The question is a bit of a red herring, as our piscine prop correspondent Angus Young reports on a remarkable, pioneering militant heroine.
As a working-class woman Selina Cooper was a rarity. Most of the prominent figures in the women’s suffrage movement of the early 20th century were from the middle or even upper classes of British society. Selina, on the other hand, had left school at 13 to work full-time in a Lancashire cotton mill to help support her widowed mother who was raising six other children. She soon became involved in trade unionism and in 1896 she founded a local branch of the Women’s Cooperative Guild in her home town of Nelson. Four years later became involved with the North of England Society for Women’s Suffrage.
Selina’s organisational and speaking skills soon attracted attention and before long she was campaigning alongside the likes of Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst and presenting petitions to Parliament. In 1907 she became a full-time organiser for the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, touring the country as an in-demand public speaker. In November that year she came to Hull in a visit recalled by her daughter Mary in a series of interviews given to author Jill Liddington for a 1984 biography called The Life and Times of a Respectable Rebel.
It seems Selina was not only an impressive speaker but also knew how to cope with regular heckling and rough treatment. Mary recalled her mother setting off for Hull early that morning to make sure she had plenty of time to advertise her meeting later that day, writing the details in chalk on pavements in the city centre.
“As she chalked the flags, all these men met her. She usually got antagonism and she was alarmed by them. There was a fish auction on and these men escorted her to the dock where they kept the live fish in tanks for hotels. They took my mother and they said: ‘We’ve got a platform ready for you Mrs Cooper’. They knew her name because it was on all of the publicity. My mother was a strong woman, five foot seven and broad built. They took her on and she thought: ‘There’s something funny about this’.
“She started speaking and the lid started coming up. She put her legs astride to sort of hold it and there were live bass in it, live fish, Anyhow, she stood it and they clapped her like mad when she finished because she stuck at it.”
Selina’s experience at Albert Dock didn’t put her off. She continued to campaign for women to have the right to vote. Three years later she was one of four women chosen to present the case for women’s suffrage to Prime Minister Herbert Asquith.
She remained politically active for the rest of her life; opposing the First World War, developing the first ever maternity centre in Nelson, becoming a magistrate in 1924 and joining a small delegation to visit four women prisoners held in Nazi Germany in 1934. She later resigned from the Labour Party because she believed the party was not taking a strong enough stand against fascism.
In her own words, Selina Cooper once summed up what kept her campaigning. “One reason why I am a convinced suffragist is that the mothers (even as wage earners) take the greater share of responsibility in the upbringing of their children; therefore, they ought to have the greater means, not the less, to enable them to do justice to the rising generation.”