Rosa May Billinghurst - The Fighting Suffragette

Last August 18, 2020 marked the 100-year anniversary of women being granted the right to vote in the United States. The United Kingdom had only been a couple years quicker: they granted the right to vote to certain qualified women over the age of thirty in 1918 (this was adjusted to all women over 21, the same as applied to men, ten years later). The mid-19th and early 20th centuries were marked by the suffragettes' activism: thousands protested, lectured, endured imprisonment, and were tortured in order to grant millions of women the right to vote and serve in governmental offices. 

I have always admired these women, of course, since it is because of them that I can make my voice heard. There are the famous American names (Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Carrie Chapman Catt, Alice Paul, or Ida B. Wells), but there are hundreds more that are not as well-known. Today we'll learn about an English suffragette who fought for women's rights while also using a modified, self-propelled tricycle or crutches to ambulate.

May at a suffragette demonstration, crutches placed on each side of her tricycle

Rosa May Billinghurst was born on May 31, 1875 in Lewisham, London, England. Her father, Henry Farncombe Billinghurst, was a banker and his wife, Rosa Ann (Brimsmead), came from a wealthy piano-manufacturing family. May (as she was called) was the second of the couple's eventual nine children. 

Not much is known about her childhood other than that she, at five months old, survived poliomyelitis. Thanks to the polio vaccine, this serious disease is decades in the past in almost the entire world (in 2018, there were only 33 reported cases globally, as compared to 58,000 in the US alone in 1952). Polio is incredibly infectious and can be very serious: though many who get infected have no symptoms or only mild flu-like symptoms, a small percentage experience paralysis, leading to disability or death. Any American adult today who was alive before vaccines were readily available can tell stories of the terror of polio epidemics that closed schools, swimming pools, libraries, and movie theaters. Many can conjure images of people using iron lungs for decades; currently there are only a handful of users still alive. Polio was officially eradicated in America in 1994 and Europe in 2002. Today the only two countries that are still in the process of eradication are Afghanistan and Pakistan.

May's experience of surviving polio left her paralyzed; she did regain the use of her hands and arms but would never be able to walk again independently. She wore leg-irons (leg braces) and used crutches or a modified tricycle to navigate her world. Her parents hired a tutor to educate their daughter at home, though her disability prevented her from going to university. Even with these physical difficulties, May maintained an active life as a young woman. May taught Sunday school and joined the temperance group Band of Hope.  Her sister, Alice, was the superintendent at a local children's home, so set May up to volunteer at the Greenwich and Deptford Union Workhouse. She later said,

“My heart ached and I thought surely if women were consulted in the management of the state happier and better conditions must exist for hard-working sweated lives such as these... It was gradually unfolded to me that the unequal laws which made women appear inferior to men were the main cause of these evils. I found that the man-made laws of marriage, parentage and divorce placed women in every way in a condition of slavery - and were as harmful to men by giving them power to be tyrants.”

These experiences led May to advocate for women's right to vote in the United Kingdom. She was nicknamed "the cripple suffragette" by newspapers (in one 1912 article listing suffragettes who were arrested, May was not referred to by name but instead only as "a cripple"). She was an active member of the Women's Liberal Federation first, then joined the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) in 1907. It had been founded a few years earlier by Emmeline Pankurst with the agenda of "Deeds not Words." She had been inspired to join by Pankurst's daughter, Christabel; May said, "I wondered how the public could ever be made to think about it. In the midst of the hopelessness of it all Christabel Pankhurst sounded the war note of militancy and was imprisoned for her boldness, and the subject of votes for women was on every tongue." When May joined the group, her family also donated a large sum of money to them. The next June, when she was 33 years old, May participated in the WSPU march to Royal Albert Hall. She was in Hagerstown the next month organizing a response to a by-election. She would later found the Greenwich branch of the WSPU and serve as its first secretary.

May at a protest, 1908

Because she used a modified tricycle (also called a "wheelchair" in records), May was very recognizable. In 1909, Annie Barnes, another suffragette, saw whom she presumed to be May distracting a police horse, causing the rider to tip off and fall in a horse trough. She was arrested and "roughly handled" into a police van. The following year, she used her adapted tricycle to participate in the "Black Friday" demonstrations, so named because of the intense violence and insults hurled at the 300 protesters, 159 of whom were arrested. Sylvia Pankhurst, a suffragette present, recorded, "We saw the women go out and return exhausted, with black eyes, bleeding noses, bruises, sprains and dislocations. The cry went round: 'Be careful; they are dragging women down the side streets!' We knew this always meant greater ill-usage." Harold Smith, an historian, later wrote that "it appeared to witnesses as well as the victims that the police had intentionally attempted to subject the women to sexual humiliation in a public setting to teach them a lesson." 

