Charlotte Despard (née French; 15 June 1844 – 10 November 1939) was an Anglo-Irish suffragist, socialist, pacifist, Sinn Féin activist, and novelist. She was a founding member of the Women's Freedom League, Women's Peace Crusade, and the Irish Women's Franchise League, and an activist in a wide range of political organizations over the course of her life, including among others the Women's Social and Political Union, Humanitarian League, Labour Party, Cumann na mBan, and the Communist Party of Great Britain.
Despard was imprisoned four times for her suffragette activism, and she continued actively campaigning for women's rights, poverty relief and world peace right into her 90s.
Early life
Charlotte French was born on 15 June 1844 in Edinburgh and lived as a child in Edinburgh and Campbeltown in Scotland and from around 1850 in England at Ripple, Kent, her father was Irish Captain John Tracy William French of the Royal Navy (who died in 1855) and her mother Margaret French, née Eccles (who died suffering from insanity in 1865). She was educated by a series of governesses and intermittently at private school, but complained in later life that her schooling was 'slipshod' and 'inferior'. Despard was always dubious of authority and ran away from home at the age of 10 getting a train to London 'to become a servant.' The family left Ripple after her father died settling in Edinburgh and later York. Despard's brother Sir John French became both a leading military commander during World War I and Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, putting them on opposing political sides in later life. She also had five sisters; one, Katherine Harley, also a suffragist, served in the Scottish Women's Hospital during the World War I in France.
Despard regretted her lack of education, although she did attend a finishing school in London. With two of her sisters, she travelled in Germany and Paris (there at the start of the Franco-Prussian war). The same year, 1870, she married businessman Maximilian Carden Despard, and travelled with him across his business interests in Asia, including India, but he then died at sea in 1890; and they had no children. Despard wore black for most of the rest of her days.
Novels
Despard's first novel, Chaste as Ice, Pure as Snow was published in 1874. Over the next sixteen years, she wrote ten novels, three of which were never published. Outlawed: a Novel on the Women's Suffrage Question was written jointly with her friend, Mabel Collins and published in 1908.
Charity
Following her husband's death when she was 46, Despard was encouraged by friends to take up charitable work. She was shocked and radicalised by the levels of poverty in London and devoted her time and money to helping poor people in Battersea, including a health clinic, soup kitchen for the unemployed, and youth and working men's clubs in this slum area. Despard lived above one of her welfare shops in one of poorest areas of Nine Elms during the week and she also converted to Roman Catholicism. She worked with women and girls clubs. In 1894, she stood and was elected as a Poor Law Guardian for Lambeth poor law union, and remained until she retired from the board in 1903.
Politics
Despard became good friends with Eleanor Marx and was a delegate to the Second International, including to the fourth congress in London in 1896. She actively campaigned against the Boer War as a "wicked war of this Capitalistic government" and she toured the United Kingdom speaking against the use of conscription in the First World War, forming a pacifist organisation called the Women's Peace Crusade to oppose all war.
Women's suffrage
Despard was a vocal supporter of the Social Democratic Federation and the Independent Labour Party. In 1906 she joined the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies and later was imprisoned four times for activism on women's franchise, twice in Holloway gaol. She had become frustrated with the lack of progress from NUWSS and she joined the more radical Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU). She became one of their recognised orators and described as a 'tireless and popular leader.. a striking figure with her thin sharp features and grimly tight lips'
In 1907, Despard was one of the women who formed the Women's Freedom League (WFL) whose motto was 'Dare to be Free', after disagreements over the autocratic way in which the WSPU was run.