Marking Equal Pay Day in 2024 would have appalled my ancestors

By Karen Bennett

Today, 20 November 2024, is Equal Pay Day in the UK. Calculated by the Fawcett Society – a charity that began through the work of the suffragist and women’s rights campaigner, Millicent Fawcett – it denotes the day from which the ‘average’ woman essentially works for free until the end of the year, because of a gender pay gap of 11.3%, up from last year’s 10.7%.

In financial services, the percentage disparity is higher than that set out by the Fawcett Society given our sectors’ collective gender pay gap was almost twice as high as the national average in 2023. And while we won’t find out what the gaps are within companies and collectively until next year, financial services’ 2024 equal pay day would have been weeks ago.

The campaign for equal pay remains as important as when it started alongside the suffrage movement. And since our work builds on the campaigns started by our ancestors, it’s why we reference women’s rights pioneers as often as we can. For example during our awards celebrations, it was included in WIBF’s President Anna Lane’s opening remarks and inspired the purple dress code, one of the original three colours introduced in 1908 by the Votes for Women magazine editor, Emmeline Pathick-Lawrence, to brand the movement.

Meanwhile, the continued inequality of wages and bonuses is something Millicent Fawcett would be shocked by, as would my great grandmother Edith Alice Forrest who died when I was 11 and who was a suffragette. Knowing Edith’s history is also one of the reasons why I actively support WIBF.

Born on 27 December 1888 in Shoreditch in London, we have the records for Edith’s birth, her 1889 baptism and of her starting school in 1892. But her time in the capital was cut short by the death of her mother in 1894 in childbirth as it was not deemed appropriate for fathers to bring up their daughters. Edith and her older sister, Janie, were sent to Mount St Mary’s Convent and Orphanage in Leeds after her father moved back there to be close to family. The oldest daughter, Wilhemina, was sent to live with an aunt and only the son, Henry, was able to stay with their father.

After leaving the orphanage, Edith became a housekeeper for Sir John Blackwood McEwen, a Scottish composer and professor at the Royal Academy of Music, and his wife Hedwig. Sir John held egalitarian political views and wrote a series of political pamphlets, including one titled ‘Total Democracy’. His influence helped Edith and Janie appreciate they could expect more from life and led to the sisters becoming suffragettes.

They also both started to train as nurses at the Royal London Hospital. However, becoming nurses meant giving up their political ambitions given the teaching staff were “fed up with all these girls going off” and said “you’re either going to be nurses or you’re going to be suffragettes. Make a choice.” It was an understandable demand given the increasing level of activity – from Women’s Sunday on 21 June 1908, which saw up to 500,000 women and men attend the event from all over the country and 30,000 women march in seven processions to Hyde Park, through to Black Friday on 18 November 1910, when women who had marched to Parliament to protest the latest government refusal to give women the vote were attacked by police and male bystanders for six hours, with hundreds injured and some killed.

At the age of 21, therefore, Edith made her choice and, responding to an ad, took up a position as a nurse in the Jersey General Hospital, which was attached to the London Hospital.

It was in Jersey that she met and married my great grandfather, Joseph Williams, bore five children – including my grandfather, Harry – and was an indefatigable force of nature for the rest of her life. We know that she supported Joseph’s military career until his eventual retirement in 1937, and as a nurse was very much in demand with the other families who lived alongside in barracks in Jersey and then in Weymouth. Even after the birth of her three youngest children, Edith still found time to raise funds for a new church (for example, by pushing her children around Weymouth to sell tea), taking in overflow visitors to the barracks for a fee and becoming a Spirella corsetiere. During WWII, Edith also became a fire watcher – carrying on after her eldest son, Joe Williams, was killed – and, after her husband’s death in 1947, she continued to work as a corsetiere. Edith died on 9 July 1985.

Edith set out a path that her daughters, granddaughters and great granddaughters are proud of and that meant we did not have to follow all of society’s established norms. And I am certain that many of my WIBF colleagues are also ancestors of suffrage movement pioneers and their history contributes towards their zeal for equity and inclusion.

Our campaigns to progress change do not have to follow the suffrajitsu tactics – where suffragettes learned jiu-jitsu to protect themselves – but they do mirror other activities. Their use of postcards and coins to start viral campaigns – such as the below one penny (1d) copper coin that dates back to before WWI and was stamped with ‘Votes for Women’ – have become our social media campaigns. While we commemorate these campaigns today, as shown by the 50p ‘Give Women the Vote’ coin that was franked in 2003, we also know that there is more progress to be made in terms of women’s rights given gender pay inequality persists.

You too can find out if your ancestor was a suffragist/suffragette or a male ally. Here are some options to search through using the name of your ancestors:

• 1911 Census – the 1911 census was a flashpoint for the women’s suffrage movement and despite the threat of a £5 fine or having to stand up to their head of the household and/or census enumerators, many women hid from home on the night of 2 April 1911 or refused to allow their details to be recorded. Others marked their returns with statements or described themselves as suffragists and suffragettes under their profession. You can look up the records themselves on the Ancestry (£) and Find My Past (£) websites, with the latter allowing you to pay micropayments for pay-per-view access to documents, as well as access via subscriptions. Some details may be available through the transcripts on the FreeCen project genealogy website.
• London Museum’s Collection – the Docklands site was host to our 2023 Awards for Achievement celebrations and you can visit the site to carry out research or use the online collection
• Mapping Women’s Movement – the project aims to map as many Votes for women campaigners as possible in cities, towns and villages across England in 1911
• Scottish Women’s Suffrage – Scottish suffrage activists were often charged with ‘Malicious Mischief’ and this National Records of Scotland collection documents some of the many of the country’s stories
• Votes of Women Newspapers – An online archive of 354 issues of the newspapers that were published between 17 October 1907 to 28 January 1916
• The Women’s Library – preserved by the London School of Economics since 2013, this library, archive, museum and the collection follows the history of feminism from the late 19th century to the present day. It also
• Women’s Suffrage Database – 3,000 names taken from the 1866 Suffrage Petition – just one of more than 16,000 petitions presented to Parliament asking for votes for women between 1866 and 1918 – and a list of Home Office arrest records in 1914.