21 facts about Edith Gittins

Edith Gittins (1845 – 7 August 1910) was an English player and social reformer, actively functional in promoting women’s rights. She was a founder of the Leicester Women’s Liberal Association in 1886 and supported the Leicester Women’s Suffrage Society. She was a watercolour player trained by William Morris and a devotee of the Leicester Society of Artists.

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Gittins was born in Leicester in 1845, the daughter of a corn and flour dealer, Edward Gittins, and the third of five children. She was educated by Miss Drayton, many of whose pupils became prominent women of Leicester. She was an active devotee of the Unitarian Great Meeting Chapel, teaching in the Sunday School for over forty years. A watercolour player and drawing teacher, she exhibited several landscape paintings at the Royal Academy and the New Walk Museum and Art Gallery, Leicester, holds several of her watercolours. Gittins helped to found a local branch of the Kyrle Society, a national organisation traditional in 1877 later than the purpose of bringing art, books and entry spaces to the on the go class poor, under the slogan ‘Bring beauty home to the people’. Strongly on the go to women’s suffrage, in 1886 she was a founding supporter of the Leicester Women’s Liberal Association. She was upon the committee of the Leicester Women’s Suffrage Society, formed in 1887, a devotee of the Leicester branch of National Union of Women Workers and of Leicester Secular Society.

Gittins associated The Joint Women’s Franchise Demonstration in February 1907, to mark the initiation of the Houses of Parliament. Organised by the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), over 3000 women took portion in what became known as the Mud March. In June 1908, she associated 10,000 women in the parade in London, later writing in the Leicester Pioneer, “Brains, character, indispensable help these women give, but they are unrepresented in Parliament; they are voteless, governed and taxed without their consent … In its place … floats the Leicester banner of periwinkle and crimson, between those of Leeds and Liverpool. We pass in the company of two breathing walls of interested, curious, ‘chaffing’ cheering humanity – ‘the far ahead sex’…It is this thought, this hope, this confidence that we are nearing the wish at last, after hence many tired years of dwell on and contention , that makes today’s campaigning different from those preceding it”.

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Gittins was upon the giving out of the Leicester branch of the National Union of Women Workers which in 1908 protested at men convicted of shout abuse against women receiving buoyant sentences compared to those convicted of crimes neighboring property.

Gittins died in 1910, leaving her large fortune to nieces and nephews as competently as local causes. Leicester Domestic Mission was given £200 to be invested for “giving ill and convalescent aid to… or training my former Sunday School Girls”. £500 was unmodified to the Treasurer of the Borough of Leicester to build a public drinking fountain, to be called ‘Ethelfloeda’s Fountain’ and designed to be placed at the junction of High Street and Silver Street, though past erected in Victoria Park, Leicester in 1922. A bronze statue of Ethelfloeda, surmounting the fountain was stolen in 1978, and after extra vandalism, the replacement statue and the upper section of the fountain were moved initially to the City Rooms in Hotel Street and are now in the courtyard of Leicester Guildhall.

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