p. 102<\/p>\n
\u201cOn Monday 4 February (1907) two of the striking weavers appeared in the magistrates\u2019 court, accused of unlawful violence. The weighty Lancashire textiles trade unionist, David Shackleton MP, alarmed at suffragette incitement of his members, arrived in Hebden Bridge and condemned the violence. Letters critical of the suffragettes began to appear in the local press. Nonetheless, even on the eve of their trial, Adela Pankhurst and Jennie Baines continued to address open air meetings.<\/p>\n
On Thursday 7 February, Jennie Baines and Laura Wilson appeared before Todmorden magistrates. Both denied the charges\u201d and refused to pay fines or sureties. Laura retaliated: \u2018I shall not find sureties to keep the peace\u2026 I shall not pay any fines or costs imposed on me by men who do not allow me to have a woman in Court to plead with me. I refuse to be bound over. That afternoon, both women were taken by trains to Leeds\u2019 forbidding Armley gaol, the first suffragettes to be incarcerated in a |Yorkshire prison. They were seen off at the station by a handful of sympathisers. That night in Hebden Bridge, Adela plus Laura\u2019s husband George Wilson justified what had occurred: the only way to settle strikes was by labour representation in parliament. (However, while still defiant, there was no longer the fill-the-gaols incitement: two imprisonments were sobering enough.) Even though their son was only five years old, George\u2019s loyalty to Laura during her imprisonment contrasts with Hannah Mitchell\u2019s experience: \u2018Most of us who were married found that \u2018Votes for Women\u2019 were of less interest to our husbands than their own dinners. George Wilson\u2019s commitment vividly illustrates how suffragette militancy within local West Riding communities sprang from labour movement solidarities which the WSPU could conveniently tap into.\u201d<\/p>\n
p. 103 \u201cNationally, early 1907 was a time of tremendous WSPU optimism and growth. The leadership exhorted supporters that \u2018The help of every woman in the country is needed now if the fetters are to be struck off that keep women a subject race.\u2019 It was indeed about this time that a Hebden Bridge WSPU branch was formed. On the night of Saturday 9 February, just two days after Jennie Baines and Laura Wilson were carted off to Armley, a local mass indignation meeting was held. The joint Hebden Bridge branch secretaries were Edith Berkley, another experienced fustian clothing machinist, and Louie Cobbe, Lilian\u2019s younger sister. Within a few weeks, WSPU branches sprang up like mushrooms along the Calder Valley: not only in Hebden Bridge and Halifax, but in smaller communities like Elland too.\u201d<\/p>\n
p. 103 Lavena (Saltonstall) even found herself at the sharp end of the local anti-suffragette backlash. She was certainly keenly aware of how a single woman, out earning her living independently of her family and speaking her own mind, was viewed by the local community. Later she recalled with vehement passion: \u2018Should any girls show a tendency to politics, or to ideas of her own, she is looked upon by the vast majority of women as a person who neglects doorsteps and home matters, and is therefore not fit to associate with their respectable daughters and sisters. If girls develop any craving for a different life or wider ideas, their mothers fear that they are going to become Socialists or Suffragettes \u2013 a Socialist being a person with lax views about other people\u2019s watches and purses, and other people\u2019s husbands or wives, and a Suffragette a person whose house is always untidy\u2026 Who is going to tell these mothers that daughters were not given to them merely to dress and domesticate. Who is going to tell them that they have a higher duty to perform to them than merely teaching them housework? Who is going to tell them that it is as cruel to discourage a child from making use of its own talent or individuality as it would be to discourage a child from using its limbs?\u201d<\/p>\n
p. 107 Over 500 ILP women signed the Manifesto to the Women\u2019s Social and Political Union <\/em>published at New Year 1907. Of these, 136 came from the West Riding of Yorkshire and a further 146 from Lancashire: together they added up to well over half of all signatories. And of the 58 WSPU branches now sprung up across the country, almost a quarter lay in Yorkshire, most in the West Riding textile towns. For such Pennine textile communities in northern England were the heartland of early WSPU support. Their very names \u2013 Halifax and Hebden Bridge, Bradford and Keighley, Leeds and Dewsbury \u2013 conjured up countless bales of wool, the racket of looms, the whirr of sewing machines.\u201d<\/p>\n p.302 The Third rebel girl who left Britain, Dora Thewlis, also emigrated to Australia \u2026 like so many other Edwardians, was primarily an economic migrant. Some time before 1914, along with her elder sister and about 20 other Huddersfield girls, she left in search of a better life than that offered by the long hours in the Yorkshire textile mills. Dora went to Warnambool in the Melbourne region, where she worked in blanket-weaving. .. in 1918, she married Jack Dow, a second-generation Australian, and they had two children.\u201d<\/p>\n p. 303 \u201cLavena Saltonstall \u2013 last hear of springing to defend the broad WEA curriculum against attacks about \u2018cloroforming the workers\u2019 \u2013 remained active in the Halifax WEA until 1916. Then, in June 1917, in Halifax Unitarian Chapel, 34-year-old Lavena, now working as an electrical engineer\u2019s clerk, married George Naket of Bradford, a 40-year-old private in the Duke of Wellington\u2019s regiment. But after the War, this talented self-taught feminist journalist, happy to take on anti-suffragists, sadly disappears from view.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" p. 102 \u201cOn Monday 4 February (1907) two of the striking weavers appeared in the magistrates\u2019 court, accused of unlawful violence. The weighty Lancashire textiles trade unionist, David Shackleton MP, alarmed at suffragette incitement of his members, arrived in Hebden Bridge and condemned the violence. Letters critical of the suffragettes began to appear in the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,2,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4787","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-feminism","category-womens-history","author-natalieben"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4787","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4787"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4787\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4788,"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4787\/revisions\/4788"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4787"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4787"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4787"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}