Excerpt from Jessie Kenney's unpublished autobiography #4
Dublin Core
Title
Excerpt from Jessie Kenney's unpublished autobiography #4
Subject
Family
Description
Excerpt from Jessie Kenney’s unpublished autobiography, “The Flame and the Flood”.
In this excerpt, Jessie recollects the peaceful family Sundays of her childhood. Discussions ranged from articles in the latest issue of The Clarion to opera and reincarnation. The afternoons would be passed in conversation until the church bells announced the Evening Service, which the family would attend. After church, the older siblings would go out for the evening whereas the youngest would stay home and play board games with their mother. Their father would usually be near by reading a newspaper or an herbal book, as he was fond of botany. Jessie fondly recalls being taught to play a good game of draughts by her mother. “Little did I realise then,” she writes, “that it would be a symbol of a broad arrowhead that would become one day not only a badge of shame and ridicule stamped on the clothes of prisoners in the gaols of our country but would evolve into a symbol of the pioneer which have to pierce through ignorance on one side, prejudice on the other and with its point cut through apathy and inertia”. She refers here to the famous arrowhead pikes suffragettes carried during marches and demonstrations to signal that they had been imprisoned for the Cause.
In this excerpt, Jessie recollects the peaceful family Sundays of her childhood. Discussions ranged from articles in the latest issue of The Clarion to opera and reincarnation. The afternoons would be passed in conversation until the church bells announced the Evening Service, which the family would attend. After church, the older siblings would go out for the evening whereas the youngest would stay home and play board games with their mother. Their father would usually be near by reading a newspaper or an herbal book, as he was fond of botany. Jessie fondly recalls being taught to play a good game of draughts by her mother. “Little did I realise then,” she writes, “that it would be a symbol of a broad arrowhead that would become one day not only a badge of shame and ridicule stamped on the clothes of prisoners in the gaols of our country but would evolve into a symbol of the pioneer which have to pierce through ignorance on one side, prejudice on the other and with its point cut through apathy and inertia”. She refers here to the famous arrowhead pikes suffragettes carried during marches and demonstrations to signal that they had been imprisoned for the Cause.
Creator
Kenney, Jessie
Source
Kenney Papers, University of East (UEA) Anglia Archives
Publisher
Unknown
Date
19??
Rights
Copyright: Estate of Jessie Kenney. All rights reserved. Included here by kind permission of Warwick Kenney-Taylor (son of Annie Kenney) and later generations of the Kenney and Taylor families.
Format
jpeg image file
Language
English (United Kingdom)
Type
Identifier
KP/JK/4/2/2/3
Text Item Type Metadata
Original Format
Paper
Collection
Tags
Citation
Kenney, Jessie, “Excerpt from Jessie Kenney's unpublished autobiography #4,” Suffragette Stories, accessed June 12, 2025, https://suffragettestories.omeka.net/items/show/92.