Agnes Harben

[13] The Harbens provided a home for Annie Kenney after one of her imprisonments, supported Rachel Barrett and many other suffragettes, released from prison to aid recovery from hunger strike and force-feeding.

At that time it was considered startling enough, and it required all the tact of Harben and his socially very competent wife to oil the wheels of tea-table intercourse, and to fill the embarrassed pauses which punctuated any attempt at conversation.

[15] On 13 February 1914, Harben became one of the founder committee[16] members of the United Suffragists which brought together militant and non-militant women and included men, like her husband, along with Louisa Garrett Anderson, H. J. Gillespie, Gerald Gould, Bessie Lansbury and George Lansbury, Mary Neal, Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence, Julia Scurr and John Scurr, Evelyn Sharp, and Edith Ayrton; Louise Eates and Lena Ashwell also became members in 1914, and the organisation grew rapidly, and it took over the publishing of the weekly Votes for Women from the militant WSPU.

[11] United Suffragist colours were purple, white and orange used in banners for suffrage events and processions, but their activity extended to clubs for working women in Southwark and grew across the country as they took members from WPSU and NUWSS e.g. in Birmingham and Portsmouth.

[11] In 1915, Harben attending the International Women's Suffrage Alliance helped to establish the Women's International League of Great Britain with Sylvia Pankhurst, Mary Sheepshanks, Charlotte Despard, Helen Crawfurd, Mary Barbour, Agnes Dollan, Ethel Snowden, Ellen Wilkinson, Margery Corbett-Ashby, Selina Cooper, Helena Swanwick, Olive Schreiner.