Miss Frances M Buss

Other sources: https://www.parliament.uk/1866
https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portrait/mw252901/Frances-Mary-Buss?search=sp&sText=frances+buss&rNo=1
Josephine Kamm, How Different from Us: A Biography of Miss Buss and Miss Beale (2012)

Database linked sources: https://www.suffrageresources.org.uk/activity/3203/what-were-the-suffrage-campaigners-fighting-for

Family information: Father was a painter and engraver.

Additional Information: Frances was a founding member of the Kensington Society, which discussed all matters relating to the position of women. It was pivotal not only in organising the 1866 women's suffrage petition, but also in representing the seeds of the formal organisation of the campaign for women's suffrage itself. Frances was an avid supporter of women's right to vote.

Other Suffrage Activities: Frances had grown up in an impoverished middle class household, as her father's business did not do well. Frances performed so well in school that she stayed on as a teacher, and afterwards she and her mother ran a small school with local funding. In 1850, Frances started her own school, the North London Collegiate School for Girls. It gained an excellent reputation, growing quite large, and through her education work, she became friends with suffragist and women's education campaigner Emily Davies. The two worked together to gain access for girls to Oxford and Cambridge examinations, and forced a schools enquiry into gender equalities in education ? which Frances gave evidence to. She also worked closely with fellow 1866 petition signatory and social reformer Josephine Butler against slavery and on the Campaign to Repeal the Contagious Diseases Acts, which held vulnerable women in the sex trade responsible for all venereal disease (rather than the men who used them) and treated them as criminals.