Catherine Bebbington / UK Parliament / Creative Commons / Via Flickr: uk_parliament

On the evening of 28 October 1908, English suffragists Helen Fox and Muriel Matters chained themselves to the brass grille that blocked the ladies' balcony from view in the House of Commons.

They were elegant ladies, but they were there to fuck shit up.

As the men below prepared to settle themselves in for a civilised debate as usual, Fox let out a loud cry of "Votes for women!"

A reporter from the Illustrated London News described the scene that followed:

In an instant every masculine countenance on the floor below was upturned to the brass-work filling the spaces between the stone mullions of that balcony reserved for spectators of the fair sex. A young, smartly gowned but disheveled woman of unusual prettiness was struggling with attendants wearing faultless evening dress and badges of authority. Before the occupant of the Speaker’s chair had recovered his presence of mind sufficiently to order a resumption of the interrupted debate, a two-foot banner was thrust through the brass-work–technically called the grille–and a shower of handbills began to descend upon the Conservatives, Liberals, Laborites, Home Rulers and Socialists below.

And what did the pretty lady do?

“Mr. Speaker!” shrieked the pretty lady, resisting with all her strength the efforts of the sergeant-at-arms to put his hand over her mouth, “we have listened too long to the illogical utterances of men who know not what they say. Attend to the women! We demand of this government, calling itself Liberal, but really the most illiberal–”

Miss Helen Fox, suffragist and probable badass.

Universal Images Group / Getty Images

At this point, the sergeant-at-arms succeeded, with the help of several other men, to pull down the entire grille whose job it was to separate women from the men of politics below.

With it tumbled the pretty Miss Helen Fox, along with her comrade of unknown physical attractiveness, Miss Muriel Matters. Just outside the Commons, meanwhile, suffragists from across England had gathered to foment something of an Edwardian riot, while one man, a "pale youth", flung leaflets at the members of parliament before being arrested, as every good ally should.

The Times would later remark on the incident – as well as another attempt to rush the House of Commons earlier that month that landed the Pankhursts in prison – as examples of “those childish demonstrations which silly women think clever".

By 1928, with the passage of the second Representation of the People Act, all British women over the age of 21 had gained the right to vote.

A hundred and seven years after the pretty lady shrieked from the grille, and 87 since women were enfranchised equally to men, women make up 22.6% of parliamentarians in the House of Commons and 22.8% in the House of Lords.

There are currently 147 women in the House of Commons – the highest number ever, both in number and in proportion. The UN ranked the UK 64th in the world in 2014 in terms of gender equality in parliament, behind Sweden, Cuba, South Africa, Finland, Ecuador, Belgium, Senegal, the Seychelles, Nicaragua, and 55 other countries.

There are more men in the House of Commons right now than the total number of women MPs in the history of parliament. (In 1992, there were more MPs named John or Jonathan than there were women MPs.) A hundred and seventy-seven more female MPs would be needed to achieve a parity. The last three general elections added an average of eight women MPs apiece. At this rate, it will take about 22 elections, or 110 years, to achieve a 50:50 parliament.

You've probably never heard of Frances Scott. She's the founder of the 50:50 Parliament campaign, and she's not willing to wait 110 years for parity.

A stipulation of writing about Scott is to ignore her biography entirely, and rather to link early and often to her petition on change.org, which calls for a debate in parliament to establish a plan of action to reach a gender parity in the House of Commons.

Frances Scott and a supporter of the No More Page 3 campaign.

50:50 Parliament / Via 5050parliament.co.uk

So here’s another link to that.

But with that out of the way, it’s time to tell you all about Frances Scott anyway. Because whether she likes it or not, it matters who she is. It matters that she is an outsider, new to activism and to politics, not quite sure what she is doing, but doing it anyway. She is just one example of the many individual campaigners working to affect British society one issue and one policy at a time.

It's a field that includes Lucy Ann Holmes of No More Page 3, whose campaign may or may not have succeeded in pressuring Britain's most-read newspaper to end its 40-year-old tradition of prominently displaying boobs. Meanwhile, campaigners against female genital mutilation such as Fahma Mohamed have successfully petitioned government ministers on change.org, while Laura Bates' blog, the Everyday Sexism project, has become an international database of women's experiences from around the world that together declare: “Yes, sexism is still a thing.”

