Jessie Stephen: Scottish Working Class Suffragette
In this blog post, Anabel Marsh, a retired librarian and women’s heritage volunteer with both Glasgow Women’s Library and Maryhill Burgh Halls has written about the activism of Scottish Suffragette, Jessie Stephen. An exhibition celebrating the life of Jessie runs until 13th June 2025 at Maryhill Burgh Halls, and is a collaboration between Anabel and Aurora Segnan, Heritage & Operations Coordinator at the Halls.
An exhibition about Jessie Stephen – Suffragette, Labour and Trades Union activist – has opened at Maryhill Burgh Halls in Glasgow.[1] Jessie, who spent her formative years in Maryhill, is one of the few Scottish working class Suffragettes we know much about. Working class women could not afford to be caught and sent to prison because they often had families depending on them, so they tended to remain anonymous. Jessie never married and dedicated her whole life to activism. This public career, her unpublished autobiography, and several interviews she gave in the 1970s mean she has left her mark on history.
Life in Glasgow
Jessie was born in London in 1893 to a Scottish father and an English mother. When she was about two years old the family moved to Edinburgh, then Dunfermline, before finally settling in Glasgow.
Jessie was the eldest of 11 and worked hard helping her mother with the younger children and taking jobs before and after school, such as delivering laundry. The children all attended Sunday School and Socialist Sunday School. Jessie did well at school and hoped to become a teacher, but in 1908 her father, a tailor, found trade so bad that Jessie left school to help support the family by becoming a domestic servant.
Jessie chose this role because food and lodgings were provided which meant she could send more money home. Her first employer, Mrs Harvey, was reasonably pleasant to work for but a later employer, Lady Chisholm, sacked her when she twisted her ankle in the course of her work. Strongly influenced by her father’s socialism, Jessie was already politically active, becoming Vice Chair of Maryhill Independent Labour Party aged only 16, and a strong believer in Trades Unions. Her treatment by the Chisholms prompted her to organise her fellow servants into the Scottish Domestic Workers’ Federation in 1913. This involved organising not just meetings of servants but addressing their employers too – as a result she got 2 hours off every day for her members and an agreement that all uniform would be paid by employers.
Alongside these activities she formed an interest in women’s suffrage and joined the Women’s Social and Political Union, or Suffragettes. One of the campaigns Jessie took part in was attacking pillar boxes with paint or acid. Dressed in her maid’s uniform, she looked completely unsuspicious and was never caught. She was also the youngest in a deputation of working women from Glasgow who went to London in 1910 to join women from all over the UK to lobby the House of Commons about women’s suffrage.
Life after Glasgow
During the First World War Jessie was recruited by Sylvia Pankhurst to work for her Workers’ Suffrage Federation in London, and she never lived in Glasgow again. When some women got the vote in 1918, Jessie was not one of them, because she was under 30 and owned no property. Women over 21 did not get the vote until 1928.
Jessie believed this was just the beginning and continued to campaign for equality in all areas of life. She served as a councillor and tried unsuccessfully to become an MP several times between the 1920s and 1960s.
To finance her activism, which included two speaking tours of North America in the 1920s, Jessie worked at a variety of jobs, including in Trades Unions, as a freelance journalist, running a twopenny library, and taking over an ailing typing service which she turned into a thriving secretarial agency and training school. However, one thing she would never do was move to a job for a higher salary if it violated what she stood for. Wherever she worked, she always fought to unionise and to get better conditions for workers, especially equal pay for women.
Jessie finally settled in Bristol in the 1940s where she became the first woman president of the Trades Council. Her work for the Trade Union movement was recognised by a TUC Gold Medal in 1955 and an MBE in 1977. She died in Bristol in 1979.
The exhibition
As well as telling the story of Jessie’s life, the exhibition includes a collection of memorabilia about her, such as:
- A mug produced as part of Journey to Justice Bristol 2017.[2]
- Commemorative material from Glasgow Women’s Library.[3] Jessie features in two of their walks and trails, and in a bookmark made from some of the wood torn from the Suffrage Oak on the Kelvin Way by Storm Ophelia in 2017.
- Educational resources including Jessie from creative project and social enterprise Protests and Suffragettes.[4]
- A banner made by Sheana Stephen, Jessie’s great-niece, and carried in a procession in Edinburgh in 2018 to celebrate the centenary of the first women getting the vote.
Jessie continued the fight for equality all her life. She was a woman who could turn her hand to almost anything with skills in organising, networking, marketing and public speaking, and was unafraid to stand up to those whose principles did not measure up to her ideals.
She was an activist almost to her last breath. When she fell ill and was admitted to hospital for the last time, she was due to attend the National Conference of Labour Women. It was reported at her funeral that her last words were: “You’ll have to change my tablets. I’m going to a women’s conference.” What might she have achieved if she had been elected to Parliament? We can only wonder.
Main sources
Corston, J. (2018). Suffragette and activist Jessie Stephen: a life remembered. Retrieved from https://ukvote100.org/2018/03/02/suffragette-and-activist-jessie-stephen-a-life-remembered-by-jean-corston/
Dallas, G. (1975). Jessie. Spare Rib, 32, 10-13.
LSE Women’s Library Collection: The Suffrage interviews. Retrieved from https://www.lse.ac.uk/library/collection-highlights/the-suffrage-interviews. (A collection of oral histories conducted by the historian Brian Harrison between 1974 and 1981. Jessie is number 157 on the list.)
Stephen, J. (n.d.). Submission is for slaves. (Unpublished autobiography. Available in Working Class Movement Library.)
[1] Maryhill Burgh Halls: Jessie Stephen
[2] Bristol – Journey to Justice