The Sadd family is one of Maldon's better-known families: John Sadd and Sons were major employers in building and the timber trade, starting with a small business at Fullbridge in 1729 and remaining major employers until 1994.

John Granger Sadd, like many Victorians, had a large family of eleven children. His tenth child was a girl, Myra Eleanor Sadd, born 3 October 1872, and she was to become famous in her own right, not as a businesswoman but as a campaigner for women's suffrage (votes for women) Coincidentally, 1872 was the year that the National Society for Women's Suffrage was formed.

Until 1832, a few wealthy women had been allowed to vote in Parliamentary elections, but the 1832 Reform Act barred them from doing so. A similar Act in 1835 prevented them from voting in local government elections, though this was gradually relaxed from 1869 onwards. The general thinking behind this was that men were equipped with the knowledge and rational powers to vote on important matters, while women were best placed working behind the scenes to support their husbands.

Clearly, this did not appeal to Myra Sadd, who was already a convinced campaigner for the vote before her marriage to Ernest Brown in 1896. Brown was a successful businessman too, founder with his brother of Brown brothers, a firm supplying bicycle parts.

Myra clearly chose a husband who respected her brains and talent: the couple married in Maldon's Congregational Chapel (now the United Reformed Church) and decorated the venue in purple, white and green, the colours of the Women's Social and Political Union. Furthermore they merged their surnames to become Sadd Brown, a century before this practice became fashionable.

Myra Sadd Brown, supported by her husband, set off on the long and painful journey which led, after many trials, to the Representation of the People Act in 1918 which gave the vote to women householders, or the wives of householders, aged 30 and over.

She became a member of the key organisations involved: the Women's Social and Political Union, the Women's Freedom League and the Free Church League for Women's Suffrage. As part of Emily Pankhurst's East London Federation of Suffragettes she hosted busloads of women from the East End in her house near Maldon.

Myra Sadd Brown didn't limit her contributions to committee membership: she was arrested in 1912 for throwing a brick through a window at the War Office and did two months hard labour in Holloway Prison together with prominent activists including Emmeline Pankhurst. Like them she went on hunger strike, and was force-fed through rubber tubes – all the more agonising for her because she had a broken nose.

Sadd Brown's letters to her family, scribbled on toilet paper and smuggled out of prison, are still available, and make poignant reading. To her young children she writes, "I have such a funny little bed, which I can turn right up to the wall when I don't use it. I am learning French & German so you must work well or mummy will know lots more than you." She never shows the slightest sign of flinching from the cause.

World War 1 saw the suffrage movements suspend their actions and support the war effort.

Women's contributions to jobs traditionally done by men made the old arguments against women's suffrage very difficult to support, and women gained the vote in 1918. This wasn't the end for Myra Sadd Brown, who went on to become a leading figure in the international women's suffrage movement. Her husband died in 1930, while Myra went on to travel to the far East in 1937 to be present at the birth of a grandchild. Planning to return home on the Trans-Siberian Railway, she suffered a stroke in Hong Kong in 1938. She was cremated there, but is commemorated on a Sadd family memorial in the Maldon United Reformed Church churchyard.

Kamala Harris's inauguration as American Vice President last week is an inspiration to American girls, but it's worth remembering that 42 years earlier our country had its first (and undoubtedly memorable) female Prime Minister.