Struggle and Suffrage in Morpeth & Northumberland

A portrait of the battle for voting rights in a rural English county, and the dramatic life and death of one fierce suffragette.

For much of the nineteenth century, the women of Northumberland occupied crucial, though largely underappreciated, roles in society. Aside from the hard life of raising families in an area where money was often hard to come by and much of the available work was labor-intensive and dangerous, women were also expected to help bring money into the household.

In what was a largely agrarian county, female laborers, known as bondagers, were widely respected for their contribution to the local economy, though there were those who criticized the system for forcing women to undertake hard manual labor. The farming economy in Northumberland depended so much on female labor that many men found it easier to be taken on by an employer if they were able to bring a suitable female worker with them.

The period was also one of considerable upheaval. There were a number of prominent Northumbrian suffragists, and the local radical suffragettes launched attacks in the area. Morpeth was a very early supporter of women’s suffrage and the mayor and local council actively supported the cause, though they remained largely opposed to the actions of the suffragettes. Among other topics, this book follows the story of London-born Emily Wilding Davison, whose mother was Northumbrian and had a wide network of relations in the county. After her father’s death, her mother relocated to the Northumberland village of Longhorsley and Emily spent long periods with her, recuperating after her numerous hunger strikes. Famously losing her life after being struck by the king’s horse at the 1913 Epsom Derby, Emily was buried with great ceremony in a quiet churchyard and to this day remains one of Morpeth’s most famous (adopted) daughters, her grave a site of pilgrimage for supporters of women’s rights.