What can we learn from Scott, a woman trying to create a movement much bigger than herself?

At the rather dilapidated Feminist Library of London one evening in February 2015, groups of mostly young women sat in small circles, planning how to bring the 50:50 campaign to universities, old media, social media, and parliament itself.

Scott flitted between them, a whirlwind of energy and zeal, her sing-songy voice revealing a certain middle-aged, middle-class respectability.

She was a businesswoman once, in “the time of big shoulder pads and power women,” as she put it, climbing the ranks to become the first woman in several executive positions in her company. While she knew that she was treated differently at times for being a woman, at the end of the day, she had a “wonderful, wonderful time”.

Now she teaches antenatal classes part-time, and describes her day job as "shopping for the family".

50:50 Parliament / Via 5050parliament.co.uk

So she's not the kind of woman who might throw a Molotov cocktail at the prime minister's motorcade. Or even chain herself to a grille in the House of Commons.

As an activist, she's brand new. Her interest in gender equality in parliament was first piqued years ago when her daughter was elected to her primary school’s student council and explained to her mum that every year, one boy and one girl were elected to represent the class. Why? Because boys and girls “have different experiences.”

For example: “Boys don’t understand the dilemmas of whether girls should wear trousers or skirts to school; and girls don’t understand the state that the boys’ toilets get into, and how dirty they become.”

These wise words from her young daughter caused Scott to think, as she recounted ecstatically, “Ka-ching ka-ching, this is interesting! They get it at primary school that girls and boys have some different experiences. And I start talking to people about it, and saying, well, hey, wouldn’t it be quite nice if we had 50:50 parliament?”

Supporters of the 50:50 campaign on 27 November 2014 – exactly 100 years since the first woman MP, Nancy Astor, entered the House of Commons to take her seat.

50:50 Parliament / Via 5050parliament.co.uk

Quite nice indeed.

And now, Scott speaks at events such as meetings of the Young Feminists of London, and holds planning meetings at London’s Feminist Library. She seems a part and product of a wave of individualist, online feminism. Her 50:50 campaign could be interpreted as a logical end point of feminism – the equality of the sexes – but she's not quite sure if she's a feminist. Not yet, anyway.

“I’m a woman," she replied, when asked outright if she considered herself a feminist. "I am a woman. I believe in gender equality. That’s kind of the bottom line, as far as I’m concerned. If that defines me as a feminist, then maybe. I don’t really know a lot about feminism. I just care passionately about women. And I care passionately about empowering women, in whatever sphere they choose to be in.”

Now that Scott is at the helm of about a dozen young organisers, however, she is eager to draw from the expertise of those who are "tuned in to modern feminism", in much the same way she is quick to apologise that she is not.

An outsider to politics, and to the sometimes competing strains of feminism, Scott asks as many questions as she gives directions. How should the campaign use social media? What other campaigns and campaigners should it ally with? How can trans identity and gender nonconformity best be welcomed and included within a campaign of this kind?

So while Scott is not "tuned in", she's not stupid, and is busy working on a way to ford a river of sometimes competing currents in feminism. She wants to do this by pulling everyone on board.

Does she think she has the right to lead such a campaign?

“I’m not sure I do!" she laughed. "I’m sure many people probably think I don’t. Why should I? I have no reputation. I can say whatever I like. I have nothing to lose.

"I can look foolish," she added, then whispered, "I don’t think you need to say that last bit!”

But the ability and the willingness to risk looking foolish is, after all, the activist's great advantage over the elected representative.

The slow progress of women MPs over time.

APPG Improving Parliament Report / Via appgimprovingparliamentreport.co.uk

The plan, then, is to make friends and not alienate people, all while trying to build a political consensus among potential allies of the 50:50 cause. The best plan to accomplish this is a lack of one.

Scott has imitated the No More Page 3 campaign with her change.org petition and her T-shirt – and her success in photographing MPs in that T-shirt – but all of this is only to generate a mood among political decision-makers, and among ordinary people, that of course it is time for there to be more women in parliament.

The petition’s core text says:

Right now there are only 148 women MPs in the House of Commons – that’s just 23% of the total. We are petitioning for debate around this issue. We would like party leaders from across the political spectrum to make a proper plan to address this under-representation. Changing the status quo is vital because representation shapes policy and policy affects women. Women are 51% of the population. We would like men and women, the best of both, in roughly equal numbers, forging legislation for the future, together.

