Ethel Agnes Mary Moorhead was a British suffragette and painter and was the first suffragette in Scotland to be forcibly-fed.
Early life
Moorhead was born on 28 August 1869 in Maidstone, Kent. She was one of six children of Brigadier Surgeon George Alexander Moorhead, an army surgeon of Irish birth, and his wife, Margaret Humphrys, an Irish woman of French-Huguenot ancestry. Her older sisterAlice Moorhead was a pioneer of female medicine, trained as a surgeon and physician. Her father was posted with the Berkshire Regiment to Afghanistan as army surgeon in 1870, and she would have seen little of him in her early years.. Her father settled in Dundee in 1902 to be closer to Alice and her newly created Dundee Women's Hospital. After training as an artist in Paris under Mucha and in Whistler's studio, Ethel returned to care for him from 1908. After her father died in 1911, Ethel moved to Edinburgh.
Suffragette campaigning
Moorhead made her maiden speech at a Dundee Women’s Social and Political Union meeting in March 1910, in December she threw an egg at Winston Churchill when he was holding a meeting in Dundee. In 1911 the Dundee branch of the Women's Freedom League congratulated her on becoming Dundee's first tax-resister. Moorhead used a string of aliases, and carried out various acts of militancy both north and south of the border. They included smashing two windows in London, attacking a showcase at the Wallace Monument near Stirling, and throwing cayenne pepper at a police constable, as well as wrecking police cells, and carrying out several arson attacks. In October 1912 after being ejected from a meeting in Synod Hall, Edinburgh Moorhead returned to attack the male lecturer with a dog whip for ejecting her. She was arrested under her own name and was fined £1, this fine was paid so Moorhead never went to prison for this act. Early in 1913, she tried to write to Arabella Scott about an incident of an amorous approach by inebriated prison doctor, which she feared would be used as propaganda. The Dundee Gaol governor did not release it. On 23 July 1913, with Dorothea Chalmers Smith, Moorhead attempted to set fire to a house at 6 Park Gardens in Glasgow, but they were caught at the scene and the firefighters found flammable materials and a postcard bearing the words: 'A protest against Mrs Pankhurst's re-arrest'. She held no formal position in the WSPU, but achieved great personal notoriety. Moorhead was imprisoned several times and released under the "Cat and Mouse Act" of 1913. She became the first Scottish suffragette to be forcibly fed, while imprisoned in Calton Jail, Edinburgh under the care of Dr Hugh Ferguson Watson. Having become seriously ill with double pneumonia, she was released into the care of Dr Grace Cadell, a fellow activist in the suffrage movement. Her experienceduly related to the presscaused much protest at the cruelty involved. Moorhead had been given a Hunger Strike Medal 'for Valour' by WSPU. This did not stop her activity, however, and along with her friend Fanny Parker she was arrested in July 1914, for trying to blow up the Burns Cottage in Alloway.
Other campaigning and later life
During the First World War, Moorhead took on additional organisational responsibilities. Together with Fanny Parker, she helped run the Women's Freedom League National Service Organisation, encouraging women to find appropriate work. In the 1920s, she traveled in Europe and edited a quarterly arts journal, which published work by, among others, James Joyce, Ezra Pound and Ernest Hemingway.. She died in Dublin in 1955. A commemorative plaque has been placed close to the site of her home in Dundee.
