Not the most well-known suffragette, but the noisiest! The story of Dundee’s Ethel Moorhead

THEY overcame male chauvinism to earn the right to vote.

But a Dundee historian believes a forthcoming movie about them is missing a trick.

Meryl Streep, Helena Bonham Carter and Carey Mulligan will be in London’s Leicester Square on Wednesday night for the premiere of Suffragette.

The film covers most of the well-established events during the Emmeline Pankhurst-led struggle for female emancipation a century ago.

But Mary Henderson, 81, reckons the story of Dundee resident Ethel Moorhead would make for a more action-packed movie.

“She was probably not the most prominent but she was certainly the noisiest,” says Mary, who has written an unpublished book on Ethel.

“I would love to see a film made about her life.”

Born in Kent in 1869, Ethel spent some time studying in Paris before heading to Glasgow and then settling in Dundee.

Her involvement with female suffrage began in 1910 when she joined the Women’s Social and Political Union, the movement formed by Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst in 1903.

Her first recorded act of dissent was in 1911 when she threw an egg at Winston Churchill at a political meeting in Dundee.

She was the first woman in the city to refuse to pay tax on the basis of “no taxation without representation”.

Ethel Moorhead

Making little headway with the male lawmakers through civil disobedience, the suffragettes turned to acts of violence and vandalism with Ethel a leading light in the campaign.

In the two years leading up to the outbreak of the First World War she was in and out of prisons across Scotland.

She smashed a glass case at the Wallace Monument and threw a stone at a car carrying Chancellor Lloyd George.

After being arrested in Glasgow for possession of fire-lighting equipment, she was sent to prison for eight months. In jail again and on hunger strike in February 1914 this time for allegedly planning an arson attack on Traquair House she became the first suffragette to be force-fed in Scotland.

Once war broke out with Germany, Ethel and the rest of the suffragette movement ended their campaign and were to play vital roles in the war effort.

After the war, and with the battle for women’s votes won (for property owners aged over 30, at least) Ethel returned to Paris where she married the writer Ernest Walsh. She died in Dublin in 1955.

“I don’t think people realise what it took to get the vote,” concludes Mary.

“It makes me extremely frustrated when they don’t exercise that right. If you don’t vote you don’t have a right to complain.”

Suffragette is at cinemas from October 12.Politics Podcast: Suffragette Special – Click here to listen