Jessie Stephen

Early life and family

Jessie Stephen was born in Marylebone, London, on 19 April 1893, the eldest of the eleven children of tailor Alexander Stephen and his wife Jane Miller. The family moved to Edinburgh, then Dunfermline, before settling in Glasgow in 1901.

Stephen was the youngest member of the WSPU Glasgow delegation to the Chancellor of the Exchequer David Lloyd George in 1912, Stephen was approached by Sylvia Pankhurst and moved from Glasgow to London,

In the 1964 general election, she was a candidate for the Labour Party in the Weston-super-Mare constituency. She died from pneumonia and heart failure at Bristol General Hospital on 12 June 1979.

Stephen's unpublished autobiography, Submission is for Slaves, is available in the Working Class Movement Library in Salford. Brian Harrison recorded an oral history interview with Stephen, in July 1977, as part of the Suffrage Interviews project, titled Oral evidence on the suffragette and suffragist movements: the Brian Harrison interviews. Stephen talks about the influence of her Father, her activities with the WSPU, the East London Federation of Suffragettes, the National Federation of Women Workers, the National Union of Clerks, the Women's Cooperative Guild, and the Workers' Birth Control Group as well as her involvement with Sylvia Pankhurst.

She is also the subject of a short animation made as part of Glasgow Women's Library's Vote 100 project and an exhibition Jessie Stephen: Maryhill's Suffragette at Maryhill Burgh Halls running from 11th March 2025 to 13th June 2025.

The tour company "Gallus Pedals" has named a bicycle after her as one of ten Glasgow women "Trailblazers" in various categories. Stephen, along with Mary Barbour and Rachel Hamilton is in the category "Women who Shaped Glasgow's Social Change"