Welcome to the new segment of my blog where I will be shingling a light on inspirational disabled people throughout history and talking about groundbreaking moments that challenged the way disabled people were seen in society. The first person I want to talk about is an amazing disabled suffragette.
Rosa May Billinghurst was born on the 31st of May in 1875, to her mother, Rosa Ann Brinsmead Billinghurst and father, Henry Farncombe Billinghurst. Her mother came from a family who manufactured pianos and her father was a banker. Rosa was the second child of nine, in a well educated, middle class family. As a young child, Rosa contracted Polio, an illness which left her paralysed from the waist down. She had to wear leg irons (old fashioned splints), used crutches and had a modified tricycle to help her get around. She spent the early years of her adult life working with the poor and teaching at a Sunday school along with her sister Alice. Rosa would also volunteer to work with children in slums, local workhouse inmates and prostitutes. Exposure to injustice increased her interest in politics and led her to become interested in the issue of women’s suffrage. For many suffrage campaigners at the time it was about the change they could make by getting more women into government positions.
Rosa joined the Women’s Social and Political Union (the WSPU) in 1907 at the age of 32 and was a dedicated member. 3 years later she founded the Greenwich branch of the WSPU. Despite the challenges of living with a disability in the early 1900s Rosa became a mentor for new recruits of the WSPU and took part in demonstrations. She relied on what was known as an invalid chair which was one of the most high tech wheelchairs of her time. One protester at the time wrote:
I remember hearing startling stories of her running battles with the police. Her crutches were lodged on each side of her self propelling invalid chair, and when a meeting was broken up or an arrest being made, she would charge the aggressors at a rate of knots that carried all before her
Rosa’s presence at marches attracted a lot of attention. She wheeled through streets decked in WSPU colours and badges that read ‘votes for women’ and through this she became a recognised public figure, drawing attention to the movement. She hit headlines in mainstream newspapers and was known as The Crippled Suffragette.
I have read many articles about Rosa which describe how she ‘overcame’ her disability to become a suffragette but in my opinion, she didn’t ‘overcome’ her disability to fight. Just like she didn’t overcome being a woman. Rosa May Billinghusrst broke the glass ceiling in terms of disabled feminism and for that I think she should be appearing in the history books more often than she does
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