Actresses' Franchise League

In 1908 the Actresses' Franchise League was founded by Gertrude Elliott, Adeline Bourne, Winifred Mayo and Sime Seruya at a meeting in the Criterion Restaurant in London.

British actresses who joined included Sybil Thorndike, Italia Conti, Inez Bensusan, Madge Kendal, Gertrude Elliott, Ellen Terry, Lillah McCarthy, Decima Moore, Cicely Hamilton, Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale, Christabel Marshall, Lena Ashwell, Edith Craig, Janette Steer, Ellison Scotland Gibb, Violet Key Jones and Lillie Langtry.

The League itself was strictly neutral in regard to suffrage tactics meaning the organisation did not either publicly endorse or condemn militancy.

The AFL set up offices at 2 Robert Street, Adelphi, near Charing Cross Station, and had branches across Britain in Edinburgh, Glasgow, Liverpool, and Eastbourne.

Representatives of the AFL and WAB sat on the advisory council of the Equal Pay Campaign Committee in the 1940s and 1950s and other members worked to raise funds for residential homes for both elderly women and men.

The last event held by AFL was a ball at the Savoy Hotel in December 1958 to commemorate its fiftieth anniversary.

[6] Many of the plays created for the AFL to perform have been reprinted since the 1980s, most recently by Dr Naomi Paxton in two anthologies with Methuen Drama in 2013 and 2018 [7] From October 2018 to January 2019 there was an exhibition at the National Theatre in London about the Actresses' Franchise League and Women Writers' Suffrage League.