I got mail from a friend in the US this morning asking if I had come across this lady. I had, but as the Suffragette Movement has never cropped up in my Barlick research I have never pursued it. I thought it might be of interest.
To read this Life of the Day complete with a picture of the subject,
visit
http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/lotw/2012-11-14
Cooper [née Coombe], Selina Jane (1864-1946), suffragist and socialist, was born on 4 December 1864 in Callington, Cornwall, the sixth of seven surviving children of Charles Coombe, railway labourer and later railway subcontractor, and his wife, Jane Uren, dressmaker. In 1876, after her father's sudden death from typhoid fever, eleven-year-old Selina, her widowed mother, and youngest brother moved up to Barnoldswick in north-east Lancashire where cotton mills offered jobs to impoverished families like the Coombes.
Selina Coombe became a half-timer: she combined part-time school with working as a creeler in the cardroom, supplying bobbins onto which fleecy strands of cotton were wound prior to spinning. On her thirteenth birthday even her half-time schooling ended forever, and the 1881 census records sixteen-year-old Selina as 'Cotton Operative'. Shortly afterwards she left the cardroom to care for her mother, now bedridden; and in 1883 they moved to nearby Brierfield, squashed between Burnley and Nelson, both fast expanding weaving towns. Here Selina worked as part-time nurse, part-time washerwoman until her mother's death in 1889. Returning to the mill, she entered Tunstills' winding rooms and joined a trade union-the large Burnley Weavers' Association. Other aspects of Selina Coombe's life, however, like those of so many other working-class women of her generation, remain shadowy.
Nelson and Burnley became early centres of socialism, and Selina Coombe was among the many millworkers drawn into the heady movement. On 24 October 1896 the Revd Leonard of nearby Colne Independent Chapel, a socialist, conducted the marriage of Selina Coombe and Robert Cooper (1869-1934), cotton weaver and founder member of the Nelson Social Democratic Federation (SDF). Their son John Ruskin was born on 21 May 1897 but died of acute bronchitic convulsions on 24 September 1897: this private sorrow haunted Selina long afterwards. However in 1899 Leonard offered the Coopers escape into the countryside, managing a new Co-operative Holiday Association centre at Keld in Swaledale. On their return, their daughter Mary was born on 8 March 1900; and about new year 1901 the Coopers moved to nearby 59 St Mary's Street, Nelson-where all three lived for the rest of their lives.
In 1898 Selina Cooper was elected president of the new Brierfield branch of the Women's Co-operative Guild, so gaining invaluable experience as a public speaker and finding a springboard for the suffrage campaigning which now swept her up. About 1900 she began collecting signatures locally among women cotton factory workers for a petition protesting that their denial of the franchise was 'unjust and inexpedient' (Liddington, 102). On 18 March 1901 she accompanied the 29,359-signature petition down to Westminster, informing the Lancashire MPs meeting the deputation that women have 'to educate their children, but if they are not interested in national life, how could they impart to their children a knowledge of true citizenship?' (ibid., 105). At this gathering Selina Cooper, fast emerging as a talented speaker, met influential members of the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) including the society's president, Millicent Fawcett, and the Leeds socialist Isabella Ford.
The Coopers' home became a focus for local campaigns. In February 1901 Selina Cooper was elected a poor-law guardian, her candidature supported by both the SDF and the Independent Labour Party (ILP). In 1903 she helped launch the Lancashire Women Textile Workers' Representation Committee, and in 1906 organized the Nelson Suffrage Society which met in the Coopers' small front room.
Selina Cooper's belief in both socialism and women's suffrage was tested in 1905 and again in 1907 at Labour Party conferences when, as an ILP delegate, she seconded a women's suffrage resolution-only to be defeated by an adult suffrage amendment. Disenchanted, suffragists like Selina Cooper distanced themselves from the Labour Party-and from the increasingly militant Women's Social and Political Union. Instead, from 1906-7 she worked as a NUWSS organizer, deploying her considerable speaking skills nationally-including supporting the young Bertrand Russell, suffrage candidate at the 1907 Wimbledon by-election.
