On the Saturday of the weekend celebrating Soroptimist International Manchester’s centenary our guests enjoyed (despite the cold weather!) a guided walking tour by www.jonathanschofieldtours.com on ‘Suffragettes, Significant Women and Manchester’.
We heard about the Pankhurst family, Lydia Becker, Annie Kenney and many more heroines of the female suffrage movement in Manchester who are commemorated in this stroll around interiors, buildings and landmarks where women fought for representation. There are stories of reasoned argument, attacks on paintings, arrests and the raising of the Votes for Women banner on 13 October, 1905.
We also learnt about some exceptional and eccentric women that have featured prominently in the Manchester story from Ann Lee ‘the bride of Christ’, through Ann Bland, Elizabeth Raffald, Mary Fildes, Elizabeth Gaskell, Shena Simon.
We warmed and enjoyed a traditionally British lunch, fish & chips in the main, in Mr Thomas’s Chop House which was established in 1867.
On Sunday morning Katarina enjoyed visiting member Susan, volunteering at the at the Pankhurst Centre and made a very striking Suffragette!
Rachelle Manders-Ratcliff