The streets of Hampstead today bear few visible traces of the women’s suffrage movement that convulsed British political life in the early twentieth century. The elegant terraces and tree-lined avenues give no indication that these houses sheltered women who were prepared to break the law, to destroy property, to endure imprisonment, hunger strikes, and the savage brutality of forcible feeding, in pursuit of a right that we now take for granted. Yet Hampstead was a significant centre of suffrage activity, and the women who lived, worked, and campaigned in NW3 made contributions to the movement that deserve to be remembered not merely as historical curiosities but as acts of extraordinary courage that helped to reshape British democracy.
The concentration of suffrage activists in Hampstead was not coincidental. The village had long attracted women of independent mind and progressive sympathies. Its tradition of religious nonconformity, its proximity to the educational and cultural institutions of central London, and its reputation as a haven for intellectuals and free-thinkers all contributed to creating an environment in which the demand for women’s political equality could take root and flourish. The women who joined the suffrage movement from Hampstead were, for the most part, educated, articulate, and socially connected — precisely the kind of women whose exclusion from the political process was most difficult to justify and whose campaign for inclusion was most difficult to dismiss.
The Local Branch of the WSPU
The Women’s Social and Political Union, founded by Emmeline Pankhurst in Manchester in 1903, established a strong presence in Hampstead within a few years of its creation. The local branch of the WSPU drew its membership from the educated middle-class women of the area and from the students and graduates of the women’s colleges that were beginning to challenge the male monopoly of higher education. The branch met regularly in private homes, in hired halls, and in the open air on Hampstead Heath, where suffrage speakers addressed crowds that ranged from the sympathetic to the hostile.
The Hampstead WSPU branch was among the more active in London, reflecting both the strength of feminist feeling in the area and the organisational abilities of its members. The branch organised meetings, distributed literature, raised funds, and coordinated the participation of local women in the national campaigns organised by the WSPU’s London headquarters. It also served as a support network for members who were arrested, imprisoned, or subjected to other forms of official harassment, providing bail money, legal representation, and emotional sustenance during periods of intense personal strain.
The branch’s activities escalated in step with the national movement’s shift from constitutional agitation to militant action. In the early years, the Hampstead suffragettes confined themselves to petitioning, lobbying, and peaceful demonstration. But as the government’s refusal to concede the vote became increasingly intransigent, and as the authorities responded to peaceful protest with arrests, imprisonment, and violence, the local branch embraced the militant tactics that the WSPU’s leadership adopted from 1909 onwards. Window smashing, arson, the destruction of letterboxes and telegraph wires, and other acts of property destruction became part of the repertoire of the Hampstead suffragettes, who carried out these actions with a determination and a sense of moral purpose that bewildered and infuriated their opponents.
The branch’s meeting places shifted frequently, partly for reasons of convenience and partly because landlords and hall owners were reluctant to host gatherings that might attract police attention or public disorder. Private homes were the most reliable venues, and several houses in the Hampstead area became regular meeting places where strategies were discussed, actions planned, and morale sustained during the long years of campaigning. These houses, many of which still stand, are among the unrecognised heritage sites of the suffrage movement — places where history was made in the quiet privacy of domestic drawing rooms.
Individual Suffragettes: Lives and Sacrifices
The strength of the suffrage movement in Hampstead was embodied in the individual women who committed themselves to the cause, often at enormous personal cost. These were not abstract ideologues but flesh-and-blood women with families, careers, and social positions, who chose to risk all of these in pursuit of a principle they believed to be fundamental to justice.
Among the most notable was Louisa Garrett Anderson, daughter of Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, the first woman to qualify as a physician in Britain. Louisa, who lived in the Hampstead area, was both a distinguished surgeon and a committed suffragette who was arrested and imprisoned for her participation in WSPU activities. Her medical training gave her a particular awareness of the physical dangers of forcible feeding, and her willingness to endure those dangers herself demonstrated a courage that went beyond the merely political. She understood, with clinical precision, what was being done to her body, and she submitted to it in the knowledge that her suffering served a cause greater than her own comfort.
