Rosa May Billinghurst (who went by her middle name, May) was born on this day in history in Lewisham, England. As a child she contracted polio and used a tricycle wheelchair for most of her life. She did not let her disability stand in her way however, and took up social work as a young woman, assisting at a workhouse and teaching Sunday school.
In 1907 she joined the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), a militant women’s rights group. According to a UK suffragette history, May became known as the ‘cripple suffragette’, not just by other suffrage campaigners but also by the national newspapers. May took part in suffrage processions in her wheelchair, distributing leaflets as she went. Her mobility device was brightly decorated with flowers and in WSPU colors.
May Billinghurst, center, in 1908 in her tricycle wheelchair. Credit…London School of Economics Library via NYT
In November, 1910 she joined some 300 other suffragettes to demand to speak with Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith. Police reacted forcefully when the women tried to storm the building. Billinghurst was thrown off her machine “in a very brutal manner,” she wrote in a statement to the police, and then:
. . . they took me down a side road and left me in the middle of a hooligan crowd, first taking all the valves out of the wheels and pocketing them, so that I could not move the machine, and left me to the crowd of roughs, who, luckily, proved my friends.”
As the New York Times reported, the police mistreatment did not put a dent in her activities. In November, 1911, she along with 220 other women was arrested after a protest against a bill that would give all men, not just property owners, the right to vote but would continue to exclude women. She was arrested again in March 1912 during a coordinated protest in which 150 women smashed windows across London.
The New York Times noted that from jail, she continued to push for women’s suffrage.:
‘Miss Billinghurst is here with her tricycle,’ wrote Alice Ker, another imprisoned suffragette, in a letter to her daughter. ‘She has irons on each leg, and can only walk with crutches, her tricycle works with handles. She drives it round the yard at exercise time. It is painted in the colors, with a placard, Votes for Women, on the back of it.’”
She received another eight-month sentence for her role in the December 1912 attacks on pillar boxes in Deptford. The people that force-fed her ripped her nostril and broke a tooth. Her treatment was reported in the newspapers and, after appeals, she was released.
Billinghurst in 1913 leading a procession of suffragettes Credit…London School of Economics via NYT
In May 1914, as part of a larger WSPU demonstration, she chained herself in her tricycle to railings at Buckingham Palace. She retired from suffrage activities after the 1918 Representation of the People Act.
Billinghurst died on July 29, 1953, at age 78.
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