Dorothy Evans

Born in the Kentish Town area of London, Evans studied at the North London Collegiate School and the Dartford College of Physical Education, qualifying as a teacher.[1] She joined the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) in 1907 and, after resigning a teaching position, from early 1910 worked full-time as the Union's Birmingham organiser.[2] During this period, she was frequently arrested and imprisoned for acts linked to the suffragette campaign, including refusing to buy a dog license.[1]

suffragette window smashing campaign

Convicted for her part in a window-smashing campaign in the West End of London, between March and July 1912 Evans was held in the Feeble-Minded Inebriate bloc of Aylesbury Prison. She protested in two hunger strikes and endured forced feeding. After her release she served as WSPU liaison between its London headquarters and its leader, Christabel Pankhurst, in Parisien exile. Evans travelled in disguise to avoid detection, but learned she had avoided arrest only because an innocent Dorothy Evans had been detained.[3]

In the spring of 1913 Evans was posted to the north of Ireland, Ulster, where Pankhurst had decided it was the Ulster Unionists, not the Irish nationalists, who where to be courted. The Irish Party had ignored her warning that if they helped defeat the 1912 Conciliation bill (which would have extended the vote to women albeit on a highly restrictive property basis), they would be in "a fight to the death" with the suffragists: "No votes for women, no Home Rule".[4]

Once in Belfast, with local militants Evans was persuaded not only to press their demands on Unionists, but to follow Unionist example in doing so. In insisting, in their opposition to Irish home rule, on "full" British citizenship the Unionists had threatened the Government with nothing less than civil war. On the 3 April 1913 police raided the flat in Belfast Evans was sharing with local activist Midge Muir, and found explosives. In court, five days later, the pair created uproar when they demanded to know why the gun-running Ulster Unionist James Craig was not appearing on the same charges.[4]

Convicted and committed to Tullamore prison, Evans went on hunger strike. She wrote to fellow militant Kate Evans, "I am getting some mental and spiritual peace, though my body is suffering – I find I am getting ill much sooner now I am not taking water either… The cells here are darker than any I have seen".[5] Because of her deterioration Evans was released on 26 July. She was cared for by a sister WPSU Hunger Strike Medallist Lillian Metge.[6][7] In May Metge had been part of the large group of women who charged at King George V outside Buckingham Palace, and during Evans's trail had herself been arrested for throwing stones at the court windows.[6]

When in the spring of 1914, the Unionist leader Edward Carson pressed by Evans overruled Craig (who had supported the Conciliation Bill) on a Unionist commitment to women's suffrage, Evans declared an end to "the truce we have held in Ulster."[8] In the months that followed WSPU militants (including Elizabeth Bell, the first woman in Ireland to qualify as a doctor and gynaecologist) were implicated in a series of arson attacks on Unionist-owned buildings and on male recreational and sports facilities.[9] In July 1914, in a plan hatched with Evans, Metge bombed the chancel of Lisburn Cathedral.[6]

Again in prison, Evans was released under the general amnesty offered to members of the WSPU at the outbreak of the war in August . She broke with the WSPU and the Pankhursts by opposing the war and became an organiser for the Independent Women's Social and Political Union.[2] In 1915, she was refused a pass to attend the Women's Peace Conference in the Hague.

After the war she become a Women's International League organiser and later occupied the same position in the Women's Freedom League. She also became a leading member (for many years chairperson) of the Six Point Group which demanded legislative redress with regard to child abuse, widowed and unmarried mothers, equal parental rights, and equal pay and opportunity in schools and the civil service, and she joined the similarly programmed National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship.[1]

During World War II, she served as the secretary of Women for Westminster, a group campaigning to increase the number of female MPs.[1]

On the outbreak of the Second World War she continued to work for the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom of which she had been Secretary since 1923. Her principal concern, however, was with employment equality. She was involved in the Equal Compensation Campaign from 1941 to 1943 and became a member of the Equal Pay Campaign Committee in 1944, to ensure equal pay in the Civil Service.[10] She was also active in the Women for Westminster group at this time and the drafted the Equal Citizenship (Blanket) Bill of 1944.[11]

Evans died after a two-day illness in Glasgow where she was to speak at a meeting. She was 55.

Evans had maintained simultaneous long-term relationships with Sybil Morrison and Emil Davies, a married Labour Party London County councillor.[1] Evans refused wedlock, and according to her friend Monica Whately saved for three years in preparation for the baby fathered by Davies in 1921. At the time of her death in August 1944 her daughter Lyndal (named after the heroine in Olive Schreiner's Story of an African Farm) was a member of the executive committee of the Six Point Group.[3]

• List of suffragists and suffragettes#British
• List of peace activists
• Women's Social and Political Union--'Hunger strikes, direct action'
• Unionism in Ireland--'Unionism and women's suffrage'