Evelina Haverfield, who had connections to the Hampstead area through her social circle, was another figure of remarkable courage. A horsewoman of exceptional skill who had served with distinction as a nurse during the Boer War, Haverfield brought to the suffrage movement a physical daring and a disregard for personal safety that made her one of the WSPU’s most effective street fighters. She was arrested multiple times for her participation in demonstrations and was noted for her willingness to physically resist the police when they attempted to disperse suffrage meetings. Her combination of social respectability — she was the daughter of a baron — and militant activism epitomised the contradiction that the suffrage movement presented to a society that could not reconcile the idea of lady-like behaviour with the reality of political resistance.
The Hampstead area also sheltered women whose contributions to the movement were less dramatic but no less essential. The organisers, the fundraisers, the pamphlet distributors, and the women who opened their homes for meetings and provided refuge for those who were being pursued by the police — all of these played crucial roles in sustaining the movement through years of campaigning that were often characterised by frustration, exhaustion, and despair. The suffrage movement was not sustained by heroic individuals alone; it was sustained by networks of mutual support and shared commitment that extended across the social geography of the neighbourhood.
Window Smashing and Property Destruction
The escalation of the suffrage campaign from peaceful agitation to militant action is one of the most debated aspects of the movement’s history, and it played out in the streets of Hampstead as it did across London. The decision by the WSPU leadership to adopt a policy of systematic property destruction — beginning with the window-smashing raids of 1909 and escalating to arson and bombing in 1913 and 1914 — divided the movement and alienated many supporters, but it also generated the publicity and the sense of crisis that the constitutionalists’ decades of patient lobbying had failed to achieve.
The window-smashing campaigns were carefully planned and coordinated affairs. Teams of suffragettes, equipped with hammers concealed in their muffs or handbags, would converge on a designated target area — a shopping street, a government building, a row of clubs in the West End — at a prearranged time and simultaneously break as many windows as possible before the police could intervene. The women knew that they would be arrested, and they went to their task with a calm determination that witnesses found both admirable and unnerving. The glass that shattered under their hammers was, for them, a symbol of the barrier that excluded them from political participation, and its destruction was an act of political communication as much as an act of criminal damage.
Hampstead women participated in several of the major window-smashing raids that the WSPU organised in central London. The raids of March 1912, which targeted the West End shopping districts and caused an estimated five thousand pounds of damage, involved suffragettes from across London, including members of the Hampstead branch. The women who took part knew that they faced arrest, prosecution, and imprisonment, and many of them had made arrangements for the care of their children and the management of their households before setting out on what they knew would be a one-way journey to Holloway Prison.
The justification for property destruction was articulated with characteristic eloquence by the movement’s leaders. Emmeline Pankhurst argued that the government had left women no alternative — that decades of constitutional agitation had been met with nothing but contempt and evasion, and that only the language of force would compel the authorities to listen. The deliberate targeting of property rather than persons was morally significant: the suffragettes were scrupulous in their avoidance of violence against people, even as they escalated their attacks on buildings and other material targets. The distinction between violence against property and violence against persons was central to the movement’s self-understanding, and it was a distinction that the authorities refused to recognise.
Hunger Strikes and Forcible Feeding
The hunger strike was the most physically dangerous weapon in the suffragettes’ arsenal, and it was deployed with a courage and a stubbornness that the authorities found impossible to counter effectively. The tactic was first used by Marion Wallace Dunlop, who refused food after her imprisonment in Holloway in July 1909, and it was quickly adopted by other imprisoned suffragettes as a means of challenging the government’s attempt to treat them as common criminals rather than political prisoners.
