Emily Ford was born in Leeds into a politically active Quaker family who moved to Adel Grange in Adel on the outskirts of Leeds when she was 15. Her parents were Robert Lawson Ford a solicitor and Hannah . Her youngest sister Isabella became a prominent campaigner for the rights of working women. When in Leeds Emily lived at the family home, Adel Grange, but after her older sister Bessie died in 1922, Emily and Isabella moved to Adel Willows, a small property nearby. Ford attended the Slade School of Art in London from 1875. From 1873 until 1881 Ford was an active member of the Leeds Ladies' Educational Association, which provided lectures and courses, supervised Cambridge Local Examinations and with other local bodies founded Leeds Girls' High School. Ford was secretary of the association and in 1879 backed a series of lectures on the laws relating to women's property rights and custody of infants. The controversy surrounding these subjects split the association's membership and it was abandoned in 1881. Like other members of the association, such as Alice Cliff Scatcherd, Ford was a member of the Manchester Society for Women's Suffrage which was a hive for activism in the 1880s. The society formed strong links with the Manchester Society of Women Painters, of which Ford was a member. The society was active from 1879 until 1883 and had among its leading members suffragettes such as Susan Dacre, Annie Swynnerton and Jessie Toler Kingsley. Ford became vice-president of the Leeds Suffrage Society where she was an active member and speaker In 1887 Ford and her sisters Isabella and Bessie became heavily involved in labour politics, focusing on the inequalities of capitalism, class and gender. Ford joined the Leeds Socialist League. Together with her sisters and Scatcherd she supported strikes of women weavers and the tailoresses in 1888 and 1889 with practical assistance and contributions towards the strike fund. In the early 1880s Ford became interested in spiritualism and joined the Society for Psychical Research. For spiritualists colour invoked spiritual and emotional states. Ford painted The Sphere of Suffering series, in which she depicted the "naked Soul in the Storm Abyss" as a female nude plunging through space while shafts of light break through the clouds above. Ford argued that "people must learn to see Spiritual truth as an artist must learn to see colour". Ford's religious convictions, feminism and social politics underwent profound change. She converted to Anglicanism, abandoned socialism and instead of focusing on a wide range of issues that concerned women she focused her efforts on women's suffrage. She transferred her suffrage society membership to London and expressed the desire that her art works should be hung "where they could speak". By that time declamatory art by women artists had reached a wide audience outside the institutions of culture and scholarship through the women's suffrage banners. She was baptised into the Anglican Church at All Souls, Blackman Lane Leeds in 1890.
Work
Ford's work was influenced by the Pre-Raphaelite movement particularly Burne-Jones. After her baptism at All Souls, she gave the church a tall font canopy designed by R. J. Johnson of Newcastle attached to which are eight panels that she painted herself. Painted in a primitivist Italian style, they depict scenes from the Bible but the figures in them are portraits of people she knew, her friends clerics, the church's congregation and herself. The paintings were restored after fundraising and intervention by Victorian Society. Her painting Towards the Dawn, described as "feminist", was donated to Newnham College in 1890 by her friend Millicent Fawcett. Ford had a studio in Chelsea that was described by fellow artist, Dora Meeson as "a meeting ground for artists, suffragists, people who "did" things". She joined the Artists' Suffrage League and designed a poster for it in 1908. She continued to devote herself to religious art designingstained glass windows and painting murals, but also produced posters, banners and shields for the suffrage movements.
