A century ago, a passionate crowd packed the Ulster Hall to hear the leader of the Suffragette Movement, Emmeline Pankhurst demand votes for women. Leading feminist author Dr Margaret Ward returned to the same venue to deliver a lunchtime lecture to an equally packed Ulster Hall, on the Ulster Suffragettes, who risked prison and physical attack in their struggle for equality.

Her talk: ‘Prison, Protests and Hunger Strikes: the Ulster Suffragettes’ discussed the leading figures in the movement and their attacks on bastions of male power that led to many of them being incarcerated in Belfast Jail on the Crumlin Road.

There was also Margaret McCoubrey, a Scot married to an Irish trade unionist from the Ormeau Road; Lilian Metge from Lisburn, a very active local militant who was jailed for her part in the attack on Lisburn Cathedral and Elizabeth Priestley McCracken, a writer from the Lisburn Road married to George McCracken, who acted as solicitor for the suffragettes.