junosmith

There is no Woman of the Day but if there was, militant suffragette Jessie Kenney (1887-1985) of Oldham, the first woman to qualify as a ship's Radio Officer, would be a contender. She was the architect of several eye-catching publicity stunts designed to bring the campaign for women’s suffrage right to the Prime Minister’s doorstep. The younger sister of Annie Kenney and born organiser, she was regarded by Christabel Pankhurst of the Women’s Social and Political Union as indispensable. Jessie began work in a cotton mill when she was 13 but managed to study at evening classes at the same time learning new skills such as typing. They stood her in good stead. Soon after their mother died in 1905, Jessie and Annie attended a meeting organised by the Independent Labour Party at which Christabel and Teresa Billington-Greig spoke and were inspired to join the WSPU. Annie made a name for herself in October of that year when she and Christabel confronted Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey at the Free Trade Hall and were imprisoned for their actions but Jessie was more cautious and took her time. In 1906, Jessie was asked by her sister to become secretary to the WSPU’s new and very effective treasurer, Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence. She got stuck in and quickly established herself, arranging meetings and stunts such as the famous Human Letter incident. She paid sixpence postage for Daisy Solomon and Elspeth McClelland to be delivered as Human Letters to No. 10 Downing Street, where delivery was refused — “You must be returned. You are dead letters” — but she had arranged for the Daily Mirror along to capture the story. It was the lead story on the front page, with photo. Jessie’s skills were so valuable — she organised interruptions of cabinet ministers' meetings as deftly as she did the pageants and processions that raised the WSPU’s profile — that Annie wrote, "Christabel insisted on Jessie's room being next to hers, as she looked upon her as absolutely indispensable for the carrying out of her London plans.” Too valuable to be in prison, but on 30 June 1908, she was arrested during a demonstration in Parliament Square and sent to HMP Holloway for a month. "At first, they were very strict; the prisoners were in their cells from 11.30 am to 8.30 next morning, with the exception of fetching water, etc. The second week, however, things were different. The wardresses were kinder, and there were many visits from doctors, magistrates, chief matrons, and others. Then two exercise times were instituted, and associated work." The following year, Jessie and a team of suffragettes targeted the Prime Minister HH Asquith, with the first incident taking place in August 1909. They broke the windows of Cabinet meeting room and lobbed objects through. In September, they disguised themselves and sailed a boat along the Military Canal mooring it next to the grounds of Lympne Castle in Kent where Asquith was staying with Home Secretary Herbert Gladstone. They accosted him outside church on Sunday morning, forcing open the church doors and knocking his hat off in the melee. “It was a real "Deeds not words" affair. Not a word was spoken on either side.” However, the more serious incident took place the next day. Jessie and the other women confronted the Prime Minister and Home Secretary on the golf course. “He then said to Miss Howey, 'I shall have you locked up,' but she promptly returned, 'I don't care what you do, Mr. Asquith!' Vera Wentworth and I then followed, and his hat was thrown off again in the scrimmage. When we arrived on the scene, Mr Asquith was calling for help and trying to push Miss Howey out of the porch. At the call of Mr Asquith, Mr Gladstone came on the scene, and a real fight ensued. Mr Gladstone and Mr Asquith tried to push us down the steps, but we pushed back as hard as they pushed forward. Mr Gladstone fought like a prize fighter and struck out left and right.” He gave her a nasty blow in the chest. “I must say he is a better fighter than he is a politician!” Jessie was imprisoned again at Holloway. It didn’t quite stop her. On 10 December 1909, she tried to bluff her way in Mr Asquith's meeting disguised as a telegraph boy but by then, imprisonment had broken her health. She developed a "lung condition" and was sent to Christabel in Paris to recuperate. When the tactics of the WSPU turned to arson and bombings, Jessie made regular journeys to England, using a pseudonym, to ensure the WSPU newspaper The Suffragette was printed and distributed. The police raided the office on 30 April 1913 and arrested several women, including her sister Annie, later imprisoned for 18 months. Part of the incriminating evidence was a letter addressed to Jessie by the WSPU’s bomb maker. She’d concealed it in a book but the police discovered it. She never forgave herself for her sister’s incarceration. Support for the WSPU went into decline when WW1 broke out. Jessie worked for the American Red Cross in Paris and earned a First Class certificate in wireless operating, making her the first woman to qualify as a ship's Radio Officer but she was barred from applying for the post. No women allowed of course. Jessie worked as a steward on cruise liners instead and later became a school administrator in London, keeping her WSPU past secret so that it wouldn’t be used as an obstacle to her career (rather like gender critical women in some professions today). She died in 1985, aged about 97. "I had to be shielded as Christabel wanted me to be kept as a dark horse".

