1893

America

..... the male electorate in Colorado voted for female suffrage

England

..... the Factory Inspectorate was created through the Act for the Regulation of Cotton Mills and Factories (1833) and four Factory Inspectors and eight sub-inspectors were found for the whole of Britain and Ireland. In 1893, after a long battle, women were admitted to the Factory Inspectorate making it the first government branch of the Civil Service to elevate women inspectors to equal status in 1921. The 1833 Act, besides forcing owners to guard moving machinery, also required them to institute schools for their child employees and the children were required to attend school for two hours a day for six days and to contribute one penny out of each shilling they earned towards the cost of schooling. Thus the Factory Inspectors became the first education Inspectors, a duty they continued up to 1860. Their full title today is Her Majesty’s Factory Inspectorate and in 1983, 150 years after they were formed, there were some 850 Inspectors including headquarters staff and with support from scientists, lawyers and other specialists

..... in 1893 Fred Duerr opened a factory at Prestage Street, Old Trafford , a business which began from the talents of his wife Mary, who made jams and marmalades for the family at her home in North Manchester. She probably made about 24 jars at a time and from these humble beginnings the company eventually had a turnover of £24m. Fred Duerr realised the business potential of his wife’s talents and told his friend who was a buyer for the original Rochdale Equitable Pioneers Co-operative Society. He said he would be interested in selling them and demand grew so quickly that the family kitchen soon became too small. In 1881 they went into business manufacturing jams in a factory, near Guide Bridge, in Manchester. Before the turn of the century the family moved business to Old Trafford. During the Boer War British troops were supplied with Duerr’s jam and it also went to the Indian Durbar of 1910. The company were also pioneers of vacuum sealing in 1905 and in the company archives there is a vacuum sealed jar of preserves which was packed in 1907 and which is still edible

..... the Women's Suffrage Societies , inspired by the success of Rollit’s Bill ( see 1892), launched a special appeal petition and collected over ¼m women’s signatures

..... the Independent Labour Party was formed and it became the ideological base for the development of the Labour Party in the 1900s. It was the first political party to give practical support to women’s suffrage, although some members of the ILP were still opposed to votes for women

..... the Ladies Golf Union was formed with Lady Margaret Scott as its first champion

..... Annie Royle Taylor became the first European woman to enter Tibet

New Zealand

..... on September 19th it became the first country in the world to open the franchise to all adults after over 30 years of women working towards this point.  Female suffrage bills had been presented to Parliament constantly from 1878 onwards and each was defeated, discarded or delayed.  The women's Christian Temperance Union became involved in the hope that women with a vote could influence liquor licensing laws. Women's organisations collected signatures and each year, an increasing number of women signed until, in 1893, a massive petition was wheeled into Parliament and unrolled like a carpet, bearing the names of over 30,000 adult women, almost a quarter of the population.  Over a thousand volunteers had cross crossed the country and one group of three young women had spent a month travelling in isolated regions.  The government tried a Machiavellian move to bring a Bill for female suffrage but ensure that it failed. However the duplicity so outraged other powerful men that two of them reversed their votes in the Upper House simply to spite him and the female vote was ushered in

Celebrated women born in this year

..... Alice Miller neé Bass ..... author, poet and playwright whose dedication to the Lancashire Authors' Association is remembered by many library users in Lancashire. She was born October 12th near Blackburn and her writing talent was quickly recognised by the headmaster at her school. At the age of 13 she left school to work in a cotton mill but struggled to improve her education by attending evening classes in Accrington and Blackburn. In 1937 she obtained an L.C.C. scholarship and took up a comprehensive training course at Hillcroft College, Surrey.   In 1942 she joined the Lancashire Authors' Association, became editor of its journal The Record in 1949 and in 1963 was appointed a Vice President. She also became a member of the advisory and editorial panel of the International Who's Who in Poetry  and a member of the sub-committee for the International Dictionary of Biography. Alice was also a part time drama tutor and producer for the Lancashire Federation of Community Service Clubs, a lecturer and speaker. Later in life she became a prolific writer of plays, poems, articles, stories etc both in dialect and standard English. She also wrote verses for hymns, children's stories and some of her poems appeared on Christmas cards belonging to the Royal Family. She was also very keen to preserve Lancashire heritage and her native dialect tongue and so joined the Lancashire Dialect Society as well. In 1954 her efforts were recognised by the then Oswaldtwistle Urban District Council when a new street of council houses ' Miller Close' was named in her honour

