occupation
Tailoress, housewife and suffragette
dates
Born: 1869, Oxford
Married: William COWLES, late 1880s
Died: Late 1960s, Harrow, Middx
residence
St Ebbes, Oxford
submitted by
Sheila HOPKINSON (granddaughter)
related faces
Background information
Rosa Martha COWLES, born in 1869, was the second daughter of William and Martha WEST, who were publicans and tailors, at one time licensees of the Jolly Bargeman in Speedwell Street. Rosa and her brother William inherited their parents’ tailoring skills, Rosa doing ‘home work’ for her brother while she was bring up her family.
She was very aware of the inequalities faced by women and was one of the rare suffragettes who was a working class woman. She went to meetings in the Wesley Church in New in Hall Street, where she would have heard speakers from Manchester talking about the suffragette movement. She kept these activities from her husband! She upheld her beliefs in the right of universal suffrage all her life, instilling in her children the importance of voting.
In her great old age she lived with one of her daughters in Harrow, dying there in the late 1960s.
Rosa Martha WEST
