Lydia Ernestine Becker (24 February 1827 – 18 July 1890) was a leader in the early British suffrage movement, as well as an amateur scientist with interests in biology and astronomy.

She established Manchester as a centre for the suffrage movement and with Richard Pankhurst she arranged for the first woman to vote in a British election and a court case was unsuccessfully brought to exploit the precedent.

[1] Her grandfather, Ernst Hannibal Becker had emigrated from Ohrdruf in Thuringia and set up a manufacturing business supplying the cotton industry with dyes and chemicals.

Her father, Hannibal Leigh Becker, was the eldest son, marrying Mary, daughter of a Hollinwood Mill owner, in 1826, with Lydia being born the following year.

[10] Her correspondence and work alike suggest that Becker had a particular interest in bisexual and hermaphroditic plants which, perhaps, offered her powerful 'natural' evidence of radical, alternative sexual and social order.

[11] Becker was also recognised for her own scientific contributions, being awarded a national prize in the 1860s for a collection of dried plants prepared using a method that she had devised so that they retained their original colours.

She gave a botanical paper to the Biology Section (D) at the 1868 meeting of the British Association about the effect of fungal infection on sexual development in a plant species.

In autumn 1866 Becker attended the annual meeting of the National Association for the Advancement of Social Science, where she was excited by a paper from Barbara Bodichon entitled "Reasons for the Enfranchisement of Women".

Becker immediately began encouraging other women heads of households in the region to petition for their names to appear on the rolls.

[25] At an 1874 speaking event in Manchester organised by Becker, fifteen-year-old Emmeline Pankhurst experienced her first public gathering in the name of women's suffrage.

Arguing there was no natural difference between the intellect of men and women, Becker was a vocal advocate of a non-gendered education system in Britain.

Ill health continued to take a toll and doctors from Gervais recommended Lydia travel the 40 miles to Geneva to see a specialist.

Her name is also listed on her father's gravestone (Hannibal Leigh Becker) in the churchyard of the Parish Church of St James, Altham in Lancashire.

[37] Becker's name and image, alongside those of 58 other women's suffrage supporters, are etched on the plinth of the statue of Millicent Fawcett in Parliament Square, London.

[38] In Paris, France, a street is named after her, the allée Lydia-Becker (Lydia Becker Lane), near Montmartre, close to the rue Eva-Kotchever.

The institute is named after Lydia Becker because she was a celebrated natural scientist who conversed with Charles Darwin and because she strongly believed that women were intellectually equal to men and deserved the same opportunities.