Mapping Women's Suffrage

Do you know if any of your ancestors in Britain were Suffragettes?  The new website Mapping Women's Suffrage may hold the answer for you.

 
The Votes for Women campaign was a long and difficult struggle fought by women and men in cities, towns, and villages right across the country. Mapping Women's Suffrage identifies, plots and records, the everyday locations and lives of as many Votes for Women campaigners as possible across England at the height of the suffrage movement in 1911. You can search or click on the suffrage map to find where the campaigners lived, accessing a cache of biographical information, photographs and archive documents about them. 

The suffrage map has been custom built to create user friendly layers of knowledge and learning capturing the whereabouts and the lives of suffrage campaigners and their roles in the votes for women campaign. The map currently enables a range of digitised materials such as photographs, letters and official documents - often scattered across and between different physical and online locations - to be gathered together for each campaigner, centralised and viewed at the place they were living at the time of the government census survey,of 1911. The map also provides tools you can use to filter campaigners on the map by key data about them. This currently includes which suffrage society they supported in 1911, and whether they took part in an organised suffrage boycott of the government census that year. You can also choose whether to view campaigner locations on a current street map, or a historical 1888-1913 Ordinance Survey Map.
 
Each Votes for Women campaigner recorded on the map, is denoted by a circular coloured icon or ‘dot’ at the address where they were living in 1911. The suffrage map recognises the contribution of multiple suffrage organisations – both law-abiding suffragists and law-breaking suffragettes - in winning Votes for Women. Therefore, the map colour codes each campaigner icon on the map by which suffrage society they were most active with at that time - purple for WSPU, red for NUWSS, and so on. You can use the side menu tools on screen, to turn on and off campaigner icons on the map, either by suffrage society, and/or by their stance on the census boycott.

The website is still a work in progress as new data is added and the online database grows, but take a look to learn more about the struggle for women's right to vote, and see if your ancestors were involved in the movement.

#52Ancestors - Week 9 - Females

Throughout history, the lives of women have in many ways been dependent on men.  In Britain before 1857 wives were under the economic and legal control of their husbands, and divorce was almost impossible. It required a very expensive private act of Parliament costing perhaps £200, of the sort only the richest could possibly afford.  

Traditionally a female went from the household of her father to that of her husband, and until a series of four laws called the Married Women's Property Act passed Parliament from 1870 to 1882, a wealthy married women usually had no control of their own property and a working class woman's wages were also the property of her husband.

Until more modern times, work opportunities for women were severely limited and many professions were limited to males only.  Few universities allowed women to study, and in the first professions that did allow women, such as teaching, women were paid significantly less that their male counterparts, and were often expected to leave when they married.

This makes tracing our female ancestors especially challenging.  Women were far less likely to leave a variety of records behind - things like land, occupation and trade, voting, education and tax records.  Even when formally mentioned, a married woman would often be referred to by her husband's name - I have a newspaper article from 1930 which refers to a great-aunt as 'Mrs Wilfred Penney', not by her given name of Edna.

Widow's Application for Relief

One of the saddest stories I have found in my family history is that of Eliza Pummeroy (nee Beseler).  Eliza was born in 1871 in Learmonth, Victoria to Edward Beseler and Emma (nee Flower).  Eliza married Alfred Pummeroy in1895 in St Kilda, where Alfred worked as a plasterer.  They had four children before Alfred suddenly became ill with pneumonia and died on 6 Feb 1901, leaving Eliza with 4 young children and in a desperate situation.

The family lived in rented housing and had little by way of savings.  With four children to look after, the eldest 4 years old and deaf and mute, the youngest (my grandfather William) only 2 months old, Eliza was unable to do much by way of paid work.  She took in washing to make a little money, and was given 3 shillings a week by the local Ladies Benevolent Society.  It wasn't enough.

After struggling for a month after her husband's sudden death, Eliza took the step of applying to the local court for help, risking having her children removed from her custody and placed in an orphanage, something she was adamant she did not want.  The judges hearing the case awarded her 10 shillings from the poor box and committed the children to the department, with the recommendation they be handed back to their mother.

This appeal was reported in several newspapers.  Two reported the case with a fair amount of detail, including the fact that the children all appeared clean and well cared for, while a third much briefer article gave a somewhat different impression, especially with the heading 'Neglected Children'.

Prahran Telegraph, Sat 9 March 1901, p3.

The Argus, Sat 9 March 1901, p15.

