Ada Flatman

Ada Susan Flatman (1876–1952) was a British suffragette who worked in the United Kingdom and the United States.

Ada Susan Flatman was born in Suffolk in 1876. She lived in the same Twentieth Century Club Notting Hill rooms as fellow activist Jessie Stephenson. She was of independent means and became interested in women's rights.

Flatman was sent to Holloway Prison, after she took part in the raid on the Houses of Parliament in 1908, led by Marion Wallace Dunlop, Ada Wright, and Katherine Douglas Smith, and a second wave by Una Dugdale.

The following year she was employed by the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) to organise their activities in Liverpool, taking over from Mary Phillips. Flatman arranged humble lodgings for Constance Lytton when she came to Liverpool disguised as a working woman, aiming to get arrested for suffragette activism to created suitable publicity.

In Liverpool she worked with Alice Stewart Ker, but it was Flatman who was trusted by Emmeline Pethick when Liverpool requested that they be allowed to open a WSPU shop. The shop was set up for her by Patricia Woodlock and became a success and it raised substantial funds for the cause. Flatman later organised the publicity surrounding the release of Woodlock who had completed a prison term in Holloway. A 1909 copy of Votes for Women depicted "Patricia" as a dreadnought.

By May 1909, Flatman travelled to Bristol where the anti-suffrage politician Augustine Birrell was at the Royal Hotel to give a speech to the local Chamber of Commerce. Flatman checked into a room at the hotel the night before the event and successfully evaded detectives assigned to follow her. After the speech's were given and a guard turned his head to speak to someone, Flatman pushed over a 10 foot barricade and ran into the room, shouting "give votes to taxpaying women!" She threw hundreds handbills in the suffragette colours of green, purple and white into the crowd which asked for Liberal men to support women's enfranchisement. She was dragged out of the event.

During the August 1909, Flatman took part in a summer campaign on the Isle of Man, and was nearly knocked off a pier when attacked by anti-suffragists. In December 1909, she was one of the group of suffragettes in the Royal Albert Hall to protest against David Lloyd George's position regarding women's suffrage. In a contemporary newspaper account in the London Evening Standard, suffrage campaigner Frances Ede described how stewards dragged Flatman from her seat and removed her "with quite needless violence".

In July 1910, Flatman was a key speaker at one of the platforms in the 10,000 women's rally at Hyde Park in London. Flatman suddenly stepped down as Liverpool branch co-ordinator in 1910, over a difference in approach to campaigning. Alice Morrissey took over as volunteer branch organiser from her, until another staff member was appointed.