Just over a hundred years ago, the suffragettes were at their most active and militant in their campaign for Votes for Women. Certain images are imprinted on our minds – Emmeline Pankhurst, so militant and yet so elegant in her long tailored coat and broad-brimmed hat; processions of thousands of women with their colourful Votes for Women banners; determined women chaining themselves to railings or being dragged off the pavements of Downing Street; smashed windows and burnt-out buildings.
Such dramatic events would have had less effect if they had not been fully backed by thousands of women in towns and villages across the country. These women may by and large not have been so militant, but they were no less determined to have the vote, and thereby a say in the running of the country. Maybe they were even more courageous in some ways, because their actions were more visible to their neighbours and acquaintances. Often they did not have the protection of large numbers when they campaigned in a sometimes hostile environment.
In my own town of Ipswich, for example, groups of men made the lives of local suffragettes miserable by heckling at their open-air meetings and disrupting every speech they gave. In a by-election in 1914, they even ripped the clothes of women speakers who demanded that the candidates state their position on votes for women, leaving them humiliated - and angry.
But such outrages merely increased their determination. They had held dozens of public and open-air meetings in and around Ipswich by then, held suffragette fairs with processions, and opened shops to sell their merchandise, and act as a focal point to talk to people.
One of their most dramatic and courageous actions occurred in 1911, when they joined the national campaign to evade the Census, refusing to give their information to a government that denied them any say in how that information would be used. Under the leadership of Suffolk-born Constance Andrews, they hired out some public rooms in Ipswich and up to thirty women spent the night there. They weren’t at home, so their names couldn‘t be entered on the Census schedule. This close, supportive group of women held an all-night party. Not bad in 1911 when women had so little power and freedom, when on a more practical level they may not have had electric light or much heating, or known how the authorities might react.
In such ways, women right across the country empowered themselves to become full, active citizens.
Joy Bounds is the author of A Song of Their Own, the story of how ordinary women supported each other to demand a say in the affairs of this country at a time when women had very little power inside or outside the home.