.....  Lady Bonham Carter neé Charlotte Helen Ogilvy ..... patron of the arts and tireless supporter of good causes. she was born on August 22nd. During the First World War she served in the Foreign Office and at one stage was seconded to MI5 where she was involved in the tracking down of Lenin before the Russian Revolution. In 1919 she was assigned to the British Delegation at the Paris Peace conference and in 1926 became a founding director of the Ballet Rambert. She gained a pilot’s licence in the 1930s and at the outbreak of WW2 joined the WAAF where she was commissioned in 1941 and worked in the photographic interpretation department. She also served in the Ministry of Economic Warfare and afterwards presided over the Women’s Advisory Housing Council. She died in 1989

..... Dorothy Dickson .....  American-born actress, dancer and singer who first appeared on Broadway in 1917 in a show called Oh! Boy. Shortly afterwards she was spotted by Florenz Ziegfeld who found a place for her in his Follies. Her fellow stars included Fanny Brice, Eddie Cantor and W.C.Fields. In 1921 she made her British debut in the revue London, Paris and New York at the London Palladium and was an immediate hit. She then starred as the lead role in Sally and in 1923 starred in Cabaret Girl. After this she was in Peter Pan in 1925 and 1926 and remained busy in London throughout her career. She continued to live in Britain for the rest of her life. There was always some debate over the year of her birth but this was finally settled by the author Michael Thornton, who uncovered her birth certificate in Kansas which stated that she was born July 25th 1893. In 1993 she received a telegram from Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother in celebration of her 100th  birthday. She also appeared in straight roles and in 1938 ventured into Shakespeare. During WW2 she entertained the troops overseas and later in the war was one of the leading figures behind the Stage Door Canteen. She died in 1995

..... Dorothy Parker neé Rothschild ..... born August 22nd  she became a drama critic for Vanity Fair and the New Yorker, reported on the Spanish Civil War, wrote short stories and film scripts and in 1926 published her first book of poetry ‘Enough Rope’. She was co-founder of the legendary Algonquin Hotel Round Table luncheon group with Robert Benchley and Robert Sherwood. Her reviews for the New Yorker magazine, whose character she helped to form, were collected in A Month of Saturdays in 1971. She also wrote for Esquire magazine, published poems and sketches and collaborated on several film scripts including The Little Foxes and A Star Is Born.  She was married 3 times, twice to the same man, and when she died on June 7th 1967 she left most of her estate to Martin Luther King. She is best remembered for her sad, sharp poems of love and death …..”men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses.” 

..... Freya Madeleine Stark ..... legendary traveller who followed in the footsteps of such figures as Lady Hester Stanhope and Gertrude Bell, intrepid, solitary Englishwomen exploring the far-flung corners of the East. She journeyed through Syria, Turkey, Arabia, Iraq, Persia and Afghanistan and into the Himalayas. She was born January 31st and studied at the Bedford School and the School of Oriental Studies and in 1926 spent a winter in remote parts of Lebanon. In 1933 she published her first book Baghdad Sketches and made her name as a writer after The Valleys of the Assassins was published in 1934.She published some 30 acclaimed books which included four volumes of autobiography and six volumes of her letters. During WW2 she was commissioned by the Ministry of Information to help with propaganda among the Arabians and went to the Yemen on a diplomatic mission, with a ciné projector and a few films. She was sent on a tour of the United States and then to Cairo and Iraq where she helped found the Arab Brotherhood of Freedom.  In 1953 she was appointed CBE and DEB in 1972. Her many other awards include the Burton Memorial Medal of the Royal Asiatic Society (1934) and the Founder’s Medal of the Royal Geographical Society (1942). She died in 1993 aged 100 years

