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Dorothy Evans
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Dorothy Evans
Dorothy Elizabeth Evans (6 May 1888 – 28 August 1944) was a British feminist activist and suffragette. On the eve of World War I she was a militant organiser for the Women's Social and Political Union twice arrested in Belfast on explosives charges. She broke with Christabel Pankhurst and the WSPU in 1914 over their support for the war, and remained until the end of her life an active peace and women's equality campaigner.
Born in the Kentish Town area of London, Evans studied at the North London Collegiate School and the Dartford College of Physical Education, qualifying as a teacher. She joined the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) in 1907 and, after resigning a teaching position, from early 1910 worked full-time as the Union's Birmingham organiser. During this period, she was frequently arrested and imprisoned for acts linked to the suffragette campaign, including refusing to buy a dog license. She also organised parties to be held in Birmingham on the night when the 1911 census was being enumerated, so that she and also suffragettes could participate in the boycott of the census.
Convicted for her part in a window-smashing campaign in the West End of London, between March and July 1912 Evans was held in the Feeble-Minded Inebriate bloc of Aylesbury Prison. She protested in two hunger strikes and endured forced feeding. After her release she served as WSPU liaison between its London headquarters and its leader, Christabel Pankhurst, in Parisian exile. Evans travelled in disguise to avoid detection, but learned she had avoided arrest only because an innocent Dorothy Evans had been detained.
In the spring of 1913 Evans was posted to the north of Ireland, Ulster, where Pankhurst had decided it was the Ulster Unionists, not the Irish nationalists, who were to be courted. The Irish Party had ignored her warning that if they helped defeat the 1912 Conciliation bill (which would have extended the vote to women albeit on a highly restrictive property basis), they would be in "a fight to the death" with the suffragists: "No votes for women, no Home Rule".
Evans quickly attracted, from the long-established Irish Women's Suffrage Society, Elizabeth McCracken (the writer "L.A.M. Priestley"), Dr Elizabeth Bell (Ireland's first qualified woman gynaecologist), both of whom were unionist, and Winifred Carney (James Connolly's secretary in the Belfast branch of the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union). By April 1914, Evans had won over so many from the IWSS that it formally disbanded.
When in the spring of 1914, the Unionist leader Edward Carson pressed by Evans (she led a forty-hour siege of his doorstep in London), overruled Craig (who had supported the Conciliation Bill) on a Unionist commitment to women's suffrage, Evans declared an end to "the truce we have held in Ulster." At a meeting held in Belfast's Ulster Hall on 13 March 1914, she proposed that:
Carson was no friend of women unless he was prepared to stand and champion their rights as strongly as he championed the rights of men ... he was their enemy, and he would be fought as any other politician ... who had the power and did not use it to get their rights ... they ... declared war on ... Carson ... The civil war that was absolutely certain was the one between the women and the powers that be.
In the months that followed WSPU militants, including Bell, were implicated in a series of arson attacks on unionist-owned or associated property: golf, tennis, and bowling-green club houses, but including Abbeylands House where the Ulster Volunteers' were drilled. On 3 April 1914 police raided the flat in Belfast Evans was sharing with activist Madge Muir, and found explosives. In court, five days later, the pair created uproar when they demanded to know why the Ulster Unionist James Craig who was arming the Volunteers with German guns was not appearing on the same charges.
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Dorothy Evans
Dorothy Elizabeth Evans (6 May 1888 – 28 August 1944) was a British feminist activist and suffragette. On the eve of World War I she was a militant organiser for the Women's Social and Political Union twice arrested in Belfast on explosives charges. She broke with Christabel Pankhurst and the WSPU in 1914 over their support for the war, and remained until the end of her life an active peace and women's equality campaigner.
Born in the Kentish Town area of London, Evans studied at the North London Collegiate School and the Dartford College of Physical Education, qualifying as a teacher. She joined the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) in 1907 and, after resigning a teaching position, from early 1910 worked full-time as the Union's Birmingham organiser. During this period, she was frequently arrested and imprisoned for acts linked to the suffragette campaign, including refusing to buy a dog license. She also organised parties to be held in Birmingham on the night when the 1911 census was being enumerated, so that she and also suffragettes could participate in the boycott of the census.
Convicted for her part in a window-smashing campaign in the West End of London, between March and July 1912 Evans was held in the Feeble-Minded Inebriate bloc of Aylesbury Prison. She protested in two hunger strikes and endured forced feeding. After her release she served as WSPU liaison between its London headquarters and its leader, Christabel Pankhurst, in Parisian exile. Evans travelled in disguise to avoid detection, but learned she had avoided arrest only because an innocent Dorothy Evans had been detained.
In the spring of 1913 Evans was posted to the north of Ireland, Ulster, where Pankhurst had decided it was the Ulster Unionists, not the Irish nationalists, who were to be courted. The Irish Party had ignored her warning that if they helped defeat the 1912 Conciliation bill (which would have extended the vote to women albeit on a highly restrictive property basis), they would be in "a fight to the death" with the suffragists: "No votes for women, no Home Rule".
Evans quickly attracted, from the long-established Irish Women's Suffrage Society, Elizabeth McCracken (the writer "L.A.M. Priestley"), Dr Elizabeth Bell (Ireland's first qualified woman gynaecologist), both of whom were unionist, and Winifred Carney (James Connolly's secretary in the Belfast branch of the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union). By April 1914, Evans had won over so many from the IWSS that it formally disbanded.
When in the spring of 1914, the Unionist leader Edward Carson pressed by Evans (she led a forty-hour siege of his doorstep in London), overruled Craig (who had supported the Conciliation Bill) on a Unionist commitment to women's suffrage, Evans declared an end to "the truce we have held in Ulster." At a meeting held in Belfast's Ulster Hall on 13 March 1914, she proposed that:
Carson was no friend of women unless he was prepared to stand and champion their rights as strongly as he championed the rights of men ... he was their enemy, and he would be fought as any other politician ... who had the power and did not use it to get their rights ... they ... declared war on ... Carson ... The civil war that was absolutely certain was the one between the women and the powers that be.
In the months that followed WSPU militants, including Bell, were implicated in a series of arson attacks on unionist-owned or associated property: golf, tennis, and bowling-green club houses, but including Abbeylands House where the Ulster Volunteers' were drilled. On 3 April 1914 police raided the flat in Belfast Evans was sharing with activist Madge Muir, and found explosives. In court, five days later, the pair created uproar when they demanded to know why the Ulster Unionist James Craig who was arming the Volunteers with German guns was not appearing on the same charges.