Campaigning for Votes for Women in Dorset: Forgotten Stories
At 2.30p.m. on Tuesday 03 March at Gold Hill Museum, Professor Karen Hunt will give an illustrated talk entitled ‘Women’s Suffrage in Dorset: forgotten stories’. She writes: Dorset is not a county usually associated with the long campaign for votes for women that culminated in partial enfranchisement in 1918. However, that does not mean that the women (and men) of the county were indifferent to women’s lack of citizenship. This talk explores where in Dorset women chose to organise, what they did and the effects it had locally. Why did suffragism blossom in some places and not others; why were there far more suffragists than suffragettes; and how did the experience of this campaigning affect Dorset women once the vote was won?
Having retired from teaching at Keele University, Karen is now Professor Emerita of Modern British History, about which she still writes and lectures. A Trustee of Bridport Museum, she worked with Holly Miller to re-create the banner of the West Dorset Women’s Suffrage Society, which has been paraded at the annual Tolpuddle Martyrs Rally. This talk is free to members of the Shaftesbury & District Historical Society, while seats should be available from 2.20p.m. to the public, on payment of £5 at the door.
Mary Lowndes (1857-1929) was the daughter of Richard Lowndes, rector of St Mary’s Church, Sturminster Newton, and his wife Annie Harriet Kaye. After studying at the Slade School of Fine Art, she began to draw cartoons (designs) for stained glass artist Henry Holiday. Her first, two-light window ‘Feed My Sheep’ was installed in 1893 at St Peter’s, Hinton St Mary in Dorset; eventually her Arts & Crafts-style designs were in demand throughout England and Wales, and the 1897 Lowndes and Drury partnership expanded into the purpose-built Glass House, Fulham, in 1906. This was the leading studio-workshop for Arts & Crafts stained glass, providing facilities for independent, like-minded practitioners, including female artists for whom Mary was an inspirational trail-blazer.
In 1907 Mary Lowndes was instrumental in the formation of The Artists’ Suffrage League, which produced dramatic posters, postcards, Christmas cards and banners, like the 1909 example at the head of this blog. In 1910 she published a guide to ‘Banners and Banner-Making’, in which she asserted that you do not want to read it, you want to worship it. Choose purple and gold for ambition, red for courage, green for long-cherished hopes … It is a declaration.
A photograph in our archives from a1913 Fancy Dress Dance organised by boarders at Miss Dunn’s Grosvenor House School for Girls, Shaftesbury, indicates that Women’s Suffrage was very much an issue of the moment for the pupils in this small but highly regarded Dorset private school.
