Hannah Mitchell

Hannah Mitchell (11 February 1872 – 22 October 1956) was an English suffragette and socialist. Born into a poor farming family in Derbyshire, Mitchell left home at a young age to work as a seamstress in Bolton, where she became involved in the socialist movement. She worked for many years in organisations related to socialism, women's suffrage and pacifism. After World War I she was elected to Manchester City Council and worked as a magistrate, before later working for Labour Party leader, Keir Hardie.

Biography

Early life

Hannah Webster was born on 11 February 1872 to Benjamin and Ann Webster in a farmhouse named after and just below Alport Castles in Hope Woodlands, in the Derbyshire Peak District. The daughter of a farmer, she was the fourth of six children. Her mother had a temper especially with her last three children, Hannah, Sarah and Benjamin. She was expected to look after her father and brothers, which she resented.

Early on Mitchell became acutely aware of gender inequality in the domestic sphere. She also observed the seemingly inevitable early marriages of girls around her to "farm lads", to avoid having children out of wedlock, and was keen to avoid the same fate. She later said in her autobiography that her mother was a bad-tempered and violent woman who sometimes made her children sleep in the barn. When she was 13 she became an apprentice dressmaker, to earn extra money for her impoverished family. In Glossop, her mistress was an older crippled seamstress, Miss Brown. Mitchell wrote that her approach was a contrast to her mother and she gently taught "that work could also be a pleasure." She became involved in the socialist movement and spoke up for shorter hours and a half-day off (paid) weekly for shop workers,

Mitchell also attended The Labour Church.

In the house where she lodged, she met a tailor's cutter called Gibbon Mitchell, Frank Gibbon Mitchell in 1896. She and her husband agreed to use birth control and had no further children.

She soon found herself disillusioned by marriage. Although her husband initially agreed to her requests for an equal division of labour in their household, she found that reality did not quite live up to this ideal. She continued to work as a seamstress to supplement Gibbon's meagre earnings, and found the rest of her time taken up with household chores. Like other women in the socialist movement, Mitchell struggled to convince male socialists of the importance of feminist issues.

In 1905, Mitchell joined Emmeline Pankhurst, Annie Kenney, Keir Hardie, Theresa Billington and Mrs Elmy at the prison gates when Christabel Pankhurst was released after a week of imprisonment for the first assault in the cause, spitting at a policeman.

Hannah Mitchell Foundation 2012 saw the formation of the Hannah Mitchell Foundation, a forum for the development of devolved government in the North of England. The name was chosen "in memory of an outstanding Northern socialist, feminist and co-operator who was proud of her working class roots and had a cultural as well as political vision."