Happy International Women’s Day from Hazlegrove!

Surely the snow was in honour of International Women’s Day, to commemorate the white clothes of the suffragettes.

White represented purity, purple justice and dignity, and green symbolised hope. Women campaigning for the right to vote over 100 years ago often tried to wear all white as it was seen as a method of increasing their legitimacy: white was not an easy colour to keep clean so wearing a white outfit meant they had made a special effort and dressed for the occasion, making it harder to label suffragettes as lacking in conviction. The words of Millicent Garratt Fawcett, speaking about suffragette Emily Wilding Davison, who died after running into the path of King George V’s racehorse at the Epsom Derby in 1913, echoes a key school value, “Courage calls to courage everywhere, and its voice cannot be denied.”

Year 8 joined me to mark the day and to remember the suffrage campaigners of the past, having spent the term in their History lessons learning about the Women’s Suffrage Movement to prepare for the CE exams.

Miss P. Gillow

Head of History