Dora Thewlis


Dora Thewlis was a British suffragette.

Early life

Dora was born in Honley, near Huddersfield in the West Riding of Yorkshire in 1890. She was one of seven children born to James and Eliza Thewlis. At the time James was working locally as a weaver. Dora worked in a Yorkshire mill as a teen.

As a suffragette

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. She was patronised by the judge at her court appearance and labelled the 'Baby Suffragette' and the 'little mill hand' by the press. She appeared on the front page of the Daily Mirror after the event, with the caption "Suffragettes storm the House."
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 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 served one. On her departure escorted by a warderess, she met 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 married Jack Dow. She died in 1976.