Dorothy Evans

Dorothy Elizabeth Evans (6 May 1888 – 28 August 1944) was a British feminist activist and suffragette. On the eve of World War I she was a militant organiser for the Women's Social and Political Union twice arrested in Belfast on explosives charges. She broke with Christabel Pankhurst and the WSPU in 1914 over their support for the war, and remained until the end of her life an active peace and women's equality campaigner. Early WSPU Engagement 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. 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. During this period, she was frequently arrested and imprisoned for acts linked to the suffragette campaign, including refusing to buy a dog license. 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. Direct action in Ulster 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 were 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".