Miss Evelyn Jane Sharp

Other sources: http://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/C4769024
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/09612020300200344
Elizabeth Crawford, The Women's Suffrage Movement: A Reference Guide 1866?1928 (1999)

Additional Information: Evelyn joined the WSPU in 1906 and was member of the Kensington branch in London. She became an active writer and speaker for the suffrage cause, admired even by those who did not agree with votes for women for her persuasiveness. Evelyn was at the heart of a number of WSPU processions, was an organiser in the Kensington area, and was even sent to Denmark to lecture there on the militant movement. She stayed away from too much trouble, as she had promised this to her mother, who was terrified at the thought of her being imprisoned. However, in 1910, her mother released her from this promise and she joined the very next deputation to the House of Commons but was not arrested. Evelyn illegally 'resisted' the 1911 government census survey by refusing to give the required details at her home in 15 Mount Carmel Chambers, Dukes Lane, London. Her first arrest came in 1911 when she broke windows as part of a demonstration against the government's 'torpedoing' of the promised Conciliation Bill. She was sentenced to two weeks in prison. She was arrested again in 1912, this time with Lady Sybil Smith, while taking part in a protest against the 'Cat and Mouse Act'. She was sentenced to two weeks in prison, went on hunger strike and was released after four days unconditionally. This meant that Evelyn's sentence had not only been shortened but she would not be rearrested. She put this unusual treatment down to having been arrested with a titled 'Lady'. When Emmeline and Frederick Pethick-Lawrence, who edited the WSPU Votes for Women newspaper, were arrested in 1912, Evelyn became editor in their absence, largely giving up her own writing career to do so. She stayed loyal to the Pethick-Lawrences when they were 'ousted' from the WSPU later that year by the Pankhursts, but seems to have stayed a member of the WSPU until 1913. In 1914, she was one of the founders of the United Suffragists (US), who sought to continue working for women's suffrage during the First World War, and Evelyn was also a pacifist. She was a member of the executive committee of the National Council for Adult Suffrage in 1916 and refused to pay her taxes in 1917, forcing her into bankruptcy. Women's suffrage advocate Henry Nevinson (see Henry Nevinson) wrote of Evelyn in 1913, 'She has one of the most beautiful minds I know... At times, she is the very best speaker among the suffragettes, and Holloway [Prison] knows her, for savage rage tears her heart.' Following his wife's death in 1933, Henry and Evelyn married. Evelyn published a fascinating series of vignettes about suffragette life in a book called Rebel Women (1910).