At first glance, it is a radical proposition: for parliament to aspire to a revolutionary overhaul of its make-up. But when you look at it closely, it's not asking for much. The actual demands of the petition are mild: for a “debate” and a “proper plan”.

The 50:50 campaign is explicit in its lack of specifics about how a gender equality of representation should be achieved.

In her speaking engagements, Scott does, in any case, refer to a number of options for how gender equality could be achieved, including those which have had success in the 63 countries ranked above the UK in the UN's report on women in parliaments around the world.

These options include 50:50 shortlists, all-women shortlists (as Scott quips: “We’ve already had all-men short lists for years!”), job shares (as proposed by the Liberal Democrats), and even good, old-fashioned, unpopular quotas.

Another option she put forth was the proposal by Tony Benn to introduce two-seat constituencies: halving the total number of electoral districts and electing a male and a female MP for each.

Scott is an idealist and a pragmatist all at once.

On the one hand, her petition is a simple proposal to work explicitly within a system in order to change it, and her campaign is cross-party. The PowerPoint presentation she pulls out at various speaking events boasts a collection of tepid quotes from all the major political party leaders, and she’s managed to photograph MPs from across the political spectrum in her T-shirt.

Even when she mentions Benn, Scott shies away from expressing a political allegiance to the populist leftist icon – “a lot of people consider him to be really radical,” she told me, nervously.

On the other hand, she has a subversive ability to look at something like parliament, as it is and has always been, and to say quite frankly that it “stinks”.

She referred to her favourite line from a film to illustrate the point:

“I have a favourite line in a movie – and it’s that duck in the film called Babe. And what’s happening is that the duck’s watching the cows, and the cows say, 'The way things are, is the way things are,' as they chew the cud, OK? And the duck wags his tail, and he says, 'The way things are stinks!' Because he’s going to be slaughtered for Christmas dinner, you see? And that’s how I feel!”

It could so easily be seen as natural, after all this time: that politics is a place for mostly men, and for probably reasonable, and perhaps inevitable, reasons. To look at that and say that it "stinks" is a radical reimagining, and a rejection of the status quo.

You don't have to look very far back in British history to find a culture of behaviour toward women that would seem utterly unacceptable today.

In 10 years, or 20, or the 110 years it could take to get a 50:50 parliament – what will schoolchildren think was unacceptable about 2015?

When the Illustrated London News wrote about the demonstration of Fox & Co. in October 1908, its reporter noted the reaction of the The Times to the whole affair:

“It is probable,” observes the great British organ [i.e. The Times], “that few of the women who within the past two weeks have been attempting to incite a mob to rush the House of Commons have any intelligent idea of the nature of the action.” Those whose lives have been spent, we read further, “as is the case with the majority of the women of this country, in the shelter of a man-made social code which guards them at every point from the rougher realities of existence,” can naturally not realize “the dangerous implications of such an attempt.”

Frances Scott and a group of supporters.

5050 Parliament / Via 5050parliament.co.uk

Of course the suffragists seemed mad to observers in their day – and entitled, and foolish, and ill-prepared for the male arena of parliamentary politics. Newspaper accounts of their actions read like parodies of the sexism of a bygone era, made all the more ludicrous by the obvious common sense – by today's standards – of the demands they "shrieked" for: that women should be allowed to vote and to participate in politics.

Will it seem like common sense some day that parliament should be made up of roughly equal numbers of men and women? Of proportionate genders, and ethnicities, and other backgrounds?

And what role can a campaign like 50:50 Parliament play in creating a new brand of common sense?

In that dismal room above London’s Feminist Library, with its worn-out chairs and rickety tables spread with 50:50 T-shirts now available in the colours of the 1920s suffragists – green, violet, and white – a room full of young people worked to make Scott's idea a reality.

In that space, the 50:50 campaign transformed into something much more than one woman’s retirement project. If this petition is to gain real traction, and if the 50:50 campaign is to ever move above and beyond its petition's simple demands for a "debate" and a "proper plan" alone, it will happen because of the willingness of a room full of energetic activists to make their way to a dilapidated old building in Elephant & Castle on a bitterly cold night. It will happen because they can not only imagine a new model for democratic representation, but can work toward it, and convince others to do the same.

One woman can only do so much. A whole room of women, though, looks more like the beginnings of a movement.