May described her treatment on Black Friday in evidence later collected by the WSPU:

“I am lame and cannot walk or get about at all without the aid of a hand tricycle, and was therefore obliged to go to the deputation riding on the machine. At first, the police threw me out of the machine on to the ground in a very brutal manner. Secondly, when on the machine again, they tried to push me along with my arms twisted behind me in a very painful position, with one of my fingers bent right back, which caused my great agony. Thirdly, they took me down a side road and left me in the middle of a hooligan crowd, first taking all the valves out of the wheels and pocketing them, so that I could not move the machine, and left me to the crowd of roughs, who, luckily, proved to be my friends. Another time, the police, in addition to personal violence, finding that they could not remove the new valves, twisted my wheel so that it was again impossible to move the machine. In this plight they left me again, first telling a man in the crowd to slit my tyre down with a policeman’s knife. This the man refused to do, and the policeman was prevented doing me further injury by a gentleman taking his name. I may also add that my arms and back were so badly bruised and strained by the rough treatment of the police that for two days after Friday, 18th, I could not leave my bed.”

She was arrested that day and charged with obstruction but released due to lack of evidence.

Police and other men abusing a female demonstrator on Black Friday, 1910

May had known that her disability left her more vulnerable than the other activists, but this did not deter her. Historian Fran Abrams wrote that,

“May Billinghurst was no fool. She knew full well, and so did the leaders of the WSPU, that her hand-propelled invalid tricycle gave her a special advantage in the propaganda battle they were waging. It made it difficult, if not impossible, for the media to portray May as a howling harridan with little care for the safety of others. At its least effective the sight of her at a demonstration was a picturesque one, commented on lightly along with other aspects of the pageantry of the day. At best, it served to underline in bold the brutal tactics of the police and the vulnerability of the suffragette demonstrators.”

Her tricycle was decorated with colored WSPU ribbons and "Votes for Women" banners for protests. At demonstrations, May placed her crutches on both sides of her tricycle and charge anyone who tried to stop her. One suffragette wrote,

“I remember hearing startling stories of her running battles with the police. Her crutches were lodged on each side of her self propelling invalid chair, and when a meeting was broken up or an arrest being made, she would charge the aggressors at a rate of knots that carried all before her. When the police retaliated and tried to control this she ran the risk of being ejected on to the ground, where she was quite helpless. Of course she took the risk with her eyes open and when this happened, as it did on occasion, made full and unscrupulous use of her infirmities so as to obtain the maximum publicity for the cause.”

May also described her actions when police officers would attempt to surround protestors: "In these situations I am invaluable. Being in a wheelchair is highly useful… the hard metal of this clumsy thing is no match against policemens' shins."

May at a protest with policemen behind her

May, surrounded, at a protest

May being attacked by police at a protest while her fellow suffragettes try to help

Over the years, she was arrested several times. Once was in November 1911, following smashing windows in Parliament Square, though a five shilling fine was paid on her behalf to allow her release. A journalist, Henry Nevinson, wrote, "Just at that time as I was returning to Whitehall I met Miss Billinghurst, that indomitable cripple, being carried shoulder high by four policemen in her little tricycle or wheel-cart that she propels with her arms. Amid immense cheering from the crowd she followed the rest into the police station."

Another of these arrests followed a WSPU campaign of shop window-smashing in March 1912. May hid a supply of stones and/or bricks under the rug that covered her knees. She was arrested for smashing a window on Henrietta Street and sent to Holloway Prison, sentenced to one month's hard labor. The prison authorities were confused on how May was supposed to complete "hard labor," so they just ignored her and gave her no extra work. She made friends with many of the other prisoners (and encouraged them to join the suffrage movement), even smuggling a letter out to Dr. Alice Ker's daughter when she was released. This letter included: "Miss Billinghurst, the tricycle lady, is going out on the 11th and will take this [letter]. She is quite lame, wears irons on her legs and walks with crutches when she is out of her tricycle. We shall miss her very much when she goes out.” In a previous letter, Ker had written to her daughter: "She has irons on each leg, and can only walk with crutches, her tricycle works with handles. She drives it round the yard at exercise time. It is painted in the colors, with a placard, Votes for Women, on the back of it.”

