Mrs Elsie Plant—suffragette, socialist and birth control activist
Elsie Plant (1890–1982) lived most of her life in Stockport, seven miles from Manchester. Her frank interview in 1978 about her political experiences has been supplemented by interviews with relatives and colleagues as well as contemporary accounts in newspapers, minute books and the memorabilia Elsie saved. Her experiences of radical Stockport have been set in a national context. After campaigning for the suffrage Elsie went on with her husband Walter to take a leading role in Stockport’s Labour Fellowship. Through this Elsie became a friend of Marie Stopes and though Elsie did not succeed in founding a birth control clinic in Stockport in the 1920s, she was successful after World War II. Elsie had a consistent philosophy as throughout her long life she always saw herself as defending the right of women to self‐determination.