#BehindEveryGreatCity
Nominate women born or having worked or campaigned in London.
The Mayor’s #BehindEveryGreatCity campaign celebrates 100 years since the first women won the right to vote in the UK. Women are behind some of the greatest achievements and discoveries in London, in the past and the present. We want to shine a spotlight on these women and their achievements, and we’d like your help.
The discussion ran from 05 February 2018 - 05 May 2018
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Community Member 6 years agoMargaret Thatcher. I can't think of anyone else that could or would have managed to have such a massive attendance on the day she went through London on a gun carriage. It was an amazing sight and feeling to be a small part of that day. No...
Show full commentMargaret Thatcher. I can't think of anyone else that could or would have managed to have such a massive attendance on the day she went through London on a gun carriage. It was an amazing sight and feeling to be a small part of that day. No politician, male or female has anywhere near the guts that she had. A massive loss to this nation.
Show less of commentAnonymous - account deleted
Community Member 6 years agoMargaret Thatcher. She saved London from the worst excesses of union militancy, enforced financial discipline on borough authorities and the greater London council, and her economic policies brought unprecedented prosperity to London and...
Show full commentMargaret Thatcher. She saved London from the worst excesses of union militancy, enforced financial discipline on borough authorities and the greater London council, and her economic policies brought unprecedented prosperity to London and its population. London found pride again following decades of mediocrity and decline.
Show less of commentdenistyurenkov
Community Member 6 years agoJane Goodall - born in London and is second only to David Attenborough when it comes to wildlife. Her life really deserves as much appreciation and attention as possible - a true legend and example for all young girls who care for...
Show full commentJane Goodall - born in London and is second only to David Attenborough when it comes to wildlife. Her life really deserves as much appreciation and attention as possible - a true legend and example for all young girls who care for environment.
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Official Representative 6 years agoHi Denistyurenkov
Thank you for your suggestion! Dr Jane Goodall was selected a few weeks ago and was featured on the Mayor's Instagram account.
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Anonymous - account deleted
Community Member 6 years agoKatie Hopkins because she speaks the unvarnished truth.
TMcMurray
Community Member 6 years agoI wish to nominate Anne Isabella Milbanke, later Lady Byron, a noted campaigner on education, penal reform & anti-slavery. Founder of the Ealing Grove School, which enabled children from poor backgrounds to access education. Lady Byron's...
Show full commentI wish to nominate Anne Isabella Milbanke, later Lady Byron, a noted campaigner on education, penal reform & anti-slavery. Founder of the Ealing Grove School, which enabled children from poor backgrounds to access education. Lady Byron's daughter Ada, aka Countess Lovelace, was credited with writing the first algorithm approximately 100yrs before the invention of the computer
Show less of commentJad Adams
Community Member 6 years agoMary Wollstonecraft, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792) who taught education as a solution to 'blind obedience' - women must take their own future in their hands.
Talk London
Official Representative 6 years agoThanks everyone for sharing! We've received a couple more nominations via our feedback form:
"Octavia Hill. Because she achieved much in social housing, albeit preferring the charitable route to the municipal, and was a founder of the National Trust.
Susie McKenna. As Creative Director of the Hackney Empire for seven years she creates London's best Christmas panto every year, set up the Hackney Empire Community Choir (headed up by wonderful award-winning Sharon D Clarke), managed the creative learning and community programme, including directing Hackney Empire's Artist Development Programme. All round wonderful woman."
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Paul Watt
Community Member 6 years agoJasmin Stone and Sam Middleton from the Focus E15 housing campaign who, as working-class women, have done far more than most politicians in highlighting and challenging the London housing crisis.
Change the World
Community Member 6 years agoI would like to nominate Adelaide Knight born in the east of of London 1871-1950, an east end suffragette. In 1906 Adelaide who was secretary of Canning Town Women's Social and Political Union made the difficult choice to go to prision for...
Show full commentI would like to nominate Adelaide Knight born in the east of of London 1871-1950, an east end suffragette. In 1906 Adelaide who was secretary of Canning Town Women's Social and Political Union made the difficult choice to go to prision for six weeks rather than be bound over from campaigning for a year. This was despite the fact that as a disabled woman her health was frail. She and two other women had been arrested for seeking a meeting with Mr Asquith the then Chancellor who was opposed to votes for women. In a letter written from prison to her husband Donald, Adelaide wrote " If they want us to obey the law, they must allow us to have a voice in the making of the laws to which our obediance is demanded. " Adelaide was describe by a fellow suffragette Dora Montifiore as "... a delicate little woman with a large family of children, but who never spared herself when it came to real militant work either at meetings, or in the street. She was more than once injured in some of the scuffles with the police, which took place between them and the militant suffragists; she went to prison when the time came for it to be necessary for her to do so and she shrank from nothing that would help forward by word or deed the revolutionary changes for which she stood." Adelaide joined the West Ham Board of Guardians and fought for social justice all of her life. Adelaide was my great grandmother.