There is no Woman of the Day but if there was, militant suffragette Catherine Corbett (1869-1950) of Surrey would be a contender. Her speciality was “pestering politicians”, and better still, ensuring their dismissive replies were picked up by the press. It was an Edwardian precursor to Let Them Speak. Catherine was born in in India; her father was in the Madras Civil Service. The campaign for women’s enfranchisement was very much a family affair. Her sister and nieces were suffragettes and she married a man whose barrister brother was a member of the Men's League For Women's Suffrage. At first, she was drawn to the moderate National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies but disillusioned with the lack of progressm she joined the more militant Women’s Social and Political Union. By 1908, she was all in, fully committed. On 28 April 1909, Catherine and Surrey-born suffragette Olivia Fargus* were photographed by the Daily Mirror walking along Downing Street on either side of Prime Minister HH Asquith with Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey looking on, attempting to reason with him on the subject of votes for women. She told a reporter that Asquith was a "little surprised and reserved but he showed no resentment…but he did add: ‘I think you are very silly’.” On 29 June 1909, Catherine was one of seven leading suffragettes — including the two Emmelines, Emmeline Pankhurst and Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence — chosen to lead a deputation to the House of Commons. It started as a peaceful protest but became a fractious affair for which “nearly 3,000 police had been drafted from all parts of London with Rochester Row and Cannon Row stations as early as five o'clock in the afternoon...Inspector Scantlebury handed [Mrs Pankhurst] a message from the Premier's private secretary, stating that it was not possible for Mr Asquith to see them, as he had already expressed opinion upon the subject...A long conversation ensued, and then a scrimmage, during which Inspector Jarvis was rather roughly handled. Mrs Pankhurst it is alleged, striking him violently on the face with her hand. Immediately the police closed round the women, who were taken into custody, struggling violently." On 19 October 1909, Catherine appeared at Dundee Police Court charged with disorderly behaviour and a breach of the peace after she and Scottish suffragette Helen Archdale, accompanied by others, grabbed the attention of passers-by by jumping off a tram, waving ribbons in suffragette colours and marched down Reform Street towards Kinnaird Hall shouting “Follow me. Force the barricades. Votes for women”. Catherine encouraged the by-now sympathetic and enthusiastic Dundonians to rush the barricades set up to keep people out of a meeting at which Winston Churchill was speaking and from which women were expressly excluded. The Dundonians obliged and three hours of disorder followed. “They would not stop until they got the barricades down, they were glorious." The protest was quelled after the police used batons and police horses to disperse the crowd and locked up some of the protestors in the basement. Compare and contrast with the kid glove treatment afforded for such a long time to anti-Jewish protesters in London these days. The Dundee Courier quoted Churchill: they were "a band of silly, neurotic women". Catherine responded by publicly thanking the police for their “kind behaviour” to her and praised the people of Dundee “for the very splendid way in which they stood up for the women, showing that they were entirely in sympathy with them, and not with the Government of Mr Churchill.” She and the other suffragettes made a lengthy speech in court, were sentenced to ten days’ imprisonment and went on hunger strike, maintaining that they were political prisoners. “I was removed to a cell in which there was not furniture, but a log fixed on the floor and a shelf fixed into the wall. Afterwards I was taken into a ward and dressed by force in prison clothes. In contrast to Holloway Prison, the baths were spotlessly clean. On my return to my cell I started a hunger strike, and took no water until 10.30 on Friday, when I was suffering a great pain and becoming so ill that I was visited every two hours. I took a little water, which brought me great relief. The nights were terrible, and I could not sleep. Every persuasion was used to make me take food, but I refused always." Catherine was not force fed — none of the women were on that occasion — but she was released after four days. The Governor of Dundee Gaol had consulted the prison medical officer and decided not to authorise force feeding, partly because “owing to local feeling”, and because he thought it unlikely ‘more than one or two nurses' would assist. By 1910, Catherine’s support for the WSPU waned when Christabel Pankhurst changed tactics towards arson and other criminal acts. She drew the line at that. In any case, her health was starting to be a concern. She died in 1950 at the age of 80. *Footnote. Sadly, Olivia Fargus was the last victim of John George Haigh, the Acid Bath Murderer, in 1949. She was 68.

