Edith Hudson

Edith Hudson, born in 1872, was a British nurse who became a militant suffragette. Census records place her as a hospital nurse at the Western Infirmary in Glasgow in 1901, after which she gave up nursing to devote herself to the campaign for votes for women. She was an active member of the Edinburgh branch of the Women's Social and Political Union, hosted its meetings at her home, and was arrested several times in Scotland and London between 1909 and 1913. Imprisoned in Holloway after a window-smashing protest in 1912, she took part in the hunger strikes that followed and was forcibly fed. In 1913 she was sentenced at Jedburgh to nine months for an attempt to set fire to the stand at Kelso Racecourse, went on hunger strike again, and was released after seven days under the Cat and Mouse Act. She then vanished, using the alias Mary Brown, and the Union awarded her a Hunger Strike Medal.