Miss Mary Raleigh Richardson

Other sources: http://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/C4769024
https://womanandhersphere.com/tag/rokeby-venus/
http://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/suffragettes/8321.shtml
Elizabeth Crawford, The Women's Suffrage Movement: A Reference Guide 1866?1928 (1999); Mary Richardson, Laugh a Defiance (1953)

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

Additional Information: Mary left Canada for Europe aged 16 with friends and settled in England. She likely joined the WSPU in 1909 and worked in one of their shops in Charing Cross, London. Mary was present in November 1910 on 'Black Friday', so named because of the violent treatment meted out to women protestors by police. It was one year later, in 1911, that Mary committed her first act of militancy, smashing three windows at the Home Office. Arrest records for her are conflicting. Arrests for such early actions do not appear, so perhaps she used an alias? She is first recorded in the Home Office records in 1913. That year, there were multiple arrests and multiple hunger strikes by Mary, who was released under the 'Cat and Mouse Act' only to offend again. In autumn 1913, when out as a 'mouse', she was arrested for setting fire to a house owned by the Countess of Carlisle. She went on hunger strike in prison and was forcibly fed. The authorities did not want to let Mary go again. In 1914, she was out and was arrested for her most well-known militant act, which was the slashing of a famous painting called 'The Rokeby Venus' in the National Art Gallery in London, which depicted the idealised semi-naked body of a young woman. Mary said that she had done it to show the contrast between the public's indifference to the slow destruction of the body of WSPU leader Emmeline Pankhurst, through continual imprisonment and hunger striking, and their 'outrage' over the destruction of a painting deemed as more 'valuable'. Many years later, Mary said that she had in fact chosen the painting because she hated pictures of female nudes, produced simply for men to look at and 'gloat over'. She was imprisoned for six months for the act and forcibly fed. She became quite ill and needed long-term convalescence upon her release. She later wrote an autobiography, in which she said that it was her 'rootlessess' in early life that enabled her to commit fully to militancy, with no family or other commitments to restrain her. During the First World War, Mary worked for Sylvia Pankhurst, helping poor communities in the East End, and joined the United Suffragists (US) in 1915.

Other Suffrage Activities: After the First World War, Mary stood unsuccesfully for Parliament and controversially became one of the leading members of the British Union of Fascists.