Dove, Iris, Yours in the Cause: Suffragettes in Lewisham, Greenwhich and Woolwhich, (1988)