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Official Representative 6 years agoHi Change The World
Thank you for sharing your nomination. Adelaide Knight was featured as this week's Hidden Credit on the Mayor's Instagram and Facebook page.
Talk London
iod
Community Member 6 years agoI would like to nominate Harriet Harman. She was born in London, has represented a London borough for decades. She was an excellent minister for women and has continued to fight for women's rights including the right not to be sexually...
Show full commentI would like to nominate Harriet Harman. She was born in London, has represented a London borough for decades. She was an excellent minister for women and has continued to fight for women's rights including the right not to be sexually harassed.
Show less of commentAnonymous - account deleted
Community Member 6 years agoDoreen Lawrence
Talk London
Official Representative 6 years agoAnother one from our feedback form, thanks for sharing!
"Kate Davies. Kate is CEO of Notting Hill Genesis, she is passionate about ensuring that London is able to meet the housing needs of lower income Londoners with high quality housing and services."
Talk London
Anonymous - account deleted
Community Member 6 years agoThe Royal College of Music Museum would like to nominate Dame Ethel Smyth - the first female composer to have an opera produced at Covent Garden! She broke down many barriers for women in music, and was also actively involved in the women's...
Show full commentThe Royal College of Music Museum would like to nominate Dame Ethel Smyth - the first female composer to have an opera produced at Covent Garden! She broke down many barriers for women in music, and was also actively involved in the women's suffrage movement. Smyth was great friends with Pankhurst, and was imprisoned at Holloway for her involvement with protests.
She also wrote the official suffragette anthem 'The March of the Women', which was sung by women up and down the country. When one friend visited her in prison, he found a chorus of defiant female prisoners singing 'The March of the Women'. Smyth was leaning out of her cell window - conducting their performance with a toothbrush!
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Official Representative 6 years agoAnother nomination, thanks for sharing!
"I’d like to nominate Constance Coltman (1889-1969): suffragist, pacifist, advocate for full gender equality and for women’s reproductive rights, and church minister. Born in Putney, she studied at Oxford. In 1917 she became the first woman to be ordained in a mainstream UK church denomination. Ordained alongside her fiancé Claud (they married the next day), they together served the East End mission of Mayfair’s King’s Weigh House Congregational Church for five years; their subseqent ministry included a congregation in Kilburn and a later return to King’s Weigh House. Constance helped to found the Fellowship of Women Ministers and the Society for the Ministry of Women, and until her death in 1969 continued to provide personal encouragement and support to women seeking to break through what at that time continued to be something of a ‘stained-glass ceiling’.
The centenary of Constance’s trailblazing ordination was widely celebrated in UK churches last year; it’s all the more remarkable to recall that her ordination even pre-dated women’s suffrage."
Talk London
Talk London
Official Representative 6 years agoHi everyone
You're invited to the Millicent Fawcett statue unveiling ceremony on Tuesday 24 April, from 11.00-12.00 on Parliament Square. Hers will be the first ever statue of a woman in Parliament Square, and the first ever statue there to be created by a woman artist, Gillian Wearing OBE.
You can find all the event information on this page: https://www.london.gov.uk/events/2018-04-24/millicent-fawcett-statue-un…
Talk London
Talk London
Official Representative 6 years agoAnother one from the feedback form, thanks for sharing:
Helena Kennedy Because she achieved success in an extremely competitive and male dominated field. She always comes across as a well informed individual who speaks sense and can bring a reasoned debate to a complex subject. Admirable!
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Anonymous - account deleted
Community Member 6 years agoI would like to nominate Catherine Booth, who helped her husband William Booth found the Salvation Army Christian Church. You can read about her on Wikipedia, including her work where she lobbied Queen Victoria to seek legislation for...
Show full commentI would like to nominate Catherine Booth, who helped her husband William Booth found the Salvation Army Christian Church. You can read about her on Wikipedia, including her work where she lobbied Queen Victoria to seek legislation for safeguarding in the form of the “Parliamentary Bill for the protection of girls”. Quoting from Wikipedia “Catherine Booth organised “Food for the million” shops where the poor could buy a cheap meal, and at Christmas hundreds of meals were distributed to the needy.” Her legacy lives on today, in the Catherine Booth Hospital, run by the Salvation Army in Tamil Nadu, India; and in other Salvation Army projects around the world. More information is available from the UK Salvation Army website Salvation Army.org.uk.
