ABSTRACT
Walking on a beach in Dorset, one day in the early summer of 1914, Alice Clark fell into conversation with a laundry worker. Women’s suffrage was their topic. Afterwards she wrote to Anna Maria and Mary Priestman of how this working-class woman had explained her involvement in the suffrage campaign: ‘she felt very independent and quite worthy of having a vote. She had brought up a family on laundry work, apprenticed three sons and supported one who was an invalid, and never had either charity or poor relief’.1
