SAPPHIC SUFFRAGETTES
THE FILM SUFFRAGETTE IS EXPECTED TO PROMPT A NEW INTEREST IN THE WOMEN WHO FOUGHT FOR OUR RIGHT TO VOTE. HILARY MCCOLLUM PUTS THE LESBIANS AND BI WOMEN IN THE MOVEMENT UNDER THE SPOTLIGHT
Annie Kenney and Christabel Pankhurst pictured soon after their arrest together in 1905
ALL IMAGES PUBLIC DOMAIN OR CREATIVE COMMONS
“Miss Browne is sleeping in Annie’s room now.”
So wrote Mary Blathwayt when ousted from the bed of suffragette Annie Kenney. Mary had met Annie at a women’s suffrage meeting and adored her from the start. She was not the only one. At least two other suffragettes, Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence and Clare Mordan, said they had fallen in love with Annie the first time they met her.
The nature of these relationships concerned some in the movement. After the vote was won, Teresa Billington-Greig said, “There was an immediate and strong emotional attraction between Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence and Annie Kenney... indeed so emotional and so openly paraded that it frightened me. I saw it as something unbalanced and primitive and possibly dangerous to the movement”.
Annie Kenney was a mill worker from Oldham who joined the Women’s Social And Political Union (the militant suffragette organisation founded by Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters) after hearing Christabel Pankhust speak at a suffrage meeting in 1905. Annie was drawn to Christabel who invited her to come to tea the next Saturday. She said: “The following week I lived on air, I simply could not eat… It was as though half of me was present, where the other half was I never asked.”