However in 1912 a new Labour-suffrage alliance was forged, triggered by the obduracy of Herbert Asquith's Liberal government and helped by ILP lobbying of the Labour Party. Along with other radical suffragists-Ada Nield Chew, Annot Robinson, Ellen Wilkinson-Selina Cooper now became in tremendous demand as a speaker; helped by the NUWSS's new election fighting fund, she stumped the country, supporting Labour by-election candidates and lobbying the giant Miners' Federation to put its might behind women's suffrage.
On the outbreak of war suffrage campaigning was suspended. Selina and Robert Cooper, like other ILP members, opposed the war and supported local conscientious objectors; in 1917 Selina bravely led a Women's Peace Crusade procession through Nelson, despite scuffling and jeering. But unlike other internationalist suffragists, Selina Cooper did not resign from Mrs Fawcett's NUWSS; and once women over thirty were enfranchised in 1918 the NUWSS encouraged her (rather unrealistically, given her feminism and her anti-war stance) to stand for parliamentary selection in a Lancashire constituency.
In 1923 and again in 1924 Selina Cooper did stand for election-as Labour candidate for Nelson town council; an outspoken socialist and known supporter of birth control, she was not elected. However, nominated by the Nelson Weavers, she was appointed a magistrate in 1924; and in 1930 she was co-opted onto the Burnley guardians (a district within Lancashire's new public assistance committee). As unemployment rose in 1931, Selina Cooper JP found herself outnumbered on a magistrates' bench 'swarming with manufacturers' (Liddington, 369) after a Nelson Weavers' demonstration against strike-breakers led to a mounted police charge and an arrest. Later that year, amid economic and political crisis, grassroots socialists like Selina Cooper found their convictions shaken to the core by Labour leadership betrayal. 'Philip Snowden and MacDonald took place of a God in those days. And when they tumbled, my mother', Mary Cooper recalled '... got very sad' (ibid., 377).
In 1933 Selina Cooper spoke in London's Central Hall on married women's right to work-'the married women of the north beg their sisters in the south to help them face the "new menace" which is threatening our position as women workers' (Liddington, 402)-sitting down to thunderous applause. Recently widowed, she was invited in 1934 by a new pro-communist Women's World Committee Against War and Fascism to join a small delegation to Nazi Germany to visit four women prisoners; on her return she told about the grim realities of Nazism. A supporter of the Popular Front in the late 1930s, in 1940 Selina Cooper joined the more marginal People's Convention initiated by the Communist Party; she was soon expelled from the Labour Party, so finding herself for the first time in half a century cast outside mainstream labour politics. It was a bitter blow.
Selina Cooper died at home on 11 November 1946 shortly before her eighty-second birthday, and was cremated three days later. The memorial meeting was attended not only by Coombe and Cooper relatives, but also by Nelson's mayor and councillors, fellow magistrates, and members of the public assistance committee, Nelson Labour Party, women's co-operative guilds-and even one or two from the far-off Edwardian days of the Nelson Women's Suffrage Society.
Memories of the campaigns of Selina Cooper and her associates faded rapidly after the First World War, overlain by the more dramatic suffragette narratives of the Pankhursts. However, her papers were preserved by her daughter, and rediscovered in 1976; and in 1996, to mark the fiftieth anniversary of her death, a memorial exhibition and lecture about Selina Jane Cooper were organized in Nelson.
Jill Liddington
Sources J. Liddington, The life and times of a respectable rebel: Selina Cooper, 1864-1946 (1984) + Lancs. RO, Cooper MSS + Oral history interviews with Mary Cooper, Tameside Local Studies Library, Stalybridge, Manchester Studies Oral History Tapes + J. Liddington and J. Norris, One hand tied behind us: the rise of the women's suffrage movement (1978) + b. cert. + d. cert. + CGPLA Eng. & Wales (1946) + parish register (baptism), Callington, Cornwall, 25 March 1870
Archives Lancs. RO, corresp., papers, and photographs, PDX 1137 SOUND Tameside Local Studies Library, Stalybridge, Manchester Studies Oral History Tapes, Mary Cooper tapes
Likenesses E. Buck, photograph, Women's Library, London [see illus.] · photographs, Lancs. RO, Cooper MSS, PDX 1137 · portraits, Lancs. RO, Cooper MSS, PDX 1137
Wealth at death £423 4s. 11d.: administration, 7 Dec 1946, CGPLA Eng. & Wales