Esther Roper (4 August 1868 – 28 April 1938) was a suffragist and social justice campaigner who fought for equal employment and voting rights for working-class women.

In 1895 she helped establish the Manchester University Settlement in Ancoats to offer education and cultural opportunities to the local working poor.

[3] Roper is credited with re-energising the organisation’s work which had lacked direction since the death of previous secretary Lydia Becker.

The couple fell in love, and the following year Gore-Booth gave up a life of privilege to move in with Roper in a terraced house in Rusholme, Manchester.

Roper later wrote of their meeting in Italy: "For months illness kept us in the south, and we spent the days walking and talking on the hillside by the sea.

[9] In the late 1800s and early 1900s Roper and Gore-Booth helped to organize groups of female flower-sellers, circus performers, barmaids and coal pit-brow workers as their right to work was threatened by moral crusades and new legislation.

In 1916, along with trans woman Irene Clyde, they founded Urania, a privately circulated journal which expressed their pioneering views on gender and sexuality.

She was buried alongside Gore-Booth in St John's churchyard, Hampstead, on 30 April, with a quote from lesbian icon Sappho carved on their gravestone.

"[15] Roper's name and picture (and those of 58 other women's suffrage supporters) are on the plinth of the statue of Millicent Fawcett in Parliament Square, London, unveiled in 2018.