Suffragettes Lining Up for Women's Sunday, 21 June 1908

Women's Sunday was the first 'monster' meeting to be organised by the militant Women's Social and Political Union. Specially chartered trains transported thousands of Suffragettes from all over Britain to march in seven processions through central London to a rally in Hyde Park. The highly choreographed demonstration attracted a crowd of up to 300,000 drawn by the colourful spectacle of the delegates dressed in the suffragette tricolour and carrying over seven hundred embroidered banners. ‘Never’, reported the Daily Chronicle, has so vast a throng gathered in London to witness a parade of political forces’.
Dorothy Hartopp Radcliffe (1887-1959) was an active member of the Women’s Social & Political Union and trusted with a number of official roles at major processions. As well as serving as a flag bearer in Women’s Sunday she was a Banner Marshal for the university graduates in the Women's March to the Albert Hall on 18 June 1910 and a Banner and Colour Captain leading the Empire Pageant for the Women’s Coronation Procession on 17th June 1911.
Radcliffe is also listed as a financial donor to the WSPU campaign ‘war chest.’ Along with other Suffragettes she appears to have refused to participate in the 1911 population census. Dorothy also went to prison for suffragette militancy and in 1913 was arrested using the false name Heather Mitchell.
In later years Dorothy converted to Roman Catholicism and, by 1939, was living as an enclosed nun at the Carmelite Monastery in East Anglia until her death in 1959.