The Women’s Social and Political Union may have started life in Manchester (Museum secures rare relic from the fight for women’s right to vote, 7 September) but the suffragette movement moved to London because, as Christabel Pankhurst said, politicians took more notice of “demonstrations of the feminine bourgeoisie than of the female proletariat”. Its committee rooms, once thronged with Lancashire mill hands, were now packed with ladies in silks and satins, not all of them as sensitive to the plight of their less affluent sisterhood as the champion of rational dress, Lady Harberton.
Don Chapman
Author, Wearing the Trousers: Fashion, Freedom and the Rise of the Modern Woman
• Good on Father Alan Everett (‘Lights … signalling faint hope, until floor by floor the darkenss snuffed them out’, 11 September) for placing poetry at the heart of a devastated community and for also providing real practical help and assistance when the Grenfell Tower victims needed it the most. This is indeed a man who cares and has ensured that 14 June 2017 will stay in our minds forever.
Judith A Daniels
Great Yarmouth, Norfolk
