Leonora Cohen OBE (née Throp; 15 June 1873 – 4 September 1978) was an English suffragette and trade unionist, and one of the first female magistrates.

[4][5] Her father, Canova Throp, was a sculptor but died in 1879[6] when Leonora was 5 years old, after developing tuberculosis of the spine,[7] which left her widowed mother to raise Cohen and her two younger brothers.

[9] She apprenticed as a milliner and while she was working as a millinery buyer, she met Henry Cohen,[3] a jeweller's assistant in central Leeds and the son of Jewish immigrants, most recently from Warsaw.

"[3] Cohen recognised at a young age that her mother had to overcome huge obstacles in her life simply because she was a woman.

[10] In 1911, Cohen joined in a protest where she threw a rock at a government-building window; she was arrested and held in Holloway Prison for seven days.

[11] As Cohen began to take more bold steps as a suffragette, her family supported her suffrage allegiance but her friends did not; she received hate letters and her son reportedly faced persecution at school.

[3] In 1913, Cohen protested against the government by using an iron bar to smash a glass showcase containing insignia of the Order of Merit in the Jewel House at the Tower of London.

[3] Leonora and Henry Cohen then moved to Harrogate to establish a vegetarian boarding house, where they also gave refuge to suffragettes fleeing from the police.

In 1913, suffragettes Annie Kenney and Flora Drummond arranged for WSPU representatives to speak with leading politicians David Lloyd George and Sir Edward Grey.

The delegates explained the pay and working conditions that they suffered and their hope that a vote would enable women to challenge the status quo in a democratic manner.

Cohen told the politicians that women in the textiles industry worked for 3 1/2d an hour whilst men were paid 6 1/2 d for the same job.

[12] She explained that voting women would have power to demand higher wages as men had done, which would stop underpaid girls from drifting onto the streets.

[13] Cohen disguised herself as a baker's van man, with Norah Duval as a boy, swapping places when delivering bread with fellow suffragette Lilian Lenton to let her escape from the art critic Frank Rutter's house in Leeds, which was used for recuperating hunger strikers.

[11] The dress that she wore to the 1914 Leeds Arts Club Ball was adorned with suffragette symbols and the logo of the Women's Social and Political Union.