Teacher and Social worker

53

Single

63 Union Road, Rotherhithe, Bermondsey

WFL?

Resists

Anna was born in 1859 in Cork, Ireland. She gained a Bachelor of Arts degree and by 1901 was living and working in England as a secondary school teacher at the Bermondsey Settlement in Farncombe Street. The Settlement provided social, health, educational opportunities and welfare for the local poor and some housing provision. In 1904, Anna put herself up for election to the local Rotherhithe Board of Guardians and along with Miss Frank (see Maria White Frank) attempted to register on the municipal voter list in Rotherhithe via her occupation of property rented in connection to the Bermondsey Settlement. Her claim was opposed in court by the local Conservative candidate but was none the less granted. Anna’s fight for women’s place at the ballot box had truly begun.

As a leading member of the Bermondsey and Rotherhithe Women’s Liberal Association (she was for a time its President) Anna presided over a meeting at the local town hall in November 1908 and gave a speech on the importance of women’s suffrage stating unequivocally that ‘the sooner the question was settled the better it would be for the country, for the women, and she added significantly for the Liberal government’. She would eventually resign from the Association in 1913 over the Liberal government’s recalcitrance on votes for women along with several other members such as treasurer and friend Lucy Knowles who had served as secretary at the Settlement. The women declared that the last three years had proved that ‘as long as Mr Asquith led the Liberal Party, it was hopeless for women to look to it for their enfranchisement’.

In 1911, Anna participated in the boycott of the government census survey organised by suffrage society’s like the Women’s Freedom League (WFL) and the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) in direct protest at women’s exclusion from the vote. Then living at 63 Union Road, Rotherhithe, and still working at the Bermondsey Settlement as a social worker, Anna wrote on her census form ‘Return refused as a protest against non-representative government. No vote; no census’. She was joined in the protest by fellow residents at Union Road and fellow Settlement workers, Miss Frank and Miss Britten. This type of civil disobedience seemed to appeal to Anna. In July 1913, she had some of her goods sold in lieu of her taxes which she refused to pay until women got the vote. A report on the sale notes that mothers from the Bermondsey Settlement turned out in significant numbers, some with babies in arms, despite the inclement weather to show their support. Anna was represented at the sale by a member of the Women’s Tax Resistance League a suffrage organisation closely aligned to the WFL which in turn was supported by many of Anna’s friends including (see) Ada Salter and was led by another, Charlotte Despard. So, to which suffrage society did Anna belong? This is difficult to determine. At the beginning of the campaign, Anna likely allied herself with the NUWSS, popular among Liberal Party women. She maintained a longstanding relationship with the society through educational lecture tours and was published in its newspaper the Common Cause (see below). Yet, her friendship circle and turn to civil disobedience from 1911 suggests a move towards the WFL. Therefore - circumspectly – Anna currently appears on our 1911 map as a WFL supporter. Formally, she may not have belonged to any suffrage society at that time. However, by 1914, she had become a Vice President of the Free Church League for Women's Suffrage formed in 1910, and later joined the United Suffragists which accepted militants and non-militants alike. Like many campaigners, the picture of Anna’s suffrage campaigning is complex.

What is certain, is that Anna was motivated throughout the campaign by her desire to alleviate poverty, particularly for married working women and their children, believing Votes for Women was integral. She wrote several articles and gave numerous speeches entwining the two causes. For example, in 1911 in suffrage newspaper the Common Cause, she published a critique of the Liberal’s government’s Maternity provision within the newly proposed Insurance Bill. This gave control of maternity payments not directly to mothers to use as they saw fit, but to Doctors and Boards of Health instead. In 1913, she gave a speech on the poverty and plight of married working-class women and the importance of the vote to effect change at a drawing room meeting in Rotherhithe; to the Progressive Women’s Suffrage Association in Cambridge; and in a speech entitled ‘Politics and Working Women’ to the Rotherhithe Women’s Political Association which she helped found to educate local women. That same year she also wrote ‘Mothers in Mean Streets’ in which she lambastes the inadequacies of the laws alleged to protect married women. She argues that the ‘semi-slave status’ of the wife under the law is the main cause of poverty and that the political enfranchisement of women would be the first step towards raising women’s status. Anna also forged the connection between improving working-class women’s lot and votes for women in 1914 via a lecture entitled ‘The Mother and her Difficulties: How the Law Treats Her’ given to the Central Sussex Women’s Suffrage Society under the auspice of educational lectures promoted by the NUWSS.

In 1922, Anna was still championing working class women’s rights. She published an article in the Women’s Leader newspaper that year which centred on the work of the Rotherhithe Women’s Guild to which she was integral. The Guild continually pressed the concerns of working women on local policy makers and Anna was in no doubt that the Guild ‘owes its origin to the fight for the vote’.

Anna died in 1937.

Can you help with more information about Anna? Perhaps a photograph of her? If so, do contact us.

For background reading on the Bermondsey Settlement with some mention of Anna and her wider publications: Seth Koven, Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London (2004) & Ellen Ross, Love and Toil: Motherhood in Outcast London, 1870-1918 (1993).

Researcher: Tara Morton.