1-192-441 - © London Museum/Heritage-Images

Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence, co-editor of Votes for Women, and business manager and Treasurer of the Women's Social and Political Union, c1909. Before her involvement with the movement Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence had spent five years as a social reformer. In 1905 she founded the Esperance Girls' Club and Social Settlement, and two years later the Maison Esperance, a cooperative dressmaking business which, unusually for the time, paid the workers a minimum wage of fifteen shillings a week for an eight-hour day, and gave them an annual holiday. She proved to be a remarkable fund-raiser and treasurer for the suffragettes, raising the equivalent of £3 million in five years. Arrested four times and serving over four months in prison, her last conviction (like her husband) was in 1912 for conspiracy to incite violence. She served only five weeks of her nine-month sentence and was released early, severely debilitated after her hunger strike and force-feeding. On their expulsion from the WSPU she and her husband continued to edit Votes for Women (thereafter the official newspaper of the WSPU would be The Suffragette.) They also founded the Votes for Women Fellowship, a new moderate militant organisation. Emmeline's many publications include: The Need for Women MPs; Women as Persons or Property?; and The Meaning of the Woman's Movement.