Women's Social and Political Union

This image was both exploited and subverted to varying degrees by the press, the WSPU , and Marsden herself. From this point forward, Marsden became a significant force within the Union as a paid organizer...

Charges against the women were dropped owing to pressure from the University Chancellor, the Liberal writer and statesman Lord Morley (now a Viscount), whose speech they had interrupted and who was said to be appalled...

Continuing the pattern begun several months previously, Marsden received high praise from Union leaders while she also continued to come under their scrutiny. She was criticised within the movement for her apparent lack of financial...

DM moved frequently during her time with the WSPU . Finances were limited and she was in high demand in Manchester, London, and such smaller districts as Southport and Blackburn. Between November...

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...

Following her split with the WSPU , DM considered joining the Women's Freedom League or the Fabian Society , but instead began to plan for a radical feminist journal that would stimulate discussion of diverse...

Through her regular journal essays and editorial decisions, Marsden not only questioned the methods and goals of established suffrage groups, primarily the WSPU , but also led discussion of such topics as auto-eroticism, monogamy...

DM was the major but not the sole driving force behind The Freewoman. The journal was launched with funds from Mary Gawthorpe , who also served for some time as its co-editor. Gawthorpe's tenure...

DM resigned from the WSPU in January 1911, having become strongly dissatisfied with its comparatively autocratic structure and narrow focus on the the vote. She was not the only activist to form such a judgment:...

In one of her first major public appearances with the WSPU , DM spoke, along with leaders of the movement, at the group's rally at Heaton Park in Manchester, to mark Woman's Sunday.

In 1909, during the height of her involvement with the WSPU , Margaret Haig Mackworth (later MHVR ) began publishing articles in praise of militancy in the Western Mail.

That autumn, against the wishes of both her father and her husband, she joined the WSPU , organising a local branch at Newport, South Wales. She paid her one-shilling annual membership fee and pledged...

She was released on bail and fined £10, in addition to £10 in court costs—but she refused to pay. She was sentenced to a month's imprisonment at a jail in Usk, where she went...

CLtook the plunge, not only of joining the WSPU , but also of volunteering to be one of the next deputation to the Prime Minister (Herbert Henry Asquith ), which would in all...

The Women's Social and Political Union put CL on its payroll as a paid organizer at two pounds a week plus expenses, making the appointment retrospective to the beginning of the year.