It is a scandal that Frances, Mary, Grace and Æthel Tollemache are not better known in the wider suffrage story. Linked to national militancy, arrested and imprisoned several times, then enduring hunger strikes, these four absolute sheroes led the way for the wider emancipation of all women. And their story didn’t stop with the vote.
In a brand new booklet called The Women Who Won The Vote, local historian and researcher Jane Duffus takes a really close look at this astonishing – but forgotten – family and all that they achieved during
their long lives.
The booklet has been published in time for International Women’s Day, on 8 March.
Jane has been researching the stories of overlooked women in our area for almost ten years and is the author of eight books – including three volumes in the popular series The Women Who Built Bristol. Jane says that she discovered the full story of the Tollemache women while researching a new book in her main series, due out this autumn, called The Women Who Built Bath.
“I had come across Grace and Æthel before, and they are included in a relatively small entry in volume one of the Bristol series,” says Jane. “However, I kept finding more and more snippets about them. Whenever I saw them mentioned in books about the wider suffrage movement in the UK, it was only as a throwaway comment, which I thought was such a shame considering how much these two women, as well as their sister Mary and mother Frances, achieved and how groundbreaking they were.”
As well as being suffragists and suffragettes, these four women were also advocates for vegetarianism, animal welfare, market gardening, the arts, the political left, the global movement for peace, and they opened one of the UK’s first Youth Hostels in their house. They even had a resident Swami for several decades.
“It is finally time to reveal the glorious true story of the Tollemache women in this suffragette bookette,” says Jane. “I’ve loved researching their stories and finding out so much about them.”
The Women Who Won The Vote was published in February and the 62-page booklet contains the full story of the Tollemache women from start to finish, accompanied by 10 photographs and a beautiful cover illustration of the family by Tina Altwegg.
Readers of Bradley Stoke Voice can buy a copy of the booklet from Jane’s website (www.janeduffus.com/shop), and get free P&P on any books by using the code ‘MARY’. There are also greeting cards of the cover available from the same link.