Mrs Julia Sarah Anne Cobden-Sanderson

Other sources: http://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/C4769024
https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portrait/mw17030/Julia-Sarah-Anne-Cobden-Sanderson?LinkID=mp16623&role=sit&rNo=4
Elizabeth Crawford, The Women's Suffrage Movement: A Reference Guide 1866?1928 (1999)

Database linked sources: https://www.suffrageresources.org.uk/activity/3203/what-were-the-suffrage-campaigners-fighting-for

Family information: Father was a famous Liberal MP and radical social reformer, Richard Cobden. Anne married James Sanderson in 1882. They had two children. James was a barrister-turned-bookbinder and was friends with the well-known Arts and Crafts designer William Morris.

Additional Information: Anne (as she preferred to be known) and her family were all well-known supporters of the law-abiding fight for women's suffrage. Anne was friends with Millicent Garrett Fawcett, leader of the NUWSS, and supportive of it as a law-abiding society. However, Anne was one of the first high-profile 'suffragists' to become a militant 'suffragette', joining the WSPU in 1906. She said that the 'throwing out' of Christabel Pankhurst and Annie Kenney from the Free Trade Hall in Manchester in 1905, for interrupting a Liberal Party meeting to ask about votes for women, spurred her into action. She attended a protest meeting in the lobby of the House of Commons in 1906 and was sentenced to two months in prison. At her trial she said, 'I am a law breaker because I want to be a law maker.' However, perhaps because of the Pankhursts' (WSPU leaders) increasingly autocratic (anti-democratic) running of the society, and its break with the Independent Labour Party (ILP), to which Anne belonged, she played a part in forming the breakaway group the Women's Freedom League (WFL) in 1907. She became a champion of the WFL, speaking at numerous meetings, and continued to engage in militant protests. She was arrested for picketing outside Number 10 Downing Street and trying to give the Prime Minister a petition. Anne also joined the Women's Tax Resistance Legaue (WTRL).

Other Suffrage Activities: Anne was a member of the Independent Labour Party (ILP) and founder, with her husband, of the Doves Press. This was a printing and bookbinding firm run along socialist principles, espoused by the Arts and Crafts movement. Anne supported WFL leader Charlotte Despard in 1918 when she stood as a Labour Party candidate in London's North Battersea.