24 Facts About Lydia Becker

Lydia Ernestine Becker was a leader in the early British suffrage movement, as well as an amateur scientist with interests in biology and astronomy.

Lydia Becker established Manchester as a centre for the suffrage movement and with Richard Pankhurst she arranged for the first woman to vote in a British election and a court case was unsuccessfully brought to exploit the precedent.

Lydia Becker was educated at home, like many girls at the time.

Lydia Becker began a correspondence with Charles Darwin and soon afterwards convinced him to send a paper to the society.

Lydia Becker forwarded Darwin a copy of her "little book", Botany for Novices.

Lydia Becker is one of a number of 19th-century women who contributed, often routinely, to Darwin's scientific work.

Lydia Becker was recognised for her own scientific contributions, being awarded a national prize in the 1860s for a collection of dried plants prepared using a method that she had devised so that they retained their original colours.

Lydia Becker dedicated herself to organising around the issue, and in January 1867 convened the first meeting of the Manchester Women's Suffrage Committee, one of the first organisations of its kind in England.

Lydia Becker got to know there Dr Richard Pankhurst, known as 'the red Doctor' whom Becker described as 'a very clever little man with some extraordinary sentiments about life in general and women in particular'.

Lydia Becker was not the first but she was a good opportunity for publicity.

Lydia Becker visited Maxwell and escorted her to the polling station.

Lydia Becker immediately began encouraging other women heads of households in the region to petition for their names to appear on the rolls.

Lydia Becker moved the resolution that women should be granted voting rights on the same terms as men.

Lydia Becker subsequently commenced a lecture tour of northern cities on behalf of the society.

Lydia Becker published her correspondence with her supporters and her opponents, notably in 1870, when she chastised the MP for Caernarvonshire after he voted against a proposal offering women the vote.

Lydia Becker became the chair of the Central Committee of the National Society for Women's Suffrage.

Lydia Becker differed from many early feminists in her disputation of essentialised femininity.

Lydia Becker differed with many suffrage activists in arguing more strenuously for the voting rights of unmarried women.

Women connected to husbands and stable sources of income, Lydia Becker believed, were less desperately in need of the vote than widows and single women.

In 1890 Lydia Becker visited the spa town of Aix-les-Bains, where she fell ill and died of diphtheria, aged 63.

Lydia Becker's name is listed on the south face of the Reformers Memorial in Kensal Green Cemetery in London.

Lydia Becker's name is listed on her father's gravestone in the churchyard of the Parish Church of St James, Altham in Lancashire.

The archives of Lydia Becker are held at the Women's Library at the Library of the London School of Economics.

The institute is named after Lydia Becker because she was a celebrated natural scientist who conversed with Charles Darwin and because she strongly believed that women were intellectually equal to men and deserved the same opportunities.