The government’s response to the hunger strikes was forcible feeding, a procedure that was medically dangerous, physically agonising, and morally indefensible. The prisoner was held down by wardresses while a doctor inserted a rubber tube through the nose or throat into the stomach and poured a liquid food mixture through it. The procedure was carried out against the will of the prisoner, often with considerable force, and it frequently caused injuries including damage to the nasal passages, the throat, and the stomach. Several suffragettes suffered permanent health damage as a result of repeated forcible feeding, and the procedure was widely condemned by the medical profession as a form of assault that violated the fundamental principles of medical ethics.
Women from the Hampstead area who were imprisoned for suffrage activities faced the prospect of hunger strike and forcible feeding with a full understanding of what was involved. The accounts of forcible feeding that circulated within the movement were graphic and harrowing, and the decision to go on hunger strike was never taken lightly. For women of education and social standing, the experience of imprisonment was itself degrading and distressing; the addition of forcible feeding transformed it into something approaching torture. The willingness of these women to endure such treatment in pursuit of a political principle is a measure of the depth of their commitment and the intensity of their anger at their exclusion from the democratic process.
The “Cat and Mouse Act” of 1913, which allowed the temporary release of hunger-striking prisoners who were near death and their re-arrest once they had recovered their health, was the government’s attempt to circumvent the political embarrassment of forcible feeding without conceding the suffragettes’ demands. The act created a cycle of imprisonment, hunger strike, release, recovery, and re-imprisonment that was psychologically devastating for the women subjected to it. Several Hampstead suffragettes experienced this cycle, emerging from prison emaciated and weakened, only to be arrested again as soon as they had regained sufficient strength to resume their activities. The homes of sympathetic residents in the Hampstead area served as nursing stations where released prisoners could recover in safety, hidden from the police who were waiting to re-arrest them.
Hampstead Heath as a Stage for Protest
Hampstead Heath served as an important venue for suffrage demonstrations and open-air meetings throughout the campaign. The Heath’s open spaces, particularly the area around Parliament Hill, provided natural amphitheatres where speakers could address large crowds without the need to hire halls or obtain permits, and the tradition of free speech on the Heath — a tradition that dated back to the Chartist meetings of the 1840s — gave the suffrage campaigners a degree of protection against the police interference that frequently disrupted meetings held elsewhere.
The suffrage meetings on the Heath were events of considerable drama. Speakers would stand on makeshift platforms or simply on the grass, addressing crowds that could number in the hundreds. The audiences were mixed — sympathisers and opponents, men and women, the curious and the committed — and the meetings frequently became heated, with heckling, counter-demonstrations, and occasional physical confrontations. The suffrage speakers, trained in the art of public oratory by the WSPU’s coaching programme, were generally well equipped to handle hostile audiences, but the threat of violence was always present, and the meetings were sometimes broken up by organised groups of anti-suffrage demonstrators.
The Heath meetings served multiple purposes. They provided a platform for the dissemination of suffrage arguments to a broad public audience. They demonstrated the strength and the determination of the movement. They provided a sense of community and solidarity for the activists themselves, who could draw comfort and inspiration from the knowledge that they were not alone in their struggle. And they connected the suffrage campaign to the long tradition of radical political agitation that had used the Heath as its stage, linking the cause of women’s enfranchisement to the broader history of democratic struggle in Britain.
The speakers who addressed the Heath meetings included some of the most prominent figures in the suffrage movement. Emmeline Pankhurst herself spoke on Hampstead Heath on several occasions, and her daughter Christabel, the WSPU’s chief strategist, was also a regular presence. The Heath meetings were not confined to the WSPU; the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, the constitutional wing of the movement led by Millicent Fawcett, also held meetings in the area, and the competition between the militant and constitutional wings of the movement was played out on the Heath as it was across the country.
The Anti-Suffrage Response in Hampstead
The suffrage movement in Hampstead did not go unchallenged. The National League for Opposing Woman Suffrage, founded in 1910, had supporters in the area, and the anti-suffrage cause drew on the same social networks and institutional resources as the suffrage movement itself. The anti-suffragists argued that women’s nature and social role unfitted them for political participation, that the extension of the franchise to women would undermine the stability of the family and the state, and that the militant tactics of the WSPU demonstrated precisely the kind of irrationality and emotional excess that disqualified women from the exercise of political power.