Show less of commentTalk London
Official Representative 6 years agoAnd another one, thanks for sharing everyone!:
Sajda Mughal the only known Muslim survivor of 7/7 has dedicated her life to work with her community to prevent and tackle online Islamic extremism. Mughal's life was irreversibly shaped by terrorism, she seeks to change attitudes of others in order combat online radicalisation.
Mughal is CEO at the women's charity, JAN Trust, based in Haringey, London. JAN Trust an innovative and unique programme, Web Guardians™. Designed to build community resilience through the education and empowerment of Muslim women and mothers to prevent and tackle online extremism. Built on the notion that Muslim women, as trusted anchors within the family unit, they are best placed to help us in our fight to prevent online radicalisation.
Mughal works tirelessly in an increasingly divided platform to provide a voice for women, working towards countering terrorism, and providing young people with the tools to achieve their ambitions in creating a better and safe society.
Over the years Mughal has also been targeted by extremists where she has faced death threats, abuse, hate mail and her property vandalised. This has not deterred her but has driven her further to drive out hate from our society, and to build a safer society for future generations.
Talk London
Official Representative 6 years agoFrom the feedback form: (Rosa) May Billinghurst was born in Lewisham in 1873 and was paralysed from the waist down during her childhood following an illness. As a young woman, she began volunteering in the Deptford slums with her sister, Alice, and these experiences working with the women living in poverty in her community strengthened her desire to work improving the lives of women in London. Rosa was an active member of the WSPU and used to cycle to demonstrations in her adapted wheelchair. She suffered being tipped from her chair, having her tyres deflated and being beaten by the police in her efforts to support the women's suffrage movement. May Billinghurst was arrested on many occasion and was sentenced to both hard labour and subjected to force feeding during her work campaigning for votes for women. She remained active following the Representation of the People's Act in 1918, working on Christabel Pankhurst's election campaign for the first general election open to women in the UK.
Talk London
Official Representative 6 years agoA few more suggestions from our feedback form:
Sharon Pursey is the co-founder of the world's first app using artificial intelligence to protect children from sextortion. Sharon co-founded the app, SafeToNet, which protects children online so they can fully benefit from using the internet without fear of exploitation, molestation, or extortion. The app provides expert information and intelligent tools to empower Informed and Collaborative Safeguarding, helping to protect children from harm. Sharon is also CEO of the SafeToNet Foundation, a charitable arm of the company that partners with charities and public-sector bodies to help make the internet a safer place for children and young people. Sharon speaks to the government, schools, welfare groups and charities, raising awareness of the online risks children face and how we can all take measures to safeguard our children.
Mrs Sara Jayne Stanes OBE. As CEO of The Royal Academy of Culinary Arts Sara has been a major influence on the education and training of Chefs and Restaurant Managers. She has been the driving force with this organisation over the last 30 years when it has also formed the Charity Chefs Adopt A School. Adopt A School has been delivering food education to children in schools since 1990.
The Academy has made a huge impact over its 35 years in the hospitality industry that is so vital to our economy. She is also the Chairman of The Academy of Chocolate which she helped start with its successful Awards programme that is held annually in London. She has published books on Chocolate and also lectures on the subject. She has live in London for over 55 years and the above organisations are based in London also.
Talk London
Talk London
Official Representative 6 years agoSharon Pursey was featured as Hidden Credit on the Mayor's Instagram account on 20 August. Thanks very much for the nomination!
Talk London
Anonymous - account deleted
Community Member 6 years agoI am sure there are far many more unsung heroines AND hero's that should be acknowledged, rather than founders of a commercial enterprise, who have or still do provide unpaid volunteer duties.
I would like to nominate Mrs Ann Chambers who...
Show full commentI am sure there are far many more unsung heroines AND hero's that should be acknowledged, rather than founders of a commercial enterprise, who have or still do provide unpaid volunteer duties.
I would like to nominate Mrs Ann Chambers who has been poppy collecting for the Royal British Legion, Twickenham for many, many years. She has been out in all weathers standing for hours, at her advanced years, collecting then returning to base on an almost daily basis and armed with another half dozen boxes is out again ranging from one end of Twickenham to the other. In what little spare time she has left she also looks after the flower arrangement at her local church, she puts me to shame with her energy in volunteer work. She is the epitome of a woman that deserves the respect and due acknowledgement for her unselfish commitment to others.
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