Mrs Barbara Bodichon Ayrton-Gould

Other sources: http://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/C4769024
Elizabeth Crawford, The Women's Suffrage Movement: A Reference Guide 1866?1928 (1999); Maud Arncliffe-Sennett, The Child (1938); Clare Eustance, 'Citizens, Scotsmen, "Bairns": Manly Politics and Women's Suffrage in the Northern Men's Federation, 1913?1920', in Angela John and Clare Eustance (eds), The Men's Share? (1997)

Family information: Daughter of a professor.

Additional Information: Barbara joined the WSPU in 1906, giving up her work as a postgraduate in 1908 to work full time as a WSPU organiser. In January 1910, she was WSPU organiser for the election campaign in Manchester (Salford) and, after marrying her husband and honeymooning that year, returned to her organising work. She wrote some pamphlets for the votes for women cause and, in 1912, Barbara was arrested for breaking windows in Regent Street, London. She engaged in other militant acts and so had to 'lay low' in France for several weeks during police clampdowns on suffragettes. Disappointed by the autocratic way that Christabel Pankhurst was running the WSPU (and that she did so from a distance in Paris), Barbara formed with others a new society, the United Suffragists (US), becoming its first secretary. She worked to further the suffrage cause during the war.

Other Suffrage Activities: After the First World War, Barbara was honorary secretary of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom and was a Justice of the Peace in Marylebone, London. She also stood four times after the war as a Labour candidate for Parliament ? unsuccessfully. Finally, in 1945, she was elected to North Hendon. She sat on the executive committee of the Labour Party for many years and was vice chairman between 1938 and 1939, and chairman from 1939?40.