..... Gina Manes neé Blanche Moulin .....  French star of the silent screen, born April 7th in Paris. She made her first film in 1919 The Man Without a Face, and went on to make a number of films with strong erotic appeal until she became a favourite star of a number of French makers of art films. She is best remembered however for her performance as Josephine in the celebrated film Napoleon (1927), by Abel Gance, although she believed that she was not cut out to play the part having established herself as a popular screen vamp. In 1980 this film was reconstructed for the London Film Festival. She reached the peak of her career in 1928 and in the same year married Georges Charlia, star of the film Prix de Beauté (1930).  With the coming of sound she successfully broke the sound barrier and her film Une Belle Garce assured her of a lucrative future for a time. From 1932 to 1935 she spent her time in Morocco and on returning to France found that she had been virtually forgotten and was reduced to playing only minor roles. During the Nazi occupation of France in the Second World War she appeared as an extra in a lion-taming act in the circus and was badly mauled. In 1949 she went to Morocco again, appeared in films and ran acting courses for budding stage and screen actors. She died in 1989                                

..... Renee Falconetti ..... in Sermano, Corsica, whose career in silent films consisted of only one film. La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc was made in 1928 and she played the lead role. The film is composed almost entirely of close-ups of her tortured face. To achieve this effect she was made to kneel on stone floors for hours and hours on end until she really was suffering. This took so much out of her that she never made another film. Although hers was the greatest single performance in the history of the cinema it was not enough to make her a major star and was probably due to the lack of glamour in the film. She wore no make-up, her head was shaved and her clothes were of sackcloth. It took 18 months to make this film and she then turned stage producer and appeared with the Comedié Francaise. After spending WW2 in Switzerland she left for South America to act in the Classics and died in Buenos Aires in 1946   

..... Ursula Bloom ..... the world’s most prolific writer who produced more than 500 books under her own name and half a dozen pseudonyms. She could also, no doubt, have staked a claim to being the author who had been publishing over the longest period of time.  When she was seven her parents privately published a book she had written about a cat and her last novel and a volume of autobiography were issued 77 years later.  Her first novel The Great Beginning was published in 1924 and from then until she stopped writing in 1976 she wrote an average of 10 books each year. In 1983 she was one of the 46 top authors who received the maximum possible amount (just under £5000) as their first annual instalment under the Public Lending Right scheme which was based on borrowings from public libraries.  As well as her novels she produced a large quantity of journalism and one of her coups was the discovery, in the 1950s, of Dr Crippen’s mistress, Ethel Le Neve, who was living as a housewife in Croydon. She died in 1984                           

..... Vera Mary Brittain ..... novelist, biographer and poet who was born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, daughter of a paper manufacturer. She was educated at St. Martins school in Surrey and in 1914 won an exchange to Somerville College, Oxford, but left after a year to work as a voluntary nurse in London, France and Malta. She returned to England in 1919, took her degree, became a journalist and married in 1925. Her greatest success was her autobiographical trilogy Testament of Youth (1933) which reflects her pacifism and feminism. Testament of Friendship (194) was a tribute to Winifred Holt and Testament of Experience was published in 1957. Her outspoken views caused much controversy. She was chairwoman of the Married Women’s Association, Vice-President of the Women’s International League of Peace and Freedom and was Life President of the Society of Women Writers and Journalists. Her daughter is the politician Shirley Williams

..... Violet Trefusis ..... eldest daughter of Alice Keppel, the famous Edwardian society hostess and Violet's affair with Vita Sackville-West shocked London society. They had known each other as children and when they met again as grown women the attraction was mutual and before long they had embarked on an affair. They went on holiday together and at one stage Vita would dress as a subaltern and they would stroll along the streets of London and as a couple would join others at tea dances and restaurants. Violet married Denys Trefusis, an officer in the Royal Horse Guards, with the proviso that she would not have to sleep with him and could continue her relationship with Vita. Thinking that things would eventually work out he agreed but she returned from their Paris honeymoon leaving him there. On his return they set up home in Possington Manor in Sussex and she was soon back with Vita. In 1920 Violet and Vita decided to go away together for good. Violet went on ahead to Amiens but as Vita waited at Dover Violet's husband and her father turned up and insisted on travelling to Amiens with her.   It was too much for them and they both agreed to return home and end the affair, but for a long time Violet continued to send letters to Vita and refused to speak to Denys. By the end of 1922 Vita had cooled off and looked back on her affair as a madness of which she would never again be capable, but Virginia Woolf was yet to come into her life. Violet continued to live with Denys and in time they found lots in common and lived quite happily together in Paris until his death from tuberculosis in 1929. She became a novelist, a great hostess and a focus of Paris intellectual society. Colette renamed her 'geranium'. She died on the 1st March 1972 aged 79 years, considered by everybody to be a grand old lady