SP 's untiring activism began in the women's movement, but unlike her mother or sister she was equally deeply committed to the struggle of the working classes. She embraced labour activism, socialism, Bolshevism, pacifism, anti-fascism, and anti-imperialism. Her crusades were waged in at least two countries, England and Ethiopia, and had far-reaching effects, angering British parliamentarians, Lenin , and her own family. She was revered as a hero in Ethiopia and elsewhere.

MR first came into contact with the women's suffrage movement in 1905, when she arrived at Oxford University as a lecturer in the Extension Delegacy programme. Soon after her arrival she was swept into the suffragist movement, and eventually she gave up lecturing to devote herself entirely to the cause—work which she found terrific. She spent the next thirteen years as an advocate for women's suffrage, but she was careful to distance her suffragism from that of the militants. As a preacher of devout Anglican faith, she particularly spoke on the economic, ethical, and religious aspects of the Women's Movement. She also began articulating her feminism, about which she later said, I was a born feminist. Among the many suffrage organizations in which she became involved, she campaigned actively with the National Council for Adult Suffrage , founded in autumn 1916.

Katharine Conway was converted to socialism after striking female cotton-workers materialized in her church, drenched from the rain.

EGB 's family was Anglo-Irish (though her mother was English) and Protestant; they owned property both in the West of Ireland and in Manchester. EGB rejected much of this heritage during her adulthood. From the time she moved away from the family estate and became immersed in suffrage and labour activism, she lived with her companion Esther Roper . Critics disagree on whether or not this was a lesbian relationship.

MG , as a householder, found herself in possession of a municipal vote, a property vote in local elections. The fact that this came without the right to a vote in parliamentary elections was a small push towards her later suffragist politics. Soon after this came her discovery, through her fiancé, of socialism and the Labour movement.

From the time she was fifteen, SG had supported Josephine Butler 's crusade against the Contagious Diseases Acts of 1864, 1866, and 1869. (She admired Butler but never met her.) The medical knowledge SG gleaned from her husband's work and books served to reignite her opposition to the Acts and to inspire her to campaign against them. Her political views were further strengthened by personal contact with eight married women whose health had been permanently ruined by contracting venereal diseases from their husbands. The Acts were implemented to curb the alarming rate of venereal infection among Britain's soldiers: at the time of the first Act, nearly one-third of them had some venereal disease. Officials tended to believe that the disease was the fault of prostitutes and that the problem could be solved by containing women. The Acts allowed police to arrest any woman suspected to be a prostitute and test her for disease; if she proved positive, then she was sent to a lock hospital indefinitely. Women's-rights activists saw these Acts as both stemming from and perpetuating the sexual double standard, by vilifying women while leaving infected men untouched and still spreading disease, particularly to their wives. Butler established the Ladies' National Association for the Repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts in December 1869. One object of her campaign was to increase educational opportunities for poor women, who, she understood, usually turned to prostitution not out of immorality but out of desperation. Butler and her fellow activists also embarked on a social purity campaign, calling for the moral and sexual reform of men. To this end they held public meetings, initiated educational programmes for women, and canvassed against the Acts. SG devoted her life and career to this campaign. The government eventually repealed the Acts in 1886.

An upper-middle-class Scotswoman, FW was led by her fervent belief in equality to renounce her class origins, becoming a Scots-American radical. Deeply ethical and political, she was not only the first female public lecturer in the United States, but also the first woman to argue publicly for sexual and racial equality.

She is remembered for her unorthodox views on sex and sexuality, marriage, and education, and for her activism in support of such concerns as birth control and pacifism.

ER became Honorary Secretary of the Liverpool Women's Suffrage Society , which was affiliated with the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies (NUWSS).

CL was born into the English ruling class and baptised into the Church ofEngland . She became a vegetarian in her twenties, for moral and compassionate as well as for health reasons. Not until she was nearly forty that she discover the movement for women's emancipation, and become a convinced and militant suffragist. Her gender activism went along with acute class-consciousness and a particular desire to reform the unfair treatment of working-class people, men as well as women, in the legal and prison systems. When she petitioned the Home Secretary from prison she did so as a Liberal in politics, as a believer in the teachingsof Christ, and as a woman. Attending Holy Communion in prison, she felt how widely at variance were the words and the whole experience from that of being a prisoner. Her suffrage experience and especially her prison experience loomed so large in her short span that it seems natural to consider other aspects of her life through the lens that they provide.

