The Women's Printing Society was a British publishing house founded in either 1874 [1] [2] or 1876 [3] [4] [5] by Emma Paterson and Emily Faithfull [4] with the company being officially incorporated as a cooperative in 1878. [1]
The company played an important role in British suffrage movement, both through its publication of feminist tracts and in providing employment opportunities for women in a field that had previously been restricted to men. [6] The house was set up to allow women to learn the trade of printing, and provided an apprenticeship program. [2] Women worked as compositors, and as of 1904, it was one of the few houses where they also did the imposing: ordering the galley proofs so that when folded, the front and back pages aligned properly. [2] As of 1899, the company employed 22 women as compositors. [1] The manager, proof-reader and bookkeeper were also women. [1] Men held the tasks of "pressmen and feeders". [7] The women apprentices earned a wage "considering the hours (9 to 6.30), etc., this is better pay than even highly-educated women can sometimes secure." [1] Some of the initial employees came from Faithful's Victoria Press. [7]
The Board of Directors included Sarah Prideaux, Mabel Winkworth and Stewart Duckworth Headlam. [7] Elizabeth Yeats studied for a brief time at the Women's Printing Society, before returning to Ireland and starting the Dun Emer Press. [8]
Up to 1893 and between 1889 and 1900, the company published the reports of the Central Committee for the National Society for Women's Suffrage. [9] It published the Women's Penny Paper through 1890, but it is not recorded why the relationship ended. [6]
Works published by the Women's Printing Society include:
Elizabeth Garrett Anderson was an English physician and suffragist. She was the first woman to qualify in Britain as a physician and surgeon. She was the co-founder of the first hospital staffed by women, the first dean of a British medical school, the first woman in Britain to be elected to a school board and, as mayor of Aldeburgh, the first female mayor in Britain.
Frances Power Cobbe was an Anglo-Irish writer, philosopher, religious thinker, social reformer, anti-vivisection activist and leading women's suffrage campaigner. She founded a number of animal advocacy groups, including the National Anti-Vivisection Society (NAVS) in 1875 and the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection (BUAV) in 1898, and was a member of the executive council of the London National Society for Women's Suffrage.
A movement to fight for women's right to vote in the United Kingdom finally succeeded through acts of Parliament in 1918 and 1928. It became a national movement in the Victorian era. Women were not explicitly banned from voting in Great Britain until the Reform Act 1832 and the Municipal Corporations Act 1835. In 1872 the fight for women's suffrage became a national movement with the formation of the National Society for Women's Suffrage and later the more influential National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies (NUWSS). As well as in England, women's suffrage movements in Wales, Scotland and other parts of the United Kingdom gained momentum. The movements shifted sentiments in favour of woman suffrage by 1906. It was at this point that the militant campaign began with the formation of the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU).
Frances Elizabeth Hoggan was a Welsh doctor and the first British woman to receive a doctorate in medicine from any university in Europe. She was also a pioneering medical practitioner, researcher and social reformer – and the first female doctor to be registered in Wales. She and her husband opened the first husband-and-wife medical practice in Britain.
Annie Louisa Swynnerton, ARA was a British painter best known for her portrait and symbolist works. She studied at Manchester School of Art and at the Académie Julian, before basing herself in the artistic community in Rome with her husband, the monumental sculptor Joseph Swynnerton. Swynnerton was influenced by George Frederic Watts and Sir Edward Burne-Jones. John Singer Sargent appreciated her work and helped her to become the first elected woman member at the Royal Academy of Arts in 1922. Swynnerton painted portraits of Henry James and Millicent Fawcett. Her main public collection of works are in Manchester Art Gallery, but individual works are also held in a few other English cities, as well as can also be seen in Glasgow, Dublin, Paris, and two in Melbourne, Australia. Annie was a close friend of leading suffragists of the day, notably the Pankhurst family.
Christiana Jane Herringham, Lady Herringham was a British artist, copyist, and art patron. She is noted for her part in establishing the National Art Collections Fund in 1903 to help preserve Britain's artistic heritage. In 1910 Walter Sickert wrote of her as "the most useful and authoritative critic living".
Margaret Elizabeth Cousins was an Irish-Indian educationist, suffragist and Theosophist, who established All India Women's Conference (AIWC) in 1927. She was the wife of poet and literary critic James Cousins, with whom she moved to India in 1915. She is credited with preserving the Indian National Anthem Jana Gana Mana based on the notes provided by Tagore himself in February 1919, during Rabindranath Tagore's visit to the Madanapalle College.
Frances Hardcastle was an English mathematician, in 1894 one of the founding members of the American Mathematical Society. Her work included contributions to the theory of point groups.
Helen Blackburn was a feminist and campaigner for women's rights, especially in the field of employment. Blackburn was also an editor of the Englishwoman's Review.
Frances Henrietta Müller was a British women's rights activist and theosophist.
The Actresses' Franchise League was a women's suffrage organisation, mainly active in England.
The Ladies' London Emancipation Society was an activist abolitionist group founded in 1863, which disseminated anti-slavery material to advance British understanding of the Union cause in the American Civil War as one pertaining to morality rather than territory. This was said to be the first national anti-slavery society for women.
Charlotte Manning was a British feminist, scholar and writer. She was the first head of Girton College.
The Liverpool Women's Suffrage Society was set up in 1894 by Edith Bright, Lydia Allen Booth and Nessie Stewart-Brown to promote the enfranchisement of women. The society held its first meeting in a Liverpool temperance hall, with Millicent Fawcett, head of the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), as its guest speaker. The society set up headquarters in Lord Street. The group became affiliated with the NUWSS in 1898, it held meetings in cafés which included talks, poetry and dance recitals. Members were recruited from prominent members of society and they distanced themselves from working class suffrage societies such as Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU).
Harriet McIlquham, also seen as Harriett McIlquham, was an English suffragist.
Caroline Ashurst Biggs (1840–1889) was an advocate for women’s rights and a third generation member of the Ashurst family of radical activists. Born in Leicester on 23 August 1840, she was the second child of Matilda Ashurst Biggs and Joseph Biggs. She died at 19 Notting Hill Square in London on 4 September 1889. At the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, her photograph was included in an exhibition of Portraits of Eminent British Women, in a section devoted to Pioneers in Philanthropy and General Advancement of Women.
Jane Macnaughton Egerton Brownlow was a British educationist, writer, translator and suffragist.
Edith Charlotte Bury Palliser, was a campaigner for women’s suffrage and rights in Great Britain and Ireland.
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