Teacher

30

Married

Wilstrop House, Roman Road, Middlesbrough.

WFL

Resists

Alice was born in Cleveland in 1881, but went to live with her Aunt and Uncle in Manchester. There, she qualified as a mathematics teacher and worked alongside Teresa Billington (later Billington-Greig) at Stockwell College. Probably late in 1903, Alice joined the WSPU with Billington, but soon became unhappy with the autocratic way the Pankhurst's were running the WSPU and its weakening of ties with the Labour Party. Alice was a lifelong Labour Party member and committed to democratic ideals, so she left the WSPU along with Billington (and about a quarter of existing WSPU members) to form a new suffrage society - the Women's Freedom League (WFL) in 1907. Alice became an organiser for the WFL in Middlesbrough and largely due to her work there the society thrived. The WFL campaigned for women’s rights well into the 1960s and Alice became vice president in the 1930s. Alice was arrested in 1909 and sentenced to a months imprisonment for 'obstructing police' whilst taking part in a deputation to the House of Commons. She married Charles Coates, a successful coal exporter, in 1910 after he shielded her from physical attack at an open-air suffrage meeting. It is at their Middlesbrough home 'Wilstrop House' along with their daughter (they went on to have two further children) and a servant that we find the couple in 1911, where Alice resists the census that year as part of the suffrage boycott. Charles notes that the female residents of the house refuse to provide details - 'until women are enfranchised' so the census official takes it upon himself to add as much detail about the women in the house as he can. Alice's sister in law (see )Marion Coates-Hanson lived in the same street and also boycotted the census. Alice remained politically active and by 1919, had become the first woman councillor for Middlesbrough, working to improve employment and living conditions for the local community. In 1951, aged 69, Alice was actively distributing leaflets advocating women's equal pay for equal work. The Equal Pay Act was granted five years before her death in 1975.