She had left the Women's Social and Political Union - also known as the WSPU – as she considered the leadership led by Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters too autocratic.

Her publications include The Militant Suffrage Movement (1911), which contained criticism of suffragettes' tactics, and The Consumer in Revolt (1912), which explored links between consumerism and feminism.

[4][a] Her mother, Helen Wilson, ran a small shop, with two other partners, that was subsidised by her own father, who managed Preston's first department store.

[8] Billington joined the Municipal Education School service where her objection to teaching about the Bible led her to consider a formal protest.

[8][9] In April 1904, she founded the Manchester branch of the Equal Pay League of the National Union of Teachers and became honorary secretary.

[15] A Daily Mirror article the next day reported ‘striking proofs of the vigour of the leaders of the movement’, describing Sylvia Pankhurst painting banners, and discussing the reasons for their activism.

[13][page needed] She refused to recognise the authority of the magistrates' court as women had played no part in defining the laws that it operated by.

[13][page needed][3][16] The Daily Mirror interviewed her, where she explained she had been engaged for several years, but ‘refuses to be led to the altar until her war cry of “Votes for Women” passes into law.

Later in June 1906, Billington helped the WSPU in their canvassing against the Liberal Party candidate in the 1906 Huddersfield by-election with Emmeline Pankhurst and Annie Kenney, impressing local activist Hannah Mitchell.

I can see her still, with the heavy plaits round her head, making it look like one carved in Ancient Greece , expounding logically, factually, forcefully and with telling illustrations of the need for women to vote.

In an article written the same year, she wrote about how women were excluded from well-paid and influential jobs, and the impact this had on her own career aspirations:[22][23]When I was quite young I desired to be an engineer.

The theories of impact, of momentum, of tension - the arrangements of levers, pulleys, planes and screws to make machines, were things to conjure with, with me.

On 14 September, Billington-Greig, Edith How-Martyn, Charlotte Despard, Alice Abadam, Marion Coates-Hansen, Irene Miller, Bessie Drysdale, and Maude Fitzherbert signed an open letter to Emmeline Pankhurst, explaining their disquiet with the way the organisation was run.

[13][page needed] The dissenters, and a significant number of other members, left the WSPU went on to form the Women's Freedom League (WFL).

[25][26] Billington-Greig resigned from the WFL in December 1910 as she felt that the membership was overly influenced by militant tactics, such as "raids" on Parliament organised by the Pankhursts.

[4][27] Billington-Greig's surviving writings from 1906 to 1907 demonstrate her views being refined, with her theory coming to encompass a demand for full equality between the sexes, and a rejection of poor tactics to achieve positive outcomes.

Historian Brian Harrison has described The Militant Suffrage Movement as "the most penetrating contemporary comment on the suffragettes", noting that it is an unusual combination of participant observation and analysis.

[38] In 1915, and again in 1923, Billington-Greig substituted for her husband at the billiard company where he was a manager, and in 1936 she worked briefly as an organiser for the Business and Professional Women's Club.

[47][10] Billington-Greig herself felt that she had failed in her work,[4][48] but D. Thom writes in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography that:"She had retained her feminist principles throughout.

In the introduction to The Non-Violent Militant: Selected Writings of Teresa Billington-Greig (1987) McPhee and Fitzgerald wrote of how Billington-Greig "lived to see her work forgotten, the organizations she had founded abandoned, a new generation indifferent, and the feminist revolution that she had devoted her life to still in the future", and express their hope that the book will "deny her claim to personal failure".

[50] Her name and picture, with 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.