Ramping Up Rights: An unfinished history of British disability activism

By Rachel Charlton-Dailey

by Simon Webb 12th December 2025

The early pages of this book are enlivened by an account of the life of Rosa May Billinghurst (1875-1953). Known as the ‘Cripple Suffragette’, May chained herself to railings and broke windows with the best of them, but childhood polio meant she had to do it from a wheelchair-tricycle. May, whom Charlton-Dailey calls ‘badass’, hid window-breaking stones under a blanket over her knees, and was even known to charge the police in her activist chariot.