On October 24, 1906, Hannah Mitchell was arrested in Manchester for participating in a suffragette protest outside a Liberal Party meeting. She had interrupted the meeting — a tactic developed by the Women's Social and Political Union — and been removed by police. This was one of many arrests. She later described the physical deterioration from the recurring cycle of protest, arrest, hunger strike, and force-feeding as something she could not have imagined in advance.

Mitchell was born in 1871 in Derbyshire into a farming family and had almost no formal schooling. She educated herself by reading anything she could find, moved to Manchester, and became active in both the Independent Labour Party and the suffragette movement. She was a working-class woman in a movement that was substantially led by middle- and upper-class women, and she wrote extensively about the class dynamics of the suffrage campaign.

The more famous case is Sylvia Pankhurst — daughter of Emmeline, sister of Christabel — who worked in the East London Federation of Suffragettes specifically with working-class women and was eventually expelled from the WSPU by her own mother and sister for her class politics and her opposition to World War I.

Emmeline Pankhurst is the name in the history books. Sylvia Pankhurst's work building a suffrage and welfare organization in the East End of London — including a day nursery, a cost-price restaurant, and a clinic — and her subsequent decades of labor organizing, anti-fascist work, and campaigns for Ethiopian independence, are known primarily to specialists.