Ethel Smyth

The British composer Ethel Smyth enjoyed a strict, elitist education. She stood up to her parents and left home to begin studying composition in Leipzig in 1877. Her operas ‘The Forest’ and ‘The Wreckers’ were hugely successful and are still on the programs of opera houses today (in most cases as the only opera by a female composer). Smyth's ‘March of the women’ became the anthem of the women’s movement in England. She herself joined the suffragette movement in 1910. The piece is also said to have been sung in London’s Holloway prison by imprisoned women’s rights activists with Smyth giving the beat with a toothbrush on the cell bars.