RIGHT TO VOTE FOR WOMEN!
Many famous suffragettes and suffragists are connected to Bloomsbury such as Millicent Fawcett and Emmeline Pankhurst, who fought for the right for women to vote – suffrage. Lesser known, and connected to Euston, was Mary Neal, who worked to improve the lives of poor seamstresses through dance and working conditions.
Born in 1860, Mary Neal was the daughter of a Birmingham button manufacturer, an anti-snob. She wanted to work against poverty, and joined the West London Mission in 1888 to serve the poor as a Sister of the People. Christian social work by women is a feature of the local area -known as social action- was often bound up in social and political questions. Mary Neal wanted to move into her own home amidst the poor but this was refused so they set up their own settlement in St Pancras.
Here, they tried living off a sewing girl’s wage of £1 a week, in a tenement block designed for working men – on Duke’s Place in Cumberland Market.
They set up The Espérance Club, an experiment in drama and dancing which taught young women and girls to sing and dance. The club, open four nights a week for almost 20 years since 1895, became renowned for its public displays of English song and Morris dancing.
Drawing of girls’ dancing feet by Sylvia Pankhurst Credit: Richard Pankhurst
These sewing girls were invited to teach all over the country. In addition, they studied the industrial conditions and gave the working women confidence to demand better working conditions.
Mary later opened ‘Maison Esperance’ to pay a living wage in well-lit workrooms.
“the contrast between their lives of drudgery and the lives of the girls for whom they make the pretty frocks, for parties, open-air pleasures… indoor revels, cannot fail to give them false ideas of what real beauty is…in some, often of the finest spirit, it implants a bitterness which no after experience can obliterate’
Mary neale
– Mary Neale, The Sweated Industries’ Exhibition 1906
Mabel Tuke worked at the Esperance club. Mabel Tuke joined the WSPU and in 1906 became the organisation’s honorary secretary. She was especially close to Christabel Pankhurst and Emmeline Pankhurst.
On 1 March 1912 she was arrested for her protest act of breaking a window at 10 Downing Street with Emmeline Pethick Lawrence. She was found guilty and received a three weeks sentence in Holloway Prison. In prison, charged with conspiracy.
These sewing girls were invited to teach all over the country. In addition, they studied the industrial conditions and gave the working women confidence to demand better working conditions.
Mary later opened ‘Maison Esperance’ to pay a living wage in well-lit workrooms.
References
Mary Neal Archive. With thanks to Lucy Neal. Permissions agreed for all images where possible.