The anti-suffrage movement in Hampstead was led, for the most part, by women — a fact that the suffragettes found both infuriating and significant. The argument that women themselves did not want the vote was one of the most powerful weapons in the anti-suffrage arsenal, and the active participation of prominent women in the anti-suffrage campaign gave it a credibility that it would not have possessed if it had been an exclusively male enterprise. The anti-suffrage women of Hampstead included social hostesses, philanthropists, and women of literary and intellectual distinction who were genuinely convinced that the extension of the franchise would be harmful to women’s interests and to society as a whole.
The confrontation between the suffrage and anti-suffrage movements in Hampstead was conducted at multiple levels. There were public debates, held in local halls and reported in the local press, in which speakers for both sides argued their cases with passion and eloquence. There were private arguments, conducted in drawing rooms and at dinner tables, that strained friendships and divided families. And there were street-level confrontations, in which the distribution of suffrage literature was met with counter-demonstrations, heckling, and occasional physical intimidation. The social fabric of the neighbourhood was tested by the intensity of the debate, and the scars it left were slow to heal.
Victory, Memory, and Commemoration
The Representation of the People Act 1918, which gave the vote to women over thirty who met certain property qualifications, and the Equal Franchise Act 1928, which extended the vote to all women over twenty-one on the same terms as men, represented the ultimate vindication of the suffrage campaign. The women of Hampstead who had fought for the vote — some of them by then elderly, some of them dead — had been proved right, and their opponents had been proved wrong. The question that remained was how their achievement would be remembered and commemorated.
The immediate post-war period was not kind to the memory of the suffragettes. The national mood favoured reconciliation and reconstruction rather than the celebration of pre-war militancy, and many former suffragettes were themselves reluctant to dwell on the conflicts and suffering of the campaign years. The movement’s history was preserved primarily by the participants themselves, who wrote memoirs, collected documents, and established archives that would prove invaluable to later historians, but it did not enter the mainstream of national memory until much later in the twentieth century.
In Hampstead, the memory of the suffrage campaign was kept alive by the women who had participated in it and by their families and friends. Some of the houses where meetings had been held, where fugitives had been sheltered, and where plans had been made were known to local residents as suffrage sites, but this knowledge was informal and undocumented. No blue plaques marked the homes of Hampstead’s suffragettes, no street names commemorated their achievements, and no monuments celebrated their courage. The physical landscape of the neighbourhood gave no indication of the extraordinary events that had taken place within it.
This neglect has been partially remedied in recent decades. The women’s suffrage movement has become the subject of intense scholarly attention and popular interest, and the contributions of individual suffragettes from all parts of the country have been researched, documented, and celebrated. In Hampstead, local historians have identified the homes of suffrage activists, traced the routes of their marches and demonstrations, and recovered the stories of individuals whose courage and sacrifice had been forgotten or overlooked. The centenary of the Representation of the People Act in 2018 prompted a wave of commemorative activity that brought the suffrage history of Hampstead to a wider public audience.
Yet much remains to be done. The story of the suffragettes of NW3 is not a story of famous names and dramatic gestures alone. It is a story of ordinary women who did extraordinary things, who risked their health, their freedom, and their social standing in pursuit of a principle that we now regard as self-evident. Their homes still stand in the quiet streets of Hampstead, their gardens still bloom in the spring, and the Heath where they spoke and demonstrated still stretches green and open to the sky. The least we owe them is the act of remembrance — the acknowledgement that these streets, these houses, and this landscape were the stage for one of the most important social struggles in British history, and that the women who fought that struggle from Hampstead deserve a permanent place in the neighbourhood’s memory and in the nation’s gratitude.
*Published in the Hampstead Renovations Heritage Collection — exploring the architecture, history, and stories of London’s most remarkable neighbourhoods.*