Blue plaque unveiled in Scarborough dedicated to suffragette Florence Balgarnie
Scarborough Civic Society has unveiled a new plaque dedicated to one women’s suffrage’s most prominent campaigners, Florence Balgarnie.
Florence Balgarnie was born at 2 Belle Vue Terrace (now incorporated into Westborough) on August 19 1856 and lived there for the first few years of her life.
Florence was a "staunch Liberal”, a suffrage campaigner, pacifist and temperance activist.
She was affiliated with the International Arbitration and Peace Association, the British Anti-lynching League, the Society for Promoting the Return of Women as County Councillors, Personal Rights Association,
Moral Reform Union, and the Men and Women's Club. She was also hon. Secretary of the Scarborough branch of the University Extension Scheme.
Dr Kirsty Ryder, studied the life of Florence Balgarnie as part of her thesis on the Women’s Suffrage Movement.
Dr Ryder said: “Florence developed her capacity for public speaking from her work on the Scarborough School board. She took great pleasure in public speaking and became highly skilled.
“She addressed several thousand people at an open air temperance meeting in Derby and she travelled internationally to speak.”
In 1889, she became secretary of the Central National Society for Women’s Suffrage.
Key events
1889 - Florence was a delegate to the Women’s Rights congress in Paris.
1902 - She represented the NUWSS at the First Conference of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance in Washington, D.C.
1904 - 1905 - She spoke at the annual general meeting of the Glasgow and West Scotland Association for Women’s Suffrage before undertaking a full suffrage speaking tour of Scotland.
1907 - She took part in the NUWSS ‘Mud March’, she contributed to essays on women’s suffrage and wrote her own essay on The Case For Women’s Suffrage.
1909 - She co-founded the People’s Suffrage Federation.
Florence Balgarnie said in The Case For Women’s Suffrage, 1907: “...women must attain the same measure of enfranchisement as men now enjoy.
“Poor and rich, employer and employed, leisured and working classes, stand together in the category of political outcasts.
“They realise what some wise men fail to comprehend, that to enfranchise even a fraction as a first instalment is to burst the sex barrier which has so long held us in thrall...”
The blue plaque was unveiled on International Women’s Day, March 8, by Dr Ryder and Charter Mayor of Scarborough, Janet Jefferson.