Women's Social and Political Union

Gawthorpe was a former teacher from Leeds who had joined the WSPU at the age of thirteen and chosen activism in preference to marriage and family. She was a longtime suffragist and socialist, who called...

There is some suggestion that CP may have had lesbian relationships. She excited devotion among her female followers, and at least one—novelist Elizabeth Robins —admitted to falling in love with her. CP also spent much...

The following year, however, SP demonstrated diligent care for her mother's reputation: she was outraged by one paragraph in Ray Strachey 's The Cause. Though it expressed gratitude and admiration for Emmeline Pankhurst ...

In 1904, with urging from her recently-made friend Esther Roper , CP considered studying law at Lincoln's Inn, as her father had done before her. Her application was dismissed on the grounds that she would...

This work, dealing with the earlier phases of the struggle, acknowledges the split among the Pankhursts, and confirms that SP felt uneasy about the WSPU leadership as early as 1911. It is a personal book...

In June 1910, fearing an upsurge in violence, CP directed the WSPU to a more conservative position, advocating votes only for women who owned property or businesses, and excluding married women. (Allowing married women to...

During the WSPU demonstration on 12 November 1910, which came to be known as Black Friday, police attacked suffragette demonstrators at Westminster, and two women died as a result. CP 's sister Sylvia

In January 1914, CP called Sylvia to Paris to demand that Sylvia's East London Federation should break its ties to the WSPU . Although their mother's suffragist impulse had originally grown in close relation to...

On her many lecture tours, CP frequently travelled with her close friend Grace Roe , an Irishwoman whom she had met in London in 1908. In nursing training at that time, Grace had attended a...

In the week that CP fled to Paris, an article entitled The Challenge, which she had written for the Votes for Women issue of 8 March 1912, was censored. The WSPU then published...

EP and some female members of the Independent Labour Party formed the Women's Social and Political Union , with the slogan Votes for Women!

After further government hesitation on the matter of women's suffrage, EP heightened the militancy of WSPU campaigns by explicitly condoning attacks on property.

At the meeting at her mother's home where the Women's Social and Political Union was born, CP was the one who gave the Union the name by which it is known to history.

On the eve of her arrest for conspiring to commit damage at the WSPU 's first violent protest (1 March) EP sent out cloak-and-dagger notices planning another militant action.

CP settled in London, at the home of the Pethick-Lawrences in Clement's Inn, shortly after Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence began working as the WSPU treasurer.