Probably a weaver

29

Single

13 Park Place(?), off Queens Road, Halifax HX1 3XS.

WSPU

Evades

Lavena was born in Hebden Bridge in 1881, the daughter of a fustian dyer. Around her tenth birthday, she became a half-time tailoress in a local clothing factory, leaving school to work
full-time soon after. In the 1901 aged 19, she is recorded as working as a machinist fustian clothing tailoress, still in Hebden Bridge.

Little is known of Lavena’s next five years. However, finding small-town Hebden Bridge restricting, in c. 1906 she moved up to more cosmopolitan Halifax, working as a weaver. Here there were more like-minded women in the Women’s Labour League and in the WSPU. Living off Queens Road, Lavena found herself in the heart of Halifax’s nest of suffragettes.

In March 1907, she went down to Westminster, was arrested ~ and imprisoned for 14 days. The next year, February 1908, she was again down in London, for the WSPU’s Women’s Parliament, was again arrested ~ and sentenced to 6 weeks.

Such harsh prison sentences inevitably took their toll. And from 1908, Lavena seemed to distance herself from WSPU militancy. In ‘Suffragettes on the Tramp’, she and Laura Wilson dressed in old clothes, walked the 25 miles to Wakefield to experience life as a tramp. And increasingly Lavena turned to the  new educational opportunities offered by the Workers’ Education Association (WEA): she wanted to make up for her few years’ schooling, cut so brutally short. Lavena now found her voice ~ and was soon writing her wonderful ‘The Letters of a Tailoress’ (The Highway, WEA), reflecting back on the confining horizons of her late-Victorian girlhood. Lavena had emerged as a talented writer. 

In March 1911, when Emmeline Pankhurst came to Halifax and spoke on the census boycott at the Mechanics’ Institute Hall, Lavena was probably sitting on the platform behind her. Three days later, on census night itself, she was undoubtedly an evader (from 13 Park Place, off Queens Road, where she was a boarder). 

In 1917, she married George Baker, a private soldier, at the Unitarian Chapel, Halifax ~ and they moved to Bradford. Sadly, Lavena fell into virtual obscurity for the next 40 years. She died in 1957 in Bradford, one of the ‘the disappeared’. 

For more see, Liddington, Rebel Girls: their fight for the vote, Virago Press 2006 (includes selections from Lavena’s writings).