Jonathan Schofield Manchester Tours
  • HOME
  • Calendar of tours
  • The Zoom Tours series
  • Gift Vouchers
  • December seven day city centre series
  • Tour Diary: Confessions of a guide
  • Every tour in pictures and some words
  • Ghost tours - spooks guaranteed
  • Exclusive: 35 King St & Georgian Manchester
  • EXCLUSIVE: Mayfield Station tours
  • Heaton Hall and Park Tour
  • The Pan-African Congress, Slavery, and Thomas Clarkson Tour: A Manchester Anniversary Tour
  • Suffragettes, Women & Manchester
  • Totally Manchester - a general tour of the city
  • Whalley Range & Alexandra Park
  • EXCLUSIVE: Refuge/ Kimpton Clock Tower Hotel
  • EXCLUSIVE: 'Boldest Building' Tour, Edgar Wood Centre
  • Secret Tunnels Tour
  • Some tours
  • Loyalty card/scheme
  • GUEST COMMENTS
  • CONTACT DETAILS AND BIOGRAPHY
  • Terms & Conditions
  • EXCLUSIVE: Chetham's Library and College House
  • EXCLUSIVE Hallé St Peter’s & Ancoats Tour NEW
  • Manchester books by Jonathan Schofield
  • The Death & Beer Tour for the Not Quite Light Festival
  • First Wednesday Spinningfields Series 2020
  • Oxford Road Corridor/ University district tour
  • Architecture & Planning: why does Manchester look like it does?
  • Castlefield & Britannia Basin
  • Didsbury, Kersal, Quays tours
  • Bombed & Besieged: Manchester at War
  • The Prestwich Tour: The surprising Manchester series
  • Some Published Articles On Manchester's Present, its Heritage and Tourism
  • The Northern Quarter & Ancoats Tour
  • Friedrich Engels And Karl Marx Tours
  • ​Chorlton tour
  • The Rollicking Pub Tour
  • The Surprising Manchester Series: Old Trafford
  • The Surprising Manchester Series: Bradford & Clayton
  • EXCLUSIVE: Kampus tours, the abandoned warehouses
  • Magical Manchester Mystery Tour - by bike
  • Incredible Interiors
  • Chapel Street and The Irwell: The Tour
  • The Tour of Uninteresting Objects
  • Shock, Surprise, Prose & Verse: Manchester and Literature
  • April Fool's Day Tour - The Incredibly Serious Tour
  • Ford Madox Brown and Pre-Raphaelite Manchester
  • The Day The World Got Smaller Tour
  • Platt Fields, Birch Fields and Rusholme Tour
  • Podcasts
  • Peterloo Massacre: The Reality & The Drama
  • Lost Graveyards and the Dead
  • Truly Madly Brutal
  • The Impossible Bridge and the Improbable Hill - River Irk Valley
  • Return to 1421: The Old Towne and Medieval Manchester
  • City of Science Tours July 2016
  • Suggested Private Tours
  • The River at Dusk - Friday 18 May
  • Literary Manchester: A city in words
  • Anthony Burgess and Literary Manchester Tour
  • Great Northern Tunnel Tour
  • 1840s Manchester: The Key Decade, talk and tour
  • Burns Night Tour Monday 25 January
  • Fire Station Tours: Calling Photographers & Sketchers
  • Manchester City of Art Tour
  • Valentine's Day tour 14 February
  • Manchester Statues, 20 July
  • The Gallery
  • Irk Valley Tour. Sweet Air, Scuttlers, Lost Churches and Hidden Stories
  • Tours deals 2 for £20, 3 for £30
  • The Ghosts of Afflecks & the Northern Quarter

Suffragettes, Significant Women and Manchester 

The Pankhurst family, Lydia Becker, Annie Kenney and many, many more heroines of the female suffrage movement in Manchester are commemorated in this stroll around interiors, buildings and landmarks where women fought for representation. There are stories of reasoned argument, attacks on paintings, arrests and the raising of the Votes for Women banner on 13 October, 1905. 2018 is the centenary of women gaining the vote.

Emmeline Pankhurst is the central figure on this tour.

Her mother and father were both radical in their beliefs, although this hadn’t prevented the father surveying his sleeping daughter one night and muttering sadly, “What a pity she wasn’t born a lad.” Still, the unconventional Emmeline inherited her parents' radicalism and, after a failed love affair in Paris, married the much older Manchester lawyer, Richard Pankhurst, a committed socialist. Richard died suddenly in 1898.


Emmeline, a member of the Independent Labour Party, carried on, now a single parent, becoming the Registrar of Births and Deaths at Rusholme to support herself and four children. In 1903, frustrated by the lack of constitutional progress made by the existing female suffrage movement, which had been led by another remarkable Mancunian, Lydia Becker, she set up the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) in her home on Nelson Street. After raising the banner of ‘Votes for Women’ in the Free Trade Hall the movement became militant. as two members of the Union, Annie Kenney and Emmeline's daughter, Christabel (pictured below), were arrested.

“You have two babies very hungry and wanting to be fed," Emmeline Pankhurst would say. "One baby is a patient baby, and waits indefinitely until its mother is ready to feed it. The other baby is an impatient baby and cries lustily, screams and kicks and makes everybody unpleasant until it is fed. Well, we know perfectly well which baby is attended to first. That is the whole history of politics. You have to make more noise than anybody else, you have to make yourself more obtrusive than anybody else, you have to fill all the papers more than anybody else, in fact you have to be there all the time and see that they do not snow you under.”

D
elayed by the outbreak of the First World War, women over 30 got the vote in 1918. Women, over 21, gained the franchise in 1928 – giving them voting equality with men finally. 

It's only fitting, as stated above, that Emmeline Pankhurst has gained a statue in Manchester by Hazel Reeves. This shows Emmeline public speaking using a chair as a rostrum. 

However, this tour also looks at some exceptional and eccentric women that have featured prominently in the Manchester story from Ann Lee 'the bride of Christ', through Ann Band, Elizabeth Raffald, Mary Fildes, Elizabeth Gaskell, Shena Simon and many more. 


Meet outside Central Library, St Peter’s Square.

​
Booking ahead is advisable

Please book on Paypal below. The receipt Paypal emails back to you operates as the ticket.

​Full Covid-19 precautions will be taken. Sensible footwear is best and you will have to agree to the terms and conditions of visiting any site as stated by the guide when you turn up. On rare occasions some areas will not be available to visit
.


PLEASE CHECK THIS WEBSITE 24 HOURS BEFORE THE TOUR IN CASE A SITUATION ARISES WHICH MAY AFFECT THE TOUR.

Suffragette & Women Tours
Picture
Picture
Proudly powered by Weebly