Dear Chris
I am Town Mayor (aka Chairperson) of Meltham Town Council and a trustee of Meltham’s Carlile Institute and am working with my colleagues and interested people in Meltham to create ways to celebrate and acknowledge Dora Thewlis’s contribution to the suffrage movement. We are looking at commissioning a piece of public art – possibly a sculpture from an artist who lives in Meltham, also a play (to be performed at the Carlile Institute in Meltham which, incidentally, was built in 1890, the year of Dora’s birth) and thirdly an information board. I am in the process of reading everything I can lay my hands on about Dora and her family so I was only too delighted to read your comment that she remained a political activist right through her life. If there’s anything you can contribute about Dora’s story, we would be delighted to hear from you. Best wishes, Kate.

What an amazing story and what a wonderful strong and principled lady Dora was. I am new to Honley but helping the local historians with Ww1 info and celebrating Honley hero’s. To me she should be included in the local history. Please get in touch if her details are not already known and recorded on the Honley Civic Society. Thank you. Lynne

Dora is my grandmother and I can assure all she remained a political activist to the end. The sacking of the Whitlam Government in 1975 promoted numerous family debates but no one stood stronger with the Labour cause than my octogenarian Grandmother who declared to my father that a vote for the Liberal Party would be a vote against everything your family has ever stood for. Strong to the end!

Well said! A working class hero against all the odds; female, young, working class, and Northern. Here was a person wanting votes for all women not just ladies.

The argument I’ve seen for why it may have worked is that the rational for most men to deny women the vote was chauvinistic in nature, rather than misogynistic. They were simply incapable of seeing women as political entities; they were mentally cast in the domestic sphere. Terrorist acts, even if they did not convince men of the righteousness of their cause, did cast them as political actors who had opinions about the public sphere. Had the argument been that women would use the vote badly it might have been less persuasive, but since the argument was that women weren’t the sort of people who cared about that sort of thing breaking the existing stereotype was instrumental in convincing people that women didn’t belong on an apolitical pedestal.