Louie Cullen

Louie Cullen ( – 24 July 1960) was a British suffragette and hunger striker who emigrated to Australia to continue her feminist activism. She was imprisoned for her activist work, and was awarded a Holloway brooch.

Life Born Louisa Clarissa Mays in about 1876, she preferred to be called Louie In that year, Cullen and Hannah Mitchell had smuggled a 'Votes for Women' banner into the House of Commons whilst there with nineteen others and Emmeline Pankhurst and left during the scene caused when they opened up their banners there. Cullen was arrested following the 1908 attempt by suffragettes to rush into the House of Commons hidden in a pantechnicon to get their voices heard on women's suffrage. in Holloway prison and went on a hunger strike for the cause of women's suffrage.

Cullen's health suffered from her imprisonment, and she and her husband moved in December 1911, initially for a two-year period, Cullen also gave practical assistance to young women alone in the city, setting up the Wayfarers social club to create a welcoming community. for the release of Adela Pankhurst Walsh, imprisoned for protesting the price of food. Cullen supported more women becoming engaged in politics, writing in 1947 to congratulate a Mrs N. A. Parker on her election as the first alderwoman to Molong council. Cullen was widely reported for publicly objecting to the use of 'obey' in the marriage ceremony of the then Princess Elizabeth (now Queen Elizabeth II) to Prince Philip, as 'positively antediluvian'. She was interviewed for the People and Women's Day. Cullen had her portrait photograph taken with the WSPU illustrated certificate, wearing her Votes for Women sash in 1958, in the National Library of Australia collection.

By 1958, Cullen was in a nursing home in Hammondville. Her death was reported internationally, including in the Singapore Free Press and the London Daily Telegraph. Cullen had said she would "like the newspapers to know, in the hope that coming young folk will remember how some freedoms are bought." There is also Cullen's Holloway brooch and her WSPU sash, which she is seen wearing in a duo photograph of her both in prison clothing and dressed in white wearing the sash for the Hyde Park Women's March, from her book written in 1959. The collection has the original certificate from Emmeline Pankhurst, honouring Louise Cullen's contribution of "self-forgetfulness and self-conquest, ever ready to obey the call of duty, and to answer to the appeal of the oppressed", which she is holding in her portrait.