Jessica "Jessie" Kenney (1887–1985) was an English suffragette who was jailed for assaulting the Prime Minister and Home Secretary in a protest to gain suffrage for women in the UK.

She was the seventh daughter of twelve children ( of whom eleven survived infancy)[1] to Horatio Nelson Kenney (1849-1912) and Anne Wood (1852-1905); the family was poor and working class.

Her mother died in 1905 at the age of fifty three [2] and in the same year Kenney became actively involved in the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) after she and her sister, Annie, heard Teresa Billington-Greig and Christabel Pankhurst[7] speak at the Oldham Clarion Vocal Club.

On 5 September 1908, three of them, Kenney, Elsie Howey and Vera Wentworth, chased and then struggled physically[2] with the Prime Minister, H. H. Asquith, and his Home Secretary Herbert Gladstone[8] during a golf match and later that day threw stones in the window at their dinner at Lympne Castle.

On 23 February 1909, Kenney took advantage of this to send two delegates, Daisy Solomon and Elspeth McClelland, from Strand Post Office to the Prime Minister and alerted a news reporter.

[9] On 16 April 1909, Kenney was in an early morning delegation who met Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence on her release from Holloway prison and took her to a breakfast, with 500 WSPU members, at the Criterion restaurant in Piccadilly Circus.

This event also led Gladstone to consider surveillance and forming a special branch of police able to use advance information to protect cabinet ministers from militant action.

[11] In June 1917 Kenney accompanied Emmeline Pankhurst on a trip to Russia aiming to encourage Russian women to the war effort, on behalf of the British Government, her writings of this journey and their experiences were never published.

[13] Edward Tupper of the National Sailors' and Firemen's Union had organised among the seamen of SS Vulture to refuse to accept Ramsay MacDonald and Fred Jowett as passengers on board the ship.