CD became joint honorary secretary of the WSPU , which had recently moved to London from Manchester. (She probably resigned at this time from the Social Democratic Federation ).

With her sister Bessie and sister-in-law Helen Cordelia , IOF was a founding member of the LeedsWomen's Suffrage Society , which formed in this year.

HT used her considerable financial resources to further the reforms that she advocated. English by birth, she espoused the cause of Irish land nationalization. Her maternal forbears were landowners, being lords of a manor in Yorkshire for centuries.

EP was politically active in London from at least 1887, when she and her husband attended the Bloody Sunday demonstration in Trafalgar Square on 13 November. The second of EP 's two London homes, a large rented house at 8 Russell Square (where the family moved after Frank died in September 1888 at a house with defective drains), became a gathering place for intellectuals. She became involved with the Match Girls' strike led by Annie Besant , and became a supporter of New Trade Unionism.

TO famously categorized herself: Race, human; Religion, none. Her parents were politically active Russian Jewish immigrants, and did not become naturalized American citizens until Tillie was seven. By that age, she and her siblings had already experienced xenophobic or antisemitic prejudice. She read politically radical texts such as The Comrade as a young girl, and joined the Young Communist League at eighteen.

In the course of her life, AB explored many facets of religion and politics. Early in her life she entertained a passionate Christian devotion and was inspired by the idea of sacrifice, even martyrdom. She then developed doubts about her religion and was for a while an atheist and member of the National Secular Society .George Bernard Shaw later described her phases chronologically: a Puseyite Evangelical, an AtheistBible-smasher, a Darwinian secularist, a Fabian Socialist, a Strike Leader, and finally a Theosophist, who was, necessarily then, a vegetarian.

CB was appointed Honorary Secretary of the Women's Protective and Provident League , one of the first organizations concerned with the rights of working women.

She was not baptised, since her father regarded the ceremony as a mere unmeaning shibboleth. Her radical and Unitarian family background encouraged her bent towards feminism and educational reform. She herself seems to have been an agnostic.

JHC was a staunch advocate for marriage reform, birth control, and women's suffrage, which she campaigned for both through her writing and through her participation in various feminist organizations. Her desire for marriage reform underlay much of her work. She felt strongly that men and women ought to be intellectually and morally equal and free to form intimate and lasting relations with one another, of the most varied character, and believed that without this reform, no social reconstruction will ever fully overcome the evils of our present state. She also supported the movement for women's advance all along the line from rational education in every branch to professional activities and sharing with men public duties and responsibilities.

Her salad-girl job provided AW with an occasion to show that she was already passionately angry about the racial injustice which most of her peers preferred not to confront.

CCM was a nationalist rebel whose work for the cause of Ireland led to five terms served in prison. Her parents were Anglo-Irish, Protestant property owners. The family divided their time between their Irish country house, Lissadell and seasons in London; both Constance and her sister Eva began as society women. Despite her wealth and title, CCM became devoted to helping Ireland's working poor: mere Irish was her own self-identification. She married, but was estranged from her husband for most of their marriage.

She was born into the highly ingenious and mobile white American skilled working or lower middle class. After a childhood of poverty (cleverly managed and cleverly concealed) she achieved, largely by her own efforts, immense (though insecure) wealth and the life of a celebrity. In politics she was a radical prepared to work against inequality, war, and totalitarianism.

FPC 's interest in women's rights was born during her work with Mary Carpenter . In her own words, she was chiefly moved by reflection on the sufferings and wrongs borne by women, in great measure owing to the déconsidération they endure consequent on their political and civil disabilities. Her early involvement in the meetings of the Social Science Association brought her into contact with virtually everyone in organised feminism of the period. There in 1862 she was the first publicly to advocate the admission of women to university examinations. Her feminism was connected for her with struggle against other injustices: she wrote for the Ladies' London Emancipation Society , founded in the early 1860s to press for the abolition of slavery in the USA.

In her memoir AWE writes that at this time she was more optimistic than her colleague Leonard Woolf about the possibilities of working with Communists, believing that a strong coalition of the Left was essential to the anti-Fascist movement.