Thewlis was sixteen when she joined the
Women's Social and Political Union in 1907. She was arrested the same year, having been part of a planned break in into the
Houses of Parliament, when seventy-five women were arrested. She was labelled the
Baby Suffragette and the 'little mill hand' by the press. She appeared on the front page of the
Daily Mirror (picture to the right) after the event, with the caption "
Suffragettes storm the House," This kind of adverse publicity was not welcomed by the suffrage movement. The judge suggested her parents might take her in hand and sort her out. Their reply was she was her own person and they fully supported her. The family were socialists and her mother Eliza was quoted in the
Huddersfield Weekly Examiner as saying that she had brought Dora up to read newspapers since the age of 7 and to debate politics. The family had also supported
Mrs Pankhurst at the local by-election. Dora's sentence was two weeks in prison, but she served one. On her departure escorted by a wardress, she met with
Edith How-Martyn. Thewlis emigrated to Australia before the start of the First World War, therefore never seeing the passage of women's suffrage in England, and in 1918 she married Jack Dow, who predeceased her in 1956. They had two children, == See also ==