Alice Maud Shipley

Alice Maud Shipley (5 June 1869 – 16 December 1951) was a militant suffragette and member of the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU)[1] who received a prison sentence during which she went on hunger strike and was force-fed, for which action she received the WSPU's Hunger Strike Medal.

[citation needed] Born in Higham Ferrers in Northamptonshire in 1869, the eldest of three children born to Martha née Smith (1845-1876), a dressmaker, and Alfred George Shepherd Shipley (1844-1914), the foreman in a shoe manufactory and a Wesleyan lay evangelist,[2] in 1891 she was a dressmaker like her mother,[3] while by 1901 she was living in Dryfesdale in Dumfriesshire in Scotland as lady's maid to a Mrs Margaret Pairman.

[4] On 21 November 1911 Shipley was among the 223 protesters arrested at a WSPU demonstration at the House of Commons, to which she had travelled with other women from the Edinburgh branch of the WSPU including Elizabeth and Agnes Thomson, Jessie C. Methven, Edith Hudson and a Mrs N Grieve.

I feel our case is a most urgent one, & I feel that only a woman can understand a woman’s needs, that women suffer for the want & care of men, & that their salvation lies in looking after their own needs & in demanding the vote".

[8] Alice Maud Shipley died in Edinburgh in Scotland in 1951 and was buried in the family plot of the Pairman family in the churchyard of St Mary's church in Biggar, South Lanarkshire.