Leonore Flag Housman

Leonore Charlotte Alexandra Flag Housman was a prominent member of the Women’s Freedom League, a suffragette organisation that broke away from the more famous Women’s Social and Political Union led by Christabel Pankhurst. Housman was distantly related to the poet and classicist of the same name through her father, Howard, a provincial judge. Her danish mother, Åse Flæg, had attended the university of Copenhagen, a relatively liberal institution, where she had become interested in the struggle for women’s suffrage. Flæg moved to England and married, but the Housman home was one in which progressive politics were often discussed, and Howard took pride in his wife’s involvement.

Leonore was born on the 21st September 1894. She attended St. Hugh’s College, Oxford, alma mater of Emily Davison, who threw herself in front of the king’s horse at the Derby in 1913. The death of an alumna in such circumstances galvanised many of the students to action on the streets of Oxford and subsequently London.

After leaving university, with the full support of her parents, Housman became an active member of a number of women’s suffrage groups. It was under her mother’s name that she campaigned, seeing this as a further means of demonstrating her commitment to women’s liberation. Her activities were the subject of derision in the press, particularly the Daily Mail. Housman was a zealous carrier of banners, and developed the habit of carrying two at once, each supported by a single pole. The technique caught on, particularly in the General Strike of 1926. Since the Mail had satirised this as ‘Flag marching’ and ‘Flag waving’ in reports on Housman’s earlier protests, the noun ‘flag’ was backformed and came to be used as the term for any such banner.

Housman herself remained politically active, campaigning for better working conditions for female munitions workers during the Second World War, and was made an honorary fellow of her old college in 1949. She died in 1960, and was buried in St. Cross Cemetery, Oxford, where her grave remains a site of pilgrimage for feminist undergraduates.