Disability History Month: 'The Cripple Suffragette'
The story of Rosa May Billinghurst, a true disability icon
Hello,
Did you know it’s Disability History Month? You could be forgiven for being unaware, as it hasn’t really been marked.
The reasons for this are legion but I think the core of the problem is the idea that disability history somehow isn’t part of collective history - that we appeared as if by magic in the 90s, with the Direct Action Network protests that led to the DDA.
Of course, that isn’t true. Disabled people have been around forever and our stories are an integral part of all stories.
One of my favourite things about disability history is that, long before the disability rights movement coalesced into anything formal, disabled people have been integral parts of other liberation movements, from the post-Stonewall LGBT pride marches to the Black Panthers. I love me some intersectionality, and I’m very proud that my community has always been imagining better worlds.
In that spirit, I thought I’d use today’s newsletter to tell you about one of my favourite figures from disability history - a woman who wasn’t really a disability activist at all (or at least not as we would understand it today), but who was at the forefront of another great struggle, for women’s right to vote.
Let me introduce Rosa May Billinghurst - aka “The Cripple Suffragette”.
Now, information about Billinghurst, who was known as May, is sparse, and an awful lot seems to be based on rumour. But one thing is clear: she was an absolute badass.
May, a wheelchair user since childhood, started her political life helping to run and then found various branches of women’s suffrage organisations, which eventually became the Women’s Social and Political Union, led by the Pankhursts.
By 1908, there are records of her on marches, using her wheelchair to distract the police (and, allegedly, their horses!) while other suffragists caused havoc.
That year may have seen her arrested for the first time, and she was definitely arrested again in 1910 when she is said to have used the image of her overturned mobility aid to attract more attention to the cause.
By this time, she was using a tricycle she had personally had adapted to dodge police and cause a scene. She also had the tricycle painted in Suffragette purple, green and white. What a legend.
She later said that on a large march in 1910, police had purposefully deflated her tyres so she couldn’t evade arrest. (Note to self: invest in some solid tyres before any direct action.)
She was arrested again in 1911 and it’s rumoured that, in 1912, she used her tricycle to hide rocks the Suffragettes used to smash shop windows. She may have repeated the trick a few years later when she supplied materials to destroy the contents of various London post boxes, for which she was jailed for eight months.
During her time in Holloway Prison, she went on hunger strike and was violently force fed, leading to a successful appeal for her release.
In 1914, she took part in a protest outside Buckingham Palace, some reports of which claim that, in a further iconic move, she chained herself and her tricycle to the palace railings.
What I love so much about May Billinghurst’s story is that she took what could have been a weakness - being a wheelchair user on chaotic, sometimes violent protests - and made it a strength. By the mid 1910s, she had proved herself a key part of the WSPU machine, giving speeches alongside Emmeline Pankhurst and appearing in the papers to make the case for women’s suffrage.
Even if some of the more outlandish of her reported endeavours have been exaggerated, she clearly made her mark.
Here’s to May, and the men and women who came after her.
Happy Disability History Month.
Speak soon,
Lucy
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