Descriptions of Jessie don’t mince words: she was, quite bluntly, ugly. She was short and stout. Her clothing was out-of-style and tattered. Her voice was deep and masculine. Often, Jessie’s audience was laughing at her before she started speaking. Yet, she would win them over.

“In two minutes the whole audience was listening intently; within five she had them in fits of laughter, this time not at her but with her,” reads an account of one of her speeches. Her acting background gave Jessie a theatrical flair, with her audiences falling into call-and-response and bursting into cheers and sobs.

As her renown grew, Jessie expanded her subject matter beyond temperance. By the late 1870s, she had become involved in the women’s suffrage movement, where she met some of her closest friends and supporters: radical middle-class women like the Quaker Priestman sisters. Soon after, she became a vocal opponent of the Contagious Diseases Acts, which gave police permission to invasively “inspect” and imprison suspected sex workers in naval port cities. Jessie spoke out against anything she saw as an affront to personal liberty, fighting for animal rights, trade unions and universal suffrage for men as well as women. She even opposed mandatory vaccination.

Jessie became known by her mostly middle-class collaborators and employers for her ability to reach working-class crowds in a way others could not. When she spoke about women’s suffrage, she could win over male miners and factory workers who, for the most part, couldn’t yet vote themselves. Constantly traveling, Jessie would send petitions back to organization leadership, grubby from being passed around and signed by dozens convinced by her arguments in open air meetings.

Of course, not everyone agreed. More than once, angry members of the audience attacked Jessie. She became one of the first advocates for women’s suffrage – if not the first – to be arrested for publicly speaking out for the cause. None of this made her back down.