On the eve of publication of the 2015 edition of her book Friends of Alice Wheeldon, historian Sheila Rowbotham explains how she found out about the case and why she was inspired to write about it.
The Independent, 17 April, 2015: In December 1916, an intelligence agent, William Rickard, pretending to be a conscientious objector and using the pseudonym "Alex Gordon", arrived at the door of the Derby socialist and feminist, Alice Wheeldon. Giving him shelter that night would have devastating consequences for herself and her family.
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I was influenced by radical historians in the 1960s who sought to make the hidden visible and the silenced heard, and, when we started the women's liberation movement in 1969, some of us began to rethink suffrage history from the bottom up, uncovering the intricate connections between suffrage campaigners and participants in other movements for radical change. This was the kind of milieu in which Alice Wheeldon was rooted.