Leonora Cohen

Leonora Cohen (née Throp; 15 June 1873 – 4 September 1978) was an English suffragette and trade unionist, and one of the first female magistrates. She was known as the "Tower Suffragette" after smashing a display case in the Tower of London and acted as a bodyguard for Emmeline Pankhurst. She lived to the age of 105 and contributed to the second wave of feminism in the 1970s.

Early life Cohen was born Leonora Throp in Hunslet, Leeds on 15 June 1873 to Canova and Jane (née Lamie) Throp. Her father, Canova Throp, was a sculptor but died in 1879 when Leonora was 5 years old, after developing tuberculosis of the spine, which left her widowed mother to raise Cohen and her two younger brothers. Cohen became a vegetarian in 1891 which she remained for the rest of her life.

She apprenticed as a milliner and while she was working as a millinery buyer, she met Henry Cohen,

In 1911, Cohen joined in a protest where she threw a rock at a government-building window; she was arrested and held in Holloway Prison for seven days. As Cohen began to take more bold steps as a suffragette, her family supported her suffrage allegiance but her friends did not; she received hate letters and her son reportedly faced persecution at school. She explained that voting women would have power to demand higher wages as men had done, which would stop underpaid girls from drifting onto the streets.

Cohen disguised herself as a baker's van man, with Norah Duval as a boy, swapping places when delivering bread with fellow suffragette Lilian Lenton to let her escape from the art critic Frank Rutter's house in Leeds, which was used for recuperating hunger strikers.

Cohen became the Leeds district organiser of the National Union of General and Municipal Workers and organised workers in their claims including a three-day strike served a term as president of the Leeds Trades Council.

Second wave of feminism Cohen retired to Colwyn Bay in north Wales. In 1970, she attended the unveiling of the Suffragette Memorial in London, and, in 1973, revisited the scene of her Tower of London action.

Since Cohen lived to the age of 105, she witnessed the second wave of feminism in the 1970s and Cohen was brought back into the public eye. Brian Harrison interviewed 183 people, including Cohen, as a part of his oral history Suffrage Interviews project, Oral Evidence on the Suffragette and Suffragist Movements: the Brian Harrison interviews. The collection includes 2 interviews with Cohen in 1974, and a third conducted in 1976. In the 1974 interview, Cohen discussed her role in the 1911 rally and her experience of her first arrest: "[At the rally] it was so packed. And the mounted police were out. And when we got up to the palace gate, I can also remember so clearly the police there on horseback and that is where I was knocked down." Cohen described the violence and huge crowds at the rallies.

In 1974 she appeared on the cover of Radio Times to promote the series Shoulder to Shoulder on the history of the women's suffrage movement;

Scholars later analysed Cohen's life as a suffragette. Jemal Nath argued that vegetarianism was linked to feminism. The suffrage movement in the late nineteenth century was used as an example. Cohen's vegetarianism, along with other suffragists, was seen as a way for women to spend less time in the kitchen because they did not have to prepare meat, While her scrapbook does not give a comprehensive account of her time campaigning, it does provide an insight into what inspired her to become a suffragette.

Cohen spent her last years in a vegetarian nursing home. The Times newspaper published Cohen's obituary. This mentioned her OBE, her job as a bodyguard for Mrs Pankhurst, her imprisonment and hunger strike and her title as the "Tower Suffragette" for the damage she did with the iron bar in the Tower of London.

Cohen attached a note to the iron bar that she threw to smash the glass cabinet in the Tower: "Jewel House, Tower of London. My Protest to the Government for its refusal to Enfranchise Women, but continues to torture women prisoners – Deeds Not Words. Leonora Cohen"/ reverse "Votes for Women. 100 years of Constitutional Petition, Resolutions, Meetings & Processions have Failed."