ABSTRACT
The market squares and village greens of the north saw a new figure enter the suffrage scene in 1879, lumbering and somewhat odd in appearance, but one who cast a spell over the audiences of working people who came to hear her. Accompanied only by her dog, Tiny, Jessie Craigen traversed the countryside, hiring a bell-ringer to spread news of her arrival in town, and holding impromptu open-air meetings outside factory-gates, or wherever she might gather listeners. Her presence challenges a common perception of the nineteenth-century women’s movement as one of narrow middle-class perspectives. The attitudes of it leadership might on occasion evidence an ignorance of, or lack of sympathy with, the problems of the less fortunate among their sex. Yet, as we have seen, there were issues on which women might identify with each other across divisions of class, and there was also a growing recognition of sources of strength to be found among working women. Lydia Becker, for example, once declared:
What I most desire is to see men and women in the middle classes stand on the same terms of equality as prevail in the working classes-and the highest aristocracy. A great lady or a factory woman are independent persons-personagesthe women of the middle classes are nobodies, and if they act for themselves they lose caste.1
