Jessie Stephenson

Sara Jessie Stephenson (1873–1966) was a British suffragette and a member of the WSPU who organised census boycott in Manchester.

Early life Sara Jessie Stephenson was born in Louth, Lincolnshire in 1873 the daughter of a farmer in Lincolnshire, England.

Despite her parents' initial reluctance, she wanted more than a domestic life and travelled in France and Germany teaching English. in Manchester.

Right to vote granted In 1918, after the First World War was almost over, and women had been pressed into roles previously unheard of in Britain whilst the men were at the front, the right for (some) women to vote was granted. Stephenson was clear in her writing "No Other Way' that the suffragist (non militant National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies) approach would not have achieved this alone:

Governments are not philanthropists - certainly not to non-voters - seldom give what they are absolutely not forced to, and I say with positive certainty - the Government would not have granted women's suffrage with such a harmless and poorly backed demand [of the NUWSS] ... . As it was the Government returning, all tired, to home affairs after the Great War, to a country recently ablaze from end to end with enthusiasm for women's vote, and likely to burst into still more desperate enthusiasm if denied, faced with this threat, passed the Electoral Bill in January .

Stephenson's two volume memoirs 'No Other Way' were released in 1932. She also said: Woman now has in her hands the key, to get repealed the scandalous laws made against her in the past ... We surviving warriors, battled, mauled and mostly worn out, look confidently to her to steadily and surely march towards the greatest reform the world has ever faced ... I have dreamt of since my early girlhood, which will, which must come.

Stephenson died in Norfolk in 1966.