Caroline Phillips (journalist)

While the Daily Journal was strongly against women’s suffrage, Phillips was able to get pro-suffrage arguments into conservative newspapers through the Letters To The Editor column.

[8] In January 1908, her employer warned Phillips that she was ‘identifying’ herself far too closely with the woman’s suffrage movement and that if she didn't stop being involved in women’s politics she could lose her job.

[4] Her role as Honorary Secretary for the Aberdeen branch of the Women's Social and Political Union meant she met and corresponded with many of the leadership of the WSPU.

Suffragists believed in using political means to achieve votes for women, while suffragettes employed the notion of "deeds not words".

[9] One example of this was, in December 1907,[10] when Emmeline Pankhurst planned on disrupting the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, Henry Asquith's, visit to Aberdeen's Music Hall[7] and Phillips did her level best to stop this from happening.

[7] Phillips had learned that the local Liberal association considered banning all women from entrance in case suffragettes had planned to disrupt proceedings.

A letter she had written suggested the WSPU should copy a non-violent strategy favoured by the peaceful National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies (NUWSS).

Thursdays meeting had better be abandoned”[6]Phillips had been a prominent figure in the Scottish suffragette movement but it was clear she had fallen out of favour.

This was followed later on with the closing down of the Aberdeen branch completely and the invitation to all its members to join the wider WSPU, under direct control from London, instead.

In 2021, Phillips was one of a collection of Scottish suffragists celebrated in a deck of cards distributed as part of an education pack to 100 schools around the country.