One Hundred Years Ago Today

One hundred years ago today, a certain group of privileged women were given the right to vote in the UK.

On paper at least, I would have been one of these privileged women.

Among the first set of women who could vote was Rosa May Billinghurst from Lewisham. Her father was a banker, her mother from a monied family, Rosa survived polio as a child leaving her unable to walk. So she took part in the Black Friday demonstrations in her adapted trike, complete with the newest technology of the day, pneumatic tyres.

It was Rosa’s privilege that gave her back her mobility. It was her privilege that allowed her to be a suffragette. And it was her privilege that made her a target.

During Black Friday she was arrested after the police had capsized her from the trike. Billinghurst knew that she was helpless when this happened but she was quite prepared to take the added publicity to benefit the suffrage cause. The police also exploited her disability leaving her in a side street after letting her tyres down and pocketing the valves.

No matter. Money could buy new valves. Privilege could get more publicity for the cause. For Rosa, her disability was key to gaining this.

If you want a suffragette that ticks all the boxes, Rosa was it.

Billinghurst would place her crutches on both sides of her tricycle and would charge any opposition. She was arrested several more times in the next few years. The prison authorities were confused when she was sentenced to one month hard labour and gave her no extra work. She was befriended by the many other prisoners including Dr Alice Stewart Ker who got her to smuggle a letter out to her daughter when Billinghurst was released.When she was sentenced to eight months for damaging letterboxes she went on hunger strike in Holloway Prison. Billinghurst was force-fed along with other suffragettes. She became so ill that she was released two weeks after being force fed.

She spoke at a public meeting in West Hampstead in March 1913. On 24 May she chained herself to the gates of Buckingham Palace and on 14 June she was dressed in white on her trike in Emily Wilding Davison’s funeral procession after she became a martyr to the cause. Billinghurst supported the Pankhurst’s lead when they decided to priorise the war over the campaign for womens rights. She helped in Christabel Pankhurst’s campaign to be elected in Smethwick in 1918. She had however joined the Women’s Freedom League and became part of the Suffragette Fellowship.

(full disclosure as a Davidson Wildcat… the last two paragraphs I lifted from Wikipedia cuz… you know… I type at 6 words per minute and Wikipedia puts the facts up pretty well. Don’t tell Professor Holland)

I think about Rosa a lot as I now head down the streets of South London myself. Lucky enough to be in the latest technology I have been thrown from being perceived as one of the worlds top 1%, to having no value because I am a woman with a disability in a matter of seconds. It’s a headlock every time it happens and although my grace in dealing with it is growing, my patience in tolerating it is not. I think this is the balance Rosa must have had to strike often. And when she found herself separated from her peers due to her disability, that must have hurt deeply.

She knew that even when gender equality was obtained, as a woman with a disability, she still would be facing inequality.

I am privileged. And that statement should make a lot of you very nervous because if you fed yourself breakfast this morning, in my book, you are privileged too. That’s OK. It is what we do with that privilege that dictates how our life is to be judged at the end. In a very odd twist of fate, Rosa knew it wasn’t just her wealth, but also her disability that gave her privilege in this world. Upon her first arrest she said:

“With all the pillar boxes we’ve done, there has been nothing in the papers about it – perhaps now there has been an arrest there will be something.”

In a world that was less open and less accessible than ours, a wealthy white disabled woman found a way to march knowing that many of her sisters didn’t see half of what she herself faced. Disability rights and equal access wasn’t on anyone’s Radar and it would be after her lifetime that those battles would even begin. But Rosa also knew she was privileged in this world, and she that meant she had the responsibility to take action when others could not.

So she marched on.

So I will too.