Organizing Secretary WSPU

38

Single

Denison House, 71 Denison Road, Manchester

WSPU

Resists

Jessie (Sara) Stephenson (1873-1966) was born in Louth, Lincolnshire. Her father was a farmer and she grew up in a family with very strict views on women’s roles linked to the private, domestic sphere. However, despite her parents’ initial reluctance, Jessie moved abroad and lived in Germany and France with their consent, while working as an English teacher. In 1907, she started campaigning for the votes for women campaign with the WSPU. On 21 June 1908, she was the chief Marshall of the Paddington section of the WSPU rally in Hyde Park, speaking from platform no. 20. A few days later she was chosen to take part in a WSPU deputation to the House of Commons. She managed to enter the House of Commons, and almost succeeded in entering the Central Hall according to her own accounts. In November 1910, she was arrested after breaking a window to protest about police brutality against suffrage activists in Parliament Square during "Black Friday". She was sentenced to one month's imprisonment in Holloway, losing her job as a secretary to a barrister and her family’s support. In 1911 she went to Manchester to work as a WSPU organizer. In April, she organised a census night protest for women who wanted to evade the census without legal consequences. She rented Denison House (see images) - her census lodge - and publicly invited ‘every woman who could help in this great protest’, announcing lodging and entertainment there on 2nd April from 4pm through to 3rd April at 4pm in the WSPU newspaper Votes for Women. On census night, 208 people participated in the protest there (see images) including figures such as Flora Drummond and Mabel Capper. In her autobiographical account, Jessie wrote that she filled in the census schedule herself writing: “this house is crowded with women who refuse to fill in the Census until women are recognised as persons and have the vote”. However, the document available from The National Archives (see image) is not the form she described. Instead, it is filled in and signed by the registrar. Only Jessie’s name is recorded as an ‘Organizing Secretary WSPU’, 'about 40 years old' and single, along with 155 other women and 52 men present. The registrar noted ‘suffragists here to avoid census’. Sources: Jill Liddington (2014) Vanishing for the Vote: Suffrage, Citizenship and the Battle for the Census (Manchester: Manchester Uni Press); Elizabeth Crawford (1999) The Women's Suffrage Movement: A Reference Guide 1866-1928 (London: Routledge). Contributed by Oihane Etayo (Warwick University).