Dora Montefiore – born Dorothy Frances Fuller (b. Kenley, UK, 20 December 1851 – d. 21 December 1933, Hastings, UK) was a British-Australian suffragist and poet. In order to assist her brother’s wife, she went to Sydney in 1874 where she married merchant George Barrow Montefiore. It is when her husband went lost at sea in 1889, and that she discovered that she had no automatic right to have guardianship of her children, that she started her fight for women’s rights. She left Australia for England in 1892. She played a key role in the women’s suffrage movement. Indeed, she held the first meeting of the Womanhood Suffrage League of New South Wales in her house in 1891. Seven years later, she joined the Millicent Fawcett’s National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (created in 189), and later the Women’s Social and Political Union created by Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst in 1903.
In 1912, she went to South Africa where she wrote about the harmful effects of capitalism. She volunteered in France during the First World War, and was part of the British Socialist Party. Her son died in 1921 in Australia, she came to see him, and made Australian Communist connections. Three years later, she represented the Communist Party of Australia in Moscow. She wrote her autobiography in 1927 and died six years later in Hastings, UK.
In 2018, the statue of the leader of the British Suffragist Movement, Millicent Fawcett, was erected and its plinth includes engravings of the names and pictures of 59 other women and men who supported women’s suffrage. Among them is the name and picture of Dora Montefiore.
More on Wikipedia and here and here for the list of engravings on Millicent Garrett Fawcett’s statue. Visit the Working Class Movement Library‘s website.
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