The Herald, Fri 8 March 1901, p5.

Mapping Women's Suffrage 1911

A new website I have just discovered focuses on the women (and men) who campaigned in England for women's rights to vote.  It seems fitting that this project has been launched to coincide with International Women's Day.   Below is a statement from the website outlining the project.

"The Votes for Women campaign was a long and difficult struggle fought by women and men in cities, towns, and villages right across the country. The Mapping Women's Suffrage project plots the diverse locations, lives and activities of many Votes for Women campaigners in England in 1911 - the height of the women's suffrage movement. You can click on the interactive map to find suffrage campaigners who lived in your street, town or city, accessing a cache of biographical information, photographs and archive documents about them. The suffrage map gives new glimpses into the lives of suffrage campaigners and the geographies of the Votes for Women movement - a snapshot in time - from this momentous period in women's history.

The Mapping Women's Suffrage project brings together academics, local history groups, family researchers, archivists and members of the public, to share and build an unprecedented picture of the Votes for Women movement and its campaigners in England in 1911. The map recognises the contribution of multiple suffrage organisations – both law abiding suffragists and law-breaking suffragettes - in winning Votes for Women as well as revealing the often-hidden lives of ordinary campaigners in the homes and communities where they lived.

The project map and website are currently being developed, so please visit regularly for more information and/or join our mailing list using the Contact Us form."

Victorian Mourning Customs

By the 19th century, mourning behaviour in England had developed into a complex set of rules, particularly among the upper classes. For women, the customs involved wearing heavy, concealing, black clothing, and the use of heavy veils of black crêpe. The entire ensemble was colloquially known as "widow's weeds" (from the Old English waed, meaning "garment").  Special caps and bonnets, usually in black or other dark colours, went with these ensembles. 

Widows were expected to wear special clothes to indicate that they were in mourning for at least two years after the death, although a widow could choose to wear such attire for the rest of her life. To change the costume earlier was considered disrespectful to the deceased and, if the widow was still young and attractive, suggestive of potential sexual promiscuity. Those subject to the rules were slowly allowed to re-introduce conventional clothing at specific times; such stages were known by such terms as "full mourning", "half mourning", and similar descriptions. For half mourning, muted colours such as lilac, grey and lavender could be introduced.  There was also mourning jewelry, often made of jet. The wealthy would wear cameos or lockets designed to hold a lock of the deceased's hair or some similar relic.

Mourning became quite an industry, with special warehouses offering specially made mourning wear.  As it was considered unlucky to have mourning clothes on hand these clothes were generally discarded after the period of mourning ended, then new clothes would have to be quickly purchased when needed again. Friends, acquaintances, and employees wore mourning to a greater or lesser degree depending on their relationship to the deceased. Mourning was worn for six months for a sibling. Parents would wear mourning for a child for "as long as they feel so disposed".  No lady or gentleman in mourning was supposed to attend social events while in deep mourning.  In general, men were expected to wear mourning suits of black coats with matching trousers and waistcoats.

The black dyes used for mourning clothes were often unstable and could not be worn next to the skin as perspiration and natural body oils would cause the colour to blotch and run. It was this reason white shirts were worn but trimmed with purple or black lace, ribbon, or piping.

Women's Voluntary Service diaries

31,401 pages of diaries by members of the Women’s Voluntary Service (WVS) are available to view for the first time.  The diaries date from 1938-1942 and cover more than 1,300 different cities, towns and villages across Great Britain.
They were inscribed on the UNESCO UK Memory of the World register in 2010 as one of the most important historical documents in the UK, but have only just been digitised after RVS raised £28,000 for the project from over 700 members of the public via the website Kickstarter.
Stella Isaacs, Marchioness of Reading, founded the WVS in May 1938 and toured the country throughout 1938 and 1939, telling audiences “the greatest disservice a woman can do at the moment is consider herself useless”.  By the end of August 1939, over 300,000 women had joined the organisation and more than 1,200 WVS centres had been set up around the country.
During the war, one in ten British women was a member of the WVS. The jobs these women did were rarely glamorous, but success of the WVS was in using the skills women already had, the skills of wives and mothers; knitting, sewing, cooking, and of course compassion and diplomacy. Where new skills were needed, such as driving in the blackout, extinguishing incendiary bombs or making jumpers from dog’s hair, training was given and many stepped up to the task.
Every account is written in a different style by a different woman. Some are long, others short but all give a fascinating window on a world which is soon to be out of living memory.