One of the subjects I’m interested in is the history of women office workers, and how it came about that women to this day dominate secretarial and clerical jobs. Many of the suffrage campaigners I have researched were office workers, and many women gained experience of administrative work in suffrage and other political or charitable activities. Lately I’ve been doing some work on Esther Knowles and Gladys Groom, who were secretaries to Frederick and Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence. I’ve written about Esther Knowles (see link below). I’ve also researched and talked about the life of Olive Beamish, a former suffragette who went on to found her own typewriting bureau.   Working in the WSPU offices One of the things that intrigues me about the history is how much of it chimes with my own experience over a hundred years later. In 1971, Spare Rib was advising women: don’t cook, don’t type. The reason was that it was seen as a feminine skill, that is a skill that would lead only to low-pai...

This article is based on research and conversations with Edward Warington Shann’s daughter, Hebe Welbourn. Quotations by Edward Warington Shann are from his letter to his mother dated 22 June 1913 and are used with Hebe Welbourn’s permission. Fire destroys a railway carriage…a hotel burned down…a church vandalised…a country mansion gutted… between 1912 and 1914 British newspapers carried reports almost daily of arson and other attacks on public and private property by the women of the Women’s Social and Political Union – the suffragettes – as part of their militant campaign for votes for women. So familiar do these headlines become that it is easy to forget that behind them were real people whose lives were affected by these incidents. One of them was Edward Warington Shann, a lecturer at St Andrew’s University, for whom an act of arson was nothing less than “a calamity”.   Edward Warington Shann was born in York in 1886. His father was a doctor, and his maternal grandfather ...