[3] Quinn took part in WSPU protests including chaining herself to the House of Commons railings and was arrested five times, and imprisoned after protesting when Prime Minister Asquith came to Leeds,[5] brutally prevented from entering the venue by police,[6] and resulting in five days in Armley Prison, Leeds in October 1908.
At the planned time of 4pm, when Big Ben chimed, Quinn blew a whistle, went to the statue of Lord Somers, and attached a banner advertising a WSPU Albert Hall rally, whilst Theresa Garnett, Margery Humes and Sylvia Russell attached themselves to other statues, and another (possibly Alys Pearsall Smith Russell)[7] whistled and started a speech in nearby Central Hall.
The reason given for this protest to the crowd who gathered was that statues were of men remembered for campaigning for 'British liberties' in Stuart days and that they (the suffragettes/suffragists) were doing the same for twentieth century Britons.
[11] During the General Strike of 1926, Quinn was a leading member of the Leeds Council of Action, and later elected as a Labour councillor from 1929 to 1943, although at one point she was expelled from the party.
[4] In a Leeds Library lecture series, former politician Michael Meadowcroft described Quinn's personality as 'formidable but difficult' with 'great passion but little diplomacy'.
[12] In 1917, Quinn was one of the two delegates sent to the Leeds Convention of the Independent Labour Party and the British Socialist Party, with 1,150 people joining leading politicians of the day including Keir Hardie, Asquith, Lloyd George, Ramsay MacDonald, Bernard Russell, Ernest Bevin which was controversially inciting action in solidarity with Russian workers and soldiers after the Russian revolution.
It carried motions on world peace, a charter of human rights, and congratulated Russian workers revolutionaries, and even encouraging organised activism in the British working class.