The Woman of the Day is Agnes Mylles of Wiltshire, the first West Country woman to be executed as a witch. She was hanged after the Witchcraft Act became law in England in 1562. Scotland passed its own Act the following year. Properly titled an ‘Act agaynst Conjuracons Inchantments and Witchecraftes’, it was England’s second witchcraft statute and formally criminalised a fact-defying nebulous belief that required no definition and no measurable evidence beyond subjective accusation or outrage. The Act directed that anyone believed to "use, practise, or exercise any Witchcraft, Enchantment, Charm, or Sorcery, whereby any person shall happen to be killed or destroyed", was guilty of a felony without benefit of clergy, and was to be put to death. This was during the reign of Elizabeth I when her court was gripped by fear of Catholic plots to topple the Queen. The Act was a consequence. It was fundamental to all of the English witch-trials that followed during that period. Agnes was accused of using witchcraft to murder the infant son of Wiltshire MP Sir Edward Bayntun and his wife, also named Agnes. How the child died is unknown but infant mortality in those days was high and about 30% died before their first birthday. It left Sir Edward without a direct heir, meaning his considerable estate would in time pass to his half brother and wife Dorothy. Agnes was accused of being commissioned jointly by Bayntun’s aunt-by-marriage Dorothy and the Devil himself in order to clear the way for Dorothy’s husband to inherit the Bayntun family fortune. Very little is known about Agnes including what she was supposed to have done or why she was allegedly chosen for the job, but I’d say that she was probably fell foul of a number of politically correct expectations. She was a Catholic, she was a widow, and she was poor and elderly. That would be sufficient in those days to portray her as that most dangerous of women, a witch-for-hire. How did anyone be sure she was responsible? Simple. All that was required was accusation and outrage. The heartbroken parents approached the Bishop of Salisbury and local magistrates with their suspicion that their infant son’s sudden death could only be explained by witchcraft. It was just a suspicion but by luck or chance, someone mentioned to the visiting Assizes judges that Jane Marsh, a widow in Somerset, was “of such skill and knowledge that she could detect persons who used witchcraft”. (That skill in itself sounds remarkably similar to “witchcraft” to me, but I digress…) Mistress Marsh was invited to travel to Salisbury and promptly identified Dorothy Bayntun as the instigator and the hapless Agnes Mylles as the perpetrator. Utterly compelling, don’t you think? It was certainly good enough for the Assizes judges. In April 1564, Agnes was tried, convicted and hanged at Fisherton near Salisbury. Jane Marsh’s reward was to be consigned to prison too while the wealthy Dorothy went free. Had Dorothy been content to enjoy her wealth, nothing more might have been known about the case but in May 1565, she and the Bishop of Salisbury (yes, him again. He keeps popping up) pressured the bereaved parents into complaining to the Court of Chancery about Jane Marsh’s incarceration. After all, she was only helping out. The only way Jane could regain her freedom was to retract her accusation, so she did, but it was thirteen months too late for poor Agnes. Just to bring you full circle, a key apologist for the Elizabethan religious settlement and arguably one of the main movers behind the Witchcraft Act was a bloke called John Jewel. Yes, the Bishop of Salisbury. Witch trials were conducted in England from the 15th century until the 18th century. About five hundred people were executed, about 90% of them women. All you had to do to avoid attention under this all-compassing Act that visited terrible punishment on innocent people on the subjective word of an accuser was to follow the rules. Don’t be older or “crone-like” (for which read: showing signs of age or a hard life); Don’t be poor; Don’t upset anyone; And above all, don’t be a woman. By now, you might well think that I am in any way drawing a parallel with the latest iteration of Conversion Therapy Bill, with its own reliance on a nebulous belief that requires no measurable evidence beyond subjective outrage. That’s purely in your imagination of course. And possibly mine. If it passes in what used to be regarded as the Mother of Parliaments but now seems to be occupied by a large cohort of one-term ideologues with a “progressive and inclusive” agenda, just remember that to avoid accusation, you need to follow the rules: Do not hold or express the lawful view that there are only two sexes and that same-sex orientation is not only valid but really does mean same-sex, not “gender” (whatever that is); Do not be a concerned therapist, social worker, teacher, medical professional or anyone else for whom safeguarding is a duty and a priority; And above all, don’t be a responsible parent who just wants to reassure their confused and vulnerable child that it’s perfectly OK to accept and love the body they’re in.