User:Pnwharton/sandbox/Dorothy Evans

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Dorothy Evans (1889-1944) was a suffragette and campaigner for equal rights for women.

Early Life and schooling

Militant suffragette activities

In July 1907, while training to be a gymnastics teacher at Chelsea Physical Training College, Dorothy Evans joined the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU). While a teacher at Batley Girls' School in Yorkshire she was first arrested in October 1909 for throwing a stone through a hall window in protest at being barred from a meeting where the President of the Board of Trade, Walter Runciman, was speaking. The school was keen to have her back but she resigned and, after a period of training, Dorothy Evans became WSPU organiser for Birmingham and the Midlands in January 1910. At this time militancy was on hold because of Prime Minister Herbert Asquith's promise of a free vote on a women's suffrage amendment in the event of a reform bill being introduced into Parliament. She nevertheless served her first prison term in Birmingham's Winson Green Prison for refusing to pay a dog tax and subsequently took part in the November 18th 1910 demonstration following Asquith's decision to shelve the Conciliation Bill which was on course to give the vote to over a million property-owning women. Named Black Friday because of the violence suffered by over two hundred women at the hands of the police, she was arrested but not charged.

Acting on their leader Emmeline Pankhurst's declaration that "the argument of the broken pane of glass is the most valuable argument in modern politics", the WSPU organised a campaign of window smashing in Central London in March 1912. Dorothy Evans's patch was the very fashionable Bond St and for breaking the windows of four shops there she spent four months in Aylesbury Prison's feeble-minded inebriate block. It was there that she would carry out her first hunger strike and endure her first bout of forcible feeding.In all, Dorothy Evans would endure ten terms in prison and many force feedings.

When in 1913 the WSPU's Kingsway headquarters in London was raided by the police, its senior staff arrested, and type for its official organ The Suffragette broken up, Dorothy Evans and colleagues managed to produce a complete issue and ensure its distribution nation-wide. It was also at this time with Christabel Pankhurst in Paris to avoid arrest that she acted as a liaison officer, travelling to and fro between Paris and London. For a period of six months, on learning that "a Mrs Dorothy Evans" had been arrested, she dyed her hair and went about in disguise.

It was also in 1913 that she was transferred to Bristol and then to Belfast where she opened the WSPU's first office and would spend the rest of her time as a suffragette. Her main aim initially in Northern Ireland was to help the Ulster suffragists lobby Sir Edward Carson, leader of the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), to support votes for Northern Irish women. This entailed much letter writing and even a five-day siege on his doorstep in London. But to no avail and so Dorothy Evans and the WSPU resumed their militant activities: targeting post boxes, private property belonging to leading unionists, and public property frequented mainly by men - golf clubs, Newtownards Race Stand, and Cavehill Bowling and Tennis Club in north Belfast.

While the authorities turned a blind eye to the UVF's imported weapons and threats of armed resistance, no such leniency greeted the suffragettes. Dorothy was arrested variously for conspiracy and possession of explosives and imprisoned at Tullamore Gaol in County Offaly and then in the A-Wing of Crumlin Road Gaol. In protest they went on hunger-and-thirst strike, were force-fed and released under the Cat and Mouse Act and rearrested. On one occasion she was so disruptive and aggressive in court that she had to be physically restrained and the trial was adjourned. Her final arrest being for her part in the July bombing in 1914 of Lisburn Cathedral which blew out some stained glass windows and caused much outrage in the town. The outbreak of war a month later resulted in her eventual release under an amnesty announced by Home Secretary, Reginald McKenna.

On her return to England she managed to secure another post as a gymnastics and mathematics teacher at Shrewsbury County School but, as she had done before the war, again she resigned, only this time (and unlike many of her fellow suffragettes), to campaign for the pacifist movement in protest at the barbarity of the war.

Post-war campaigning

Impact and influence

External links

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