Use your vote! She couldn’t…

Elizabeth Pease Nichol (1807-1897) Campaigner against Slavery and for Medical Education A Quaker born in Darlington, she founded a local women’s abolition society, personally collecting thousands of signatures for anti-slavery petitions. She supported Chartism.   When she married Professor Nichol in her forties, she was expelled from the Quakers for marrying ‘out’ which saddened her.  After signing the 1866 suffrage petition she joined the local Edinburgh Society fo Women’s Suffrage.  When Sophia Jex Blake and others demanded the opportunity to study Medicine there in 1877, Elizabeth spoke out at the rowdy public meeting where male medical students were abusive and threatened violence. She commented that if this was the attitude of the only doctors available to women, then it was high time women qualified!