Amy Bull

Amy Maud Bull, MBE or Amy Hicks (16 July 1877 – 11 February 1953) was a British teacher and suffragist.

For the British suffragist, trade unionist and socialist, see Amie Hicks.

Amy Bull MBE
Born	Amy Maud Hicks (1877-07-16)16 July 1877 Great Holland, Essex, England
Died	11 February 1953(1953-02-11) (aged 75) Little Baddow, Essex, England
Nationality	British
Occupation	Teacher
Known for	Suffragette

Life

Bull was born in Great Holland Hall in 1877. She went to Girton Hall where she won a prize every year until she obtained a first degree in classics in 1899. She was a lecturer at Westfield College in 1900–1901, then taught at Belvedere High School, Liverpool (1901–1904) and was a fellow at Bryn Mawr College (1904–1905).[1]

Amy's mother, Lilian Hicks (by Lena Connell)

Amy's mother, Lilian Hicks, had been associated with the suffrage cause since Amy was a young girl.[2] They were both members by 1902 of the Central Society for Women's Suffrage and they were soon joining celebrations of civil disobedience in pursuit of their cause. By 1907 they were both in the Women's Freedom League and Amy was serving as a secretary. Amy was imprisoned for three weeks for obstruction that year.[1]

In about 1909 the Women's Freedom League published a postcard which featured Lilian Hicks.[3] She and her mother were arrested on Black Friday in 18 November 1910.[1]

Bull was a member of the Women's Tax Resistance League which sought to resist paying tax to a government that only men had voted for. In 1912 she was smashing West End shop windows as part of a Women's Social and Political Union demonstration. She was sentenced in March 1912 and she was jailed for four months during which time she went on hunger strike and was force fed.[2] She and Sylvia Pankhurst founded the East London branch of the Women's Social and Political Union on 27 May 1913[1] and in the same year her mother was secretary of the Hampstead United Suffragists.[4]

The first World War started in 1914 and Bull served in the Women's Volunteer Reserve which had been founded by suffragettes to help the war effort.

She married John Major Bull on 4 August 1927. She went on be a rural district councillor and to lecture on home produced food to meetings of Women's Institutes. She was awarded an MBE in 1948.[1]

Bull died in Little Baddow in 1953.[1]

References

1. Elizabeth Crawford, ‘Bull , Amy Maud (1877–1953)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 accessed 31 Dec 2016
2. "Criminals or lunatics: The Essex women who fought for suffrage". Essex Life. Retrieved 11 January 2020.
3. Suffragette postcards: real photographic portrait, womanandhersphere.com, retrieved 31 December 2016
4. Elizabeth Crawford (15 April 2013). The Women's Suffrage Movement in Britain and Ireland: A Regional Survey. Routledge. p. 178. ISBN 978-1-136-01062-0.