Frances Dove Window in All Saints' High Wycombe. She presented the window to the parish church to pay tribute to the achievement of women through the ages.
English: The three-light window in All Saints' High Wycombe is known as the “Dove Window” and remembers Frances Dove (1847-1942). It was designed by Caroline Townshend and Joan Howson. Frances Dove was one of the first students to enrol at Girton College and became founder and first headmistress of Wycombe Abbey School for girls in 1896. She was an active advocate of “women’s rights” and when the 1907 Qualification of Women (County and Borough Councils) Act was passed, which gave women the right to sit on local councils even though they could not vote, she was one of the first women in the country to be elected. In 1908 she was invited by the Council to become the Mayor and although Miss Dove had been elected by the Council this was overturned at the public “mayor making” ceremony when a male candidate stepped forward. This “mayor making” ceremony would take place in the market square ( an ancient weighing-in ceremony) at which the “mayor elect” is acclaimed by the people. Never before or since was another candidate brought in at that ceremony and “elected” by acclamation of the crowd, a crowd on that occasion no doubt packed with anti-feminists. Although Dove was not elected the Bucks Free Press noted that she was the only person to come out of the meeting with dignity. It seems she chose to wear a scholar’s cap with her councillor’s robes and High Wycombe women councillors still wear scholar’s caps with their robes to this day. She retired as headmistress in 1910, was appointed a JP, supported the Suffragettes and in 1928 was made a dame. She presented the window to the parish church to pay tribute to the achievement of women through the ages, in the face of male domination. The window was dedicated on Ascension Day in 1933. In the left panel, Townshend and Howson depicted Charlotte Brontë, Emily Davies, the first principal of Girton, St Bridget, St Winifred, Elizabeth Fry, the prison reformer and Florence Nightingale. They also listed the names of Maud Royden and Dame Millicent Fawcett, both suffragettes, Agnata Ramsay, the first woman to achieve a classics tripos at Cambridge, Mary Kingsley, Hannah More, anti-slavery writer and friend of Wilberforce and Edith Cavell. In the centre panels are depictions of St Margaret the Scottish Queen, Margaret Roper, daughter to Sir Thomas More, Margaret Beaufort, mother of Henry VII and benefactress of Oxford and Cambridge universities and Ann Clough, the first principal of Newnham College and the names Josephine Butler the social reformer, Octavia Hill, co-founder of the National Trust, Jenny Lind, opera singer, Sophia Jex-Blake, a pioneer of medical education for women, Elizabeth Garret-Anderson, first woman member of the British Medical Association and Agnes Jones the nurse praised by Florence Nightingale. In the right hand panel were depicted Grace Darling, Queen Victoria, Christina Rosetti and St Hilda together with the names St Frideswide, Mary Slessor the Scottish missionary, Alice Marval who died caring for plague victims in India, Amy Johnson, and Elsie Inglis a suffragette who took women’s medical units to serve on the Western Front in the Great War.