Mary Jane Clarke


Mary Jane Clarke, was a British suffragette. She was the younger sister of suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst and she was arrested in 23 November 1910. She died after being force fed whilst in prison on Christmas Day 1910 - the suffragette's "first woman martyr".

Biography

Clarke was born in Salford and was one of ten children; her older sister Emmeline Pankhurst being one of them. Her father was the managing director of a cotton-printing works. She was educated at the École Normale Supérieure, Paris along with her sister. She was co-founder with Emmeline of the Emerson & Co. shop in Hampstead Row. At the shop, her artistic skills added decoration of the shops’s stock of art-enameled fancy goods and was described in the 1891 census as a "decorative artist". After the Pankursts moved to Manchester in 1893, she helped to reliance Emerson's there in 1898. In December 1895, she married John Clarke. By 1904 she left him, and lived with Sylvia Pankhurst.
In the early years of the Women’s Social and Political Union, Clarke acted as Emmeline Pankhurst's deputy as registrar in Manchester. By February 1906, she was fully involved in the WSPU and in 1907 was appointed a WSPU organiser. In 1909, she led a group, including Irene Dallas, to Downing Street, and was arrested and sentenced to one month in prison.
Clarke had been given a Hunger Strike Medal 'for Valour'.
After being released, she began speaking for the WSPU in Yorkshire in 1909 and by the summer was the organizer supported by Minnie Baldock who was financially supported by Minnie Turner to help Clarke on the south coast in Brighton. She ran the general election campaign in the January 1910 United Kingdom general election.
After Black Friday, 18 November 1910, she was arrested for window smashing, 23 November 1910, and held in HM Prison Holloway and force-fed. She was released on 23 December 1910. She died on 25 December 1910, in Winchmore Hill, London. She was described in her obituary by Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence as "the first woman martyr who has gone to death for this cause".

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