JACK, ALEXIA BUTTER (1863-1949) A teacher, she was first a pupil-teacher in Aberdeen before going to work and live in Edinbugh. By 1913 she held the position of “second master” in an elementary school, one of only three women to have achieved this level of promotion in Edinburgh. In 1907 she became the first honorary secretary of the Edinburgh branch of the WOMEN’S FREEDOM LEAGUE, remaining in that post certainly until 1915. She was also honorary secretary and treasurer of the Scottish Council of the WFL and was a Scottish representative on the national executive of the WFL in 1912. During the First World War, under the aegis of the WFL she worked to look after the interests of women engaged in agriculture until in 1915 she suffered a breakdown in health. After the partial enfranchisement of women in 1918 Alexia Jack became the first honorary secretary and a vice-president of the Edinburgh Women Citizens’ Association. In her will, among other charitable bequests, she left £100 to the Edinburgh Women Citizens’ Association, £100 to the WFL, and £100 to the Scottish Council of Women Citizens.
Address: (1908) 4 Fountainhall Road, Edinburgh; (1949) 46 Great King Street, Edinburgh.
Bibliography: L. Leneman, A Guid Cause: The Women’s Suffrage Movement in Scotland, 1991.
JAMIESON, CHRISTINA (c. 1864-1942) Born at Cruisdale, Sandness, Shetland, the second child and elder daughter of Robert Jamieson, the local schoolmaster. After the death of her father, at the turn of the century the family moved to Lerwick. Christina Jamieson contributed articles to the People’s Journal, the Scotsman and the Weekly Scotsman. As her obituarist in the Shetland News, 4 June 1942, recorded, “Keenly interested in public affairs, she could not abide the inferior position in their conduct accorded in her time to women” and in order to help change this state of affairs she founded and became secretary of the SHETLAND SUFFRAGE SOCIETY, a member of the NATIONAL UNION OF WOMEN’S SUFFRAGE SOCIETIES. She was the co-designer of the Orkney and Shetland BANNER and carried it in the suffrage Coronation procession in London on 21 June 1911. In 1909 she published, as Sketch of Votes for Women Movement, a brief history of the women’s suffrage cause, the text of which she had delivered as a lecture to a packed meeting of the Lerwick Literary and Debating Society. A radical in politics, Christina Jamieson invited Ethel SNOWDEN to Lerwick to persuade Shetlanders of the justness of the case for women’s suffrage. In 1916 Christina Jamieson was elected to the Lerwick School Board, the first woman to serve on any public body in Shetland. In 1935 she emigrated to New Zealand to spend her final years with one of her brothers.
Address: Twagios, Lerwick, Shetland.
JARROW (NUWSS) In 1913 the society was a member of the NORTH-EASTERN FEDERATION OF THE NATIONAL UNION OF WOMEN’S SUFFRAGE SOCIETIES. Secretary (1913) Miss Isabel Fletcher, Oaklands, Jarrow-on-Tyne, Co. Durham.
JEFFERY, GABRIELLE VIOLET (1886-1940) Born in Devon, she joined the WOMEN’S SOCIAL AND POLITICAL UNION in 1909. Mary BLATHWAYT noted in her diary that Gabrielle Jeffery arrived in Newport from Bristol on 6 September 1909 in order to be WSPU ORGANIZER there. Gabrielle Jeffery still held this position there in early 1910 and then in June, at Kensington Town Hall, founded the CATHOLIC WOMEN’S SUFFRAGE SOCIETY (which later became St Joan’s Social and Political Alliance).
Address: (1913) 55 Berners Street, London W1; (1940) 5 Holly Place, Hampstead, London NW.
JEWELLERY AND BADGES At the end of the nineteenth century the concept of a badge to identify the wearer with a political campaign was not novel. Apart from those mentioned in the ditty below, in the 1840s the Anti-Corn Law League had produced a “Corn Law ribbon”, which featured a wheatear pattern, and in 1889 a “Home Rule badge”, sporting the profile of Gladstone, was advertised “for sleeve-links or button-hole”. However, Laura Morgan-BROWNE’s “Franchise Ballad III”, published in the Woman’s Herald, 20 February 1892, suggested for the first time the attraction of a badge for suffrage campaigners. The first verse runs:
-303-
