This ribbon badge is connected to the Women’s Sunday votes for women rally which took place on 21 June 1908. It was organised by the women-only militant Women’s Social and Political Union or WSPU, which was active from 1903 and went on to embrace the term 'suffragette'. This event is thought to have been the largest demonstration that had taken place in Britain up to this point. Tens of thousands of women marched to Hyde Park, London, England watched by hundreds of thousands of spectators. The ribbon badge features the word ‘SPEAKER’ and would have been worn by one of the eighty speakers on the day, who addressed the crowd from twenty temporary platforms. It also features the letters ‘NWSPU’, a variant on the better-known name WSPU, the ‘N’ standing for ‘National’.

Women’s Sunday publicly launched the WSPU’s new, and quickly iconic, colour scheme of purple, white and green, chosen by WSPU leader Emmeline Petherick-Lawrence in May 1908. As the suffrage researcher Elizabeth Crawford has explained, before this the WSPU had used red and white flags, ‘although it is unclear whether this was to show solidarity with socialism, with suffrage, or simply because it made a bright banner’. The new colour scheme was intended to promote the organisation and display unity. In ‘The Political Importance of the Colours’ published in Votes for Women on 7 May 1909, Christabel Pankhurst wrote, ‘every member of the Union will become an advertiser for the Exhibition, and will bring […] a dozen or a score, or an even larger number, of men and women of her acquaintance who, seeing for themselves, will appreciate for the first time the strength of the woman’s movement’. Petherick-Lawrence expounded on the intended symbolism of these colours: purple for dignity, white for purity and green for hope. Various contemporary women’s suffrage groups used colours in these ways.

These three colours are a central feature of the ribbon badge, the form of which references both previous political campaigns and the military. Ribbons had a long association with political movements in Britain. As early as the 1840s, the Anti-Corn Law League used a Corn Law ribbon featuring a wheat-ear pattern. Suffrage ribbons, especially those featuring metal elements, also evoked military insignia. Medals, which referenced the military even more directly, were sometimes given within this suffrage movement. Through these and other military references such as sashes, women indicated that they were ready to fight for the vote, symbolism which took on even more resonance as groups including the WSPU escalated their militant activities. The gilt wreath of laurels on this particular ribbon badge foretold victory.

This votes for women campaign blended forceful feminism with traditional femininity, partly to dispel the argument that emancipated women would become ‘unwomanly’. Both aspects of this approach are neatly encapsulated in this ribbon badge, which asserts women’s right to speak in public and includes a delicate bow, a conventional feature of feminine dress in Britain.

In 1918, around the time that the WSPU was dissolved, the UK government granted suffrage to women over the age of thirty who met a property qualification, ostensibly to recognise women’s contribution to World War I. All men over the age of twenty-one could vote in this part of the world. It took another ten years for this government to approve all women over twenty-one voting. The voting age was lowered to eighteen in 1969.