On 14 February 1907, Louisa Entwistle, a 20-year-old Blackburn weaver, stood in the dock of Westminster Police Court. She was one of almost sixty women arrested during a demonstration outside Parliament organised by the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU). Louisa, who chose a week in Holloway Gaol over a ten-shilling fine, was keen to explain her actions. The Lancashire Evening Post reported that she told the magistrate she was “here to get votes for women. I am here on behalf of my companions who work in the mill and until we get votes we shall not be satisfied.”
Louisa’s demand for votes for working women was not unusual. Emmeline Pankhurst formed the WSPU in 1903 with friends from the Manchester Independent Labour Party (ILP). Its first recruits came from the northern labour and trade union movement. There was Teresa Billington, the ILP’s first female organiser, Mary Gawthorpe of Leeds Women’s Labour League and the Oldham mill girl, Annie Kenney, alongside her sisters Jessie and Nell. This close relationship fractured in 1906 when Annie Kenney was sent down to London to establish a national centre. She targeted working women in Canning Town but also made more affluent contacts such as the wealthy left-wing couple Emmeline and Frederick Pethick-Lawrence. Their connections (and resources) widened the class base of the WSPU so much that when its Manchester secretary, Alice Milne, attended a London meeting that October her diary recorded that it was “full of fashionable ladies in rustling silks and satins”. The Union’s politics also shifted when, after refusing WSPU support for the ILP candidate at the Cockermouth by-election, Emmeline Pankhurst, her daughter Christabel and other suffragettes resigned from the party.
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