Campaigner for women’s suffrage
Mary Cozens was born in Wonston, Hampshire, on 24 April 1857. Her father, John, was a prosperous farmer, while her mother, Charlotte, passed away during childbirth in 1860. Although details of Mary’s early years remain unknown, records indicate that by the early 1890s she had relocated to Kensington, London, where she became active in the women’s movement.
By early 1892 she was the honorary secretary of the Women’s Suffrage Demonstration Committee which held a rally in Hyde Park and called for votes for women on the same terms as men. This committee soon split and the section that Mary was secretary and treasurer of (Women’s Franchise League) held a rally in St James Hall in support of Sir Albert Rollit’s suffrage bill. This was quite a raucous meeting and had to be prematurely abandoned.
Mary left the Women’s Franchise League and joined the Women’s Emancipation League and at their 1892 conference she caused consternation by suggesting that ‘’The time had come when they must do something desperate. There was such a thing as dynamite, which they had at their disposal … Miss Cozens maintained that if they had a regiment of women who could shoot straight men would not trifle them, but give the franchise in a week’ (Yorkshire Evening Post, 26 Oct 1892). The press publicised her remarks, but such extreme ideas proved unacceptable even for the radical Women’s Emancipation Union, leading to Mary Cozens’s removal from the group.
By late 1893 Mary Cozens was the organising force behind a new group, the Parliamentary Committee for Woman Suffrage, established to bring women’s suffrage before Parliament. She openly criticised the established suffrage societies, claiming that ‘The action of Lady Frances [Balfour] and her friends has been in the main confined to the atmosphere of drawing-rooms; my society has striven, and so far with some measure of success to secure the discussion of the question in Parliament and by the Press’ (The Times, 16 March 1897). Most members of these societies supported the Liberal party. In February 1895, Lady Frances called Cozens a “little reptile” in a letter to Millicent Fawcett for backing a bill that conflicted with the societies’ goals. Mary tried again on 1897 to put forward the Parliament committee’s bill to the House of Lords but this again failed.
In 1897, the Parliamentary Committee refused to join the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies and was criticised for backing Conservative pro-suffrage candidates. It faded from records after surviving into the 1900s. By early 1907, Mary Cozens joined the Women’s Social and Political Union but there is no record of her engaging in militant activities; she may have boycotted the 1911 census, as her name is absent from the household record at her Brighton address.
Mary’s half-sister, Margaret, with whom she had been living, died in 1903, and by 1907 Mary was living with her stepmother Ellen at her home at 74 Stanford Avenue Brighton. The house was named ‘Harlesford’ after the family estate. Mary died in 1920 and in her willleft instructions that after her death ‘one of my jugular veins be cut and that a fee of ten pounds be paid to the surgeon preferably a woman surgeon who performs this operation’. Mary left a considerable part of her estate to the village of Tetsworth, and the Cozen’s Bequest remains to this day. The bequest was intended to be distributed annually ‘among necessitous women either widows or spinsters residing in the parish of Tetsworth’.