Charlotte Despard

Charlotte French was born on 15 June 1844 in Edinburgh She was educated by a series of governesses and intermittently at private school, but complained in later life that her schooling was 'slipshod' and 'inferior'. Despard was always dubious of authority and ran away from home at the age of 10 getting a train to London "to become a servant". She had five sisters; one, Katherine Harley, also a suffragist, served in the Scottish Women's Hospital during the World War I in France. He died at sea in 1890; they had no children. Despard was a Freemason as a member of Universal Co-Freemasonry, acting as Assistant Deacon in the Co-Masonic procession of September 1911. ==Novels==

Despard's first novel, Chaste as Ice, Pure as Snow was published in 1874. Over the next sixteen years, she wrote ten novels, three of which were never published. ''Outlawed: a Novel on the Women's Suffrage Question'' was written with her friend, Mabel Collins and published in 1908. ==Charity==

Following her husband's death when she was 46, Despard was encouraged by friends to take up charitable work. She was shocked and radicalised by the levels of poverty in London and devoted her time and money to helping poor people in Battersea, including a health clinic, soup kitchen for the unemployed, and youth and working men's clubs in this slum area. Despard lived above one of her welfare shops in one of the poorest areas of Nine Elms during the week. She converted to Roman Catholicism. ==Politics==

Despard became good friends with Eleanor Marx and was a delegate to the Second International, including to the fourth congress in London in 1896. She campaigned against the Boer War as a "wicked war of this Capitalistic government" and she toured the United Kingdom speaking against the use of conscription in the First World War, forming a pacifist organisation called the Women's Peace Crusade to oppose all war. outside No. 10 Downing St prior to being arrested on 19 August 1909 Women's suffrage Despard was a vocal supporter of the Social Democratic Federation and the Independent Labour Party. In 1906 she joined the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies and later was imprisoned four times for activism on women's franchise, She was an active Catholic and on Ash Wednesday in 1907, she went with others to the House of Commons and got arrested. In establishing WFL, Despard was joined by Teresa Billington-Greig, Bessie Drysdale, Edith How-Martyn, Alice Abadam, Marion Coates-Hansen, among others, as signatories to a letter to Emmeline Pankhurst explaining their disquiet on 14 September 1907. In 1911, when first imprisoned with Nina Boyle, Despard was furious when someone paid the fines, allowing them to be released right away; Boyle remarked upon her 'complete and absolute fearlessness'. along with Virginia Crawford, as she realised that the women's movement groups had to work together at times as well. She led the delegation at the Women's Coronation Procession (1911). caravan In 1909, she met Mahatma Gandhi in London, in her role in the Women's Freedom League. The following September, she was with Agnes Husband again on the platform at Regent's Park. In 1914, she spoke along with Anna Munro and Georgiana Solomon at the WFL Hampstead branch 'at home', hosted by Myra Sadd Brown, raising funds for the Women's Suffrage National Aid Corps. which Despard had founded. From 1915 onward, she worked with Agnes Harben and others to maintain international women's movements representation in Britain. In 1919, she was one of twenty British delegates to the Women's International League Congress in Zurich (12–17 May). She is pictured next to Helen Crawfurd from Glasgow. She kept in communication with other suffragists, such as Daisy Solomon. In 1928, Despard was one of the suffrage movement leaders at the celebratory breakfast for the passing of the Equal Franchise Bill. Kate Harvey converted her house, Brackenhill, in Highland Road, Bromley, to a thirty-one-bed hospital, intended for wounded soldiers in World War I. However, refugee women and children were sent there instead. Despard and Harvey bought a 12-acre tract in Upper Hartfield, which they also called 'Brackenhill'. Harvey had become involved in Theosophyas did Despardand the children from Bromley were transferred to The Cloisters, an open-air school dedicated to that cause in Letchworth. The School in Hartfield became an Open Air School, which closed in 1939. ==Later life==

Unlike other suffragists, Despard refused as a pacifist to become involved in the British Army's recruitment campaign during World War I, a stance different from that of her family: her brother, Field Marshal John French, was Chief of the Imperial General Staff of the British Army and commander of the British Expeditionary Force sent to Europe in August 1914, and their sister Katherine Harley served in the Scottish Women's Hospital in France. She was a vegetarian and anti-vivisectionist. She was associated with London Vegetarian Society, becoming president in 1918 and vice-president in 1931, She supported the Save the Children charity and Indian independence movement. Despard was a board member of the World Congress of Faiths in the 1930s. ==Activism in Ireland, and communism==

In 1908 Despard joined Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington, Margaret Cousins and other feminists to form the Irish Women's Franchise League. She urged members to boycott the 1911 Census and withhold taxes and provided financial support to workers during the 1913 Dublin lock-out. In 1918, Despard provided a forward to her dissection of the evolving relationship between the sexes,The Feminine in Fiction. After World War I, she settled in Dublin and was a supporter of Éamon de Valera, but they were later reconciled. She was classed as a dangerous subversive under the 1927 Public Safety Act by the Irish Free State government for her opposition to the Anglo-Irish Treaty and her house was occasionally raided by the authorities. In 1930, Despard toured the Soviet Union to look at workers' conditions there. Impressed with what she saw, she joined the Communist Party of Great Britain. She met and was photographed with the Indian independence leader Subhas Chandra Bose when he visited Ireland in 1936. She remained actively political well into her 80s and 90s, giving anti-fascist speeches in the likes of Trafalgar Square in the 1930s. She died, aged 95, after a fall at her new house, Nead-na-Gaoithe, Whitehead, County Antrim, near Belfast in November 1939. She was buried in the Republican Plot at Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin. ==Legacy==

On death, she was described as someone who "brought home to English people an understanding of what womenhood could be capable of when inspired by fiery ardour for what it truly believed to be a great cause for humanity". ==Publications==

• Chaste as Ice, Pure as Snow. Vol. I; Vol. II; Vol. III (Philadelphia: Porter and Coates, 1874) • Jonas Sylvester (London: Sonnenschein and Co., 1886) • ''The Rajah's Heir. A Novel''. Vol. I; Vol. II (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1890) • A Voice from the Dim Millions; Being the True History of a Working Woman (1891) • ''Economic Aspects of Woman's Suffrage'' (London: King, 1908) • Collins, Mabel and Despard, Charlotte, Outlawed: A Novel on the Suffrage Question (London: Drame, 1908) • ''Theosophy and the Women's Movement'' (London: Theosophical Society, 1913) ==See also==