May's arrest records from the Home Office's "Index of Suffragettes Arrested"

Her second stint at Holloway Prison came after May, in December 1912, damaged letters in postboxes by pouring in a black sticky substance (the bottles were hidden beneath the rug over her knees). She was tried at the Old Bailey in January and sentenced to eight months in prison. She had represented herself in court and focused on pleading the case for women's suffrage. Her defense, titled "The Guilt Lies on the Shoulders of the Government," was published in The Suffragette. She had told the all-male jury: “This is a women’s war in which we hold human life dear and property cheap, and if one has to be sacrificed for the other, then we say let property be destroyed and human life be preserved...We are not hooligans seeking to destroy, but we mean to wake the public mind from its apathy.” The judge remarked to her, "No one could, I think, doubt for a moment - as mistaken as I think you to be - that you were animated by the highest and purest motives in what you did... you do not belong to the class of hysterical women, many of whom are associated with this movement, who appear to be animated mainly or at any rate in some measure by a desire for notoriety."

Emmeline Pankurst wrote her friend from Paris: "I cannot tell you how deeply I feel your splendid courage and endurance. All my heart will be with you during the ordeal that lies before you." Once in prison, May and others went on a hunger strike. They were force-fed, meaning people restrained them while a tube was forced down their nose or throat into their stomach; there were reports from Australian suffragettes that some were forcibly fed through their rectum. May wrote of her experience:

“I just laid on my back and endured it all - on Sunday I was very weak and on Sunday night I tried to get out to the bell because my head was swimming round so I fell on the floor and fainted... My head was forced back and a tube jammed down my nose. It was the most awful torture. I groaned with pain and I coughed and gulped the tube up and would not let it pass down my throat. Then they tried the other nostril and they found that was smaller still and slightly deformed, l suppose from constant hay-fever. The new doctor said it was impossible to get the tube down that one so they jammed it down again through the other and I wondered if the pain was as bad as child-birth. I just had strength and will enough to vomit it up again and I could see tears in the wardresses’ eyes.”

May became so ill from her experience, as well as enduring facial wounds and damaged teeth, that she was released from prison after just ten days, following an appeal the Home Secretary. The prison doctor had also supported this, fearing that she would die of a heart attack. She spoke to an audience from her hospital bed, still bleeding and vomiting. She received the Hunger Strike Medal from the WSPU "for Valour."

A pamphlet advertising May speaking at a suffrage meeting shortly after leaving prison

This horrific treatment did not stop May's activism. She published graphic accounts of her experiences in suffrage journals. She was back speaking at public meetings in March 1913. Two months later, she chained herself to the gates of Buckingham Palace (where police again attacked her and destroyed her tricycle). The next month, she participated in Emily Davison's funeral procession of 6000 people, dressed in white and in her tricycle. In May of 1914, May and a massive group of activists tried to petition to King George V for the right to vote. She was not arrested this time, but she was deliberately tipped out of her tricycle by policemen. Charlotte Drake, a fellow suffragette, had to lift May back in. Drake wrote, "I was beside her. They threw us back, but we returned. Two policemen picked up the tricycle with Miss Billinghurst in it, turned it over and dropped her to the ground. The excitement gave me strength - I picked her up bodily and lifted her back. We straightened the machine as best we could, rested a little to rake breath and struggled on again."

May in Davison's funeral procession, 1913

Things abruptly changed that summer when World War I broke out. The English government agreed to release all imprisoned suffragettes if the WSPU agreed to end its militant activism and instead support the war effort. May supported this move. Near the end of the war, in February of 1918, Parliament passed the Representation of the People Act, giving women over thirty the right to vote "if they were registered property occupiers (or married to a registered property occupier) of land or premises with a rateable value greater than £5 or of a dwelling-house and not subject to any legal incapacity, or were graduates voting in a university constituency." This act gave 8.5 million women (2 out of 5 adult women) the right to vote in the UK. This included May, who was 43 at the time. The government also passed the Parliament (Qualification of Women) Act, giving women over 21 the right to run for election to Parliament. After this was passed, she stopped campaigning for women's suffrage.

You probably aren't surprised to learn that May's activism work did not end here. She worked for Christabel Pankhurst's campaign for the House of Commons in Smethwick in December 1918; she, representing "The Women's Party," lost by only 775 votes. May joined the Women's Freedom League, originally founded to fight for women's suffrage but continued on to work for women's equality. She later joined the Suffragette Fellowship; this group was founded in 1926 to "perpetuate the memory of the pioneers and outstanding events connected with women's emancipation and especially with the militant suffrage campaign, 1905-14, and thus keep alive the suffragette spirit."

