Discovering Birmingham's fight for the vote

Local Historian Don leads the trail

Katherine Old writes: 
The Balsall Heath History Society led a historic walking tour around Birmingham City Centre exploring the city’s links to the suffrage movements of the chartists, suffragettes and suffragists throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Birmingham's King Tom, Suffragettes and our Right to Vote

Touching history - Thomas Atwood, Leader of
Birmingham Political Union, the most effective political
organisation exerting pressure for parliamentary reform.

On Saturday 15 September, 3pm – 4.30pm PHC will be leading a heritage walk from Victoria Square to discover Birmingham's heritage in the fight for our rights to vote.

Making Birmingham Votes Count

Debating Representation in Council Chambers
6th February 2018

Following our Rally celebrating 100 years since the signing of 'The Representation of the People Act', People's Heritage Co-operative are working with Birmingham City Council Wellbeing Service seeking funding for a range of activities throughout 2018 and into 2019.

Suffragettes Unseen

Christina Broom,
Museum of London Collection

Listening to Meryl Streep’s interview this week, about women in film, films made by women and about women, following the release of Suffragette!, we are reminded of how much unseen history of women there is, not necessarily undocumented but certainly undervalued in its potential, particularly that recorded, made by and about women.

A visit to Museum of London last week to see the Christina Broom exhibition ‘Soldiers and Suffragettes’ was an eye opening experience for me in many ways. Museum of London Docklands is a lovely space, situated along the Thames at the evocatively named West India Quay, giving you a sense of the river’s trading history, a very different feel to it’s sister site in the heart of the City.

Fight for the Right!

In 2012-13 I worked on an exciting project called Fight for the Right: the Birmingham Suffragettes. Funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund, the project gave an opportunity for young women living in Birmingham to explore the activities of both sides of the suffrage campaign, militant and non-militant, that took place in the city in the early 1900s. A group of young women from two local schools, Kings Norton Girls’ School and Waverley School, who were aged 12-15 during the project, investigated social and political change by looking at different ways of campaigning and protesting by women who wanted the right to vote. The young women involved in the project believed that the Birmingham suffrage campaigners were an important part of their heritage. While some of those involved had some prior knowledge of the suffragettes, often little is known or understood by young women about the histories of women involved in the campaign that lived and acted locally. Fight for the Right aimed to re-dress the balance by exploring women’s voting history from a local perspective, focusing specifically on the activities of the Birmingham suffrage movement between 1909 and 1914. While primarily a local history project, participants also considered social and cultural change within women’s rights today and explored ideas about voting and politics.