Lydia Becker

Lydia Becker (1827-1890) was born in Manchester, the eldest of 15 children. When Lydia was 18 years old her mother died and she was left with much of the responsibility of raising her younger brothers and sisters. She became interested in botany and astronomy and published Botany for Novices and Elementary Astronomy in the late 1860s.

In 1866 Lydia attended a lecture on votes for women in Manchester and immediately joined the cause of the suffragettes. She wrote an article on the subject for the Contemporary Review magazine and later that year joined with Emily Davies and Elizabeth Wolstenholme to form the Manchester Women's Suffrage Committee.

In 1870 Lydia became the editor of the Women's Suffrage Journal and was elected as a governor on the Manchester Schools Board. She had very strong and progressive views on the education of young women and in 1877, on hearing that a new girl's school being built by the Manchester Board was to offer cookery lessons, remarked that 'if she had her own way, every boy in Manchester would be taught to mend his own socks and cook his own chops.'

In 1874 Parliament considered a proposal that single women be allowed the vote, but not married women. Lydia Becker, who was single, supported this suggestion as a temporary solution, which outraged many of the married suffragettes. She died in 1890 having caught diptheria in the health resort of Aix-les-Bains, without having realised her main objective--the full vote for women was eventually obtained in 1928.