Marion Coates Hansen

Marion Coates Hansen, born Marion Coates , was a feminist and womens suffrage campaigner, an early member of the militant Womens Social and Political Union and a founder member of the Womens Freedom League in 1907. She is generally credited with having influenced George Lansbury, the Labour politician and future party leader, to take up the cause of votes for women when she acted as his agent in the general election campaign of 1906. Lansbury became one of the strongest advocates for the womens cause in the pre1914 era.

Hansen spent her almost her whole life in Middlesbrough, and was an active member of the local Independent Labour Party . Born into the welltodo Coates family, she was drawn to socialism through her association with Joseph Fels, the American industrialist and social reformer for whom she worked as a nanny in Philadelphia in the early 1890s. She was one of a group who left the WSPU in protest against the increasingly autocratic attitudes of Emmeline Pankhurst and her family towards the organisations general membership. After the First World War she took up local politics in Middlesbrough, became a local councillor in Middlesbrough, and was involved in housing reform and slum clearance. Her contributions to the cause of womens rights has largely been overlooked by historians, who have tended to concentrate on higher profile figures.

Source: Wikipedia