Gertrude Ansell, a 52-year-old businesswoman and suffragette, reacted by smashing a window of the Home Office as a protest and was jailed for a month.

[1]: 247 In July 1919, Etta Lemon and the Duchess of Portland delivered a letter signed by 150 men, including celebrities such as H. G. Wells and Thomas Hardy, to the president of the Board of Trade, Sir Auckland Geddes, asking that the war-time restriction on the importation of plumage should be continued until legislation was passed.

[1]: 256–7 In July 1920, Henry William Massingham, editor of The Nation, wrote a column about the bill's lack of success, pointing out that the much-prized egret feathers were obtained by shooting birds that had chicks on their nests, and asking "But what do women care?

This provoked Virginia Woolf to write a strong piece, published in the Woman's Leader, in which she painted pictures of the crowds of feather-wearing ladies in Regent Street and of the cruelty of the slaughter of the birds, but pointed out that it was men who were the bird-hunters and men who were 66 of the 67 members of Standing Committee C which had on five occasions failed to produce a quorum of 20 members for a discussion of the bill.

Although it forbade the import of plumage, it did not control the sale or wearing of it, and Etta Lemon wrote in the RSPB annual report that "It is impossible to say that the Act is a wholly satisfactory one".