Full equality of voting finally came to the UK in July 1928 with the passage of the Representation of the People (Equal Franchise) Act. This gave all women over 21 the right to vote, regardless of property ownership. This finally gave women full electoral equality with men. One of the most influential English suffragettes, Emmeline Pankhurst, had died just over two weeks earlier, narrowly missing the momentous occasion. May and other former WSPU colleagues attended her funeral; The Daily Mail described the procession as "like a dead general in the midst of a mourning army." The WSPU flag was carried alongside the UK flag and the women wore their sashes and ribbons. Two years later, a memorial statue of Pankhurst was unveiled in Victoria Tower Gardens, next to the Houses of Parliament. May was also able to attend this ceremony. 

The fight for women's equality continued across various domains of life. A feminist documentarian, Jill Craigie, created the Equal Pay Film Fund, which May supported. Craigie released the short film, To Be a Woman, in 1951 after two years of work. It is available for free on YouTube. She became an historical authority on the suffragette movement, collecting feminist literature and pamphlets dating back to the early nineteenth century.

Though May had an active life, it appears that she was unable to live on her own. She lived with her parents in Lewisham, the area of her birth, until 1922. She then lived with her artist brother, Alfred John Billinghurst, and, later, her adopted daughter, Beth. May and her daughter lived in the garden on the property, called "Minikoi," in the town of Sunbury-on-Thames, southwest of London. In 2019, Beth wrote a book about her famous mother, entitled Rosa May Billinghurst: Beth's Untold Story. Beth had been adopted by May in 1933 and lived with her until the age of fourteen when she was removed from her care. It seems that, even with this complicated history, Beth dearly loved and remained loyal to her adoptive mother. 

May died at a hospital in Twickenham on July 29, 1953. She donated her body to science. Her archives are currently held at The Women's Library at the London School of Economics. In 2018, in honor of the centennial of women's voting in the UK, a statue of Dame Millicent Fawcett was unveiled in Parliament Square, London. Fawcett was the first women to be honored with a statue there. The statue's plinth is engraved with the names and images of 55 women and four men who supported women's suffrage. May's name and picture are there. 

As usual with these posts, I like ending with the person's own words. There were many to choose from with May, so I settled on an excerpt from her 1913 trial, “The government may further maim my crippled body by the torture of forcible feeding, as they are torturing weak women in prison today. They may even kill me in the process, for I am not strong, but they cannot take away my freedom of spirit or my determination to fight this good fight to the end.”

Most sincerely,

Christina

Further Reading/Listening/Watching

• "The Crippled Suffragette" - YouTube video from Jessica Kellgren-Fozard

• "Rosa May Billinghurst" - a 2020 episode from the podcast Deviant Women

• Freedom's Cause: Lives of the Suffragettes by Fran Abrams

Works Consulted

Baker, K. (2020, December 14). The New Podcast 'Smashing the Box' of Disabled Feminism. BBC News. https://www.bbc.com/news/disability-54934504.

Battle, K. (2018, May 30). A Sunbury Suffragette. Village Matters. http://www.villagematters.co.uk/sunbury-matters/sunbury-matters-articles/2018/05/a-sunbury-suffragette.

Battle, K. (n.d.). Rosa May Billinghurst (1875-1953). Exploring Surrey's Past. https://www.exploringsurreyspast.org.uk/themes/subjects/womens-suffrage/suffrage-biographies/rosa-may-billinghurst-1875-1953/.

Fielding, S. (2020, October 30). Overlooked No More: Rosa May Billinghurst, Militant Suffragette. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/30/obituaries/rosa-may-billinghurst-overlooked.html.

Fox, K. (2017, December 22). Rosa May Billinghurst: suffragette, campaigner, 'cripple'. The National Archives Blog. https://blog.nationalarchives.gov.uk/rosa-may-billinghurst-suffragette-campaigner-cripple/.

Hanlon, S. (n.d.). Rosa May Billinghurst: Suffragette on Three Wheels. Sheila Hanlon | Historian | Women's Cycling. https://www.sheilahanlon.com/?page_id=1314.

Mildly Irritated Cripple. (2020, June 3). The Cripple Suffragette: Rosa May Billinghurst. Daisy the Chronic Invalid. https://www.daisythechronicinvalid.com/post/the-cripple-suffragette-rosa-may-billinghurst.

Rosa May Billinghurst. The Difference She Made. (2018, March 8). https://thedifferenceshemade.wordpress.com/2018/03/08/rosa-may-billinghurst/.

Simkin, J. (2020, January). May Billinghurst. Spartacus Educational. https://spartacus-educational.com/Wbillinghurst.htm.

Last Updated: 21 Sept. 2023