A SUFFRAGE debate, complete with hecklers, will be reenacted in the Town Hall to celebrate the centenary of the first British women winning the right to vote.

The event will form the centrepiece of this year’s Oxford International Women’s Festival, which has themed its two-week programme around the historic anniversary.

Organiser Debbie Hollingsworth said: “Some years it can be a little bit of a struggle to come up with a theme but this time it was obvious what it had to be.

"The debate will be a fantastic way to make the history of the fight for women to be able to vote come to life.

“People will be in costume and the speeches will be real ones that were given in the Town Hall a hundred years ago.

"We’ll even have some hecklers to really get into the spirit of things.”

The festival, which is now in its 29th year, starts on Saturday and will run until Sunday, March 11, with the debate at the Town Hall on March 8.

Following the imagined debate between leading local and national speakers from both sides of the women’s suffrage campaign, there will be a discussion about what the vote means to women in the 21st century.

This will be led by Diane Atkinson, historian and author of ‘The Remarkable Lives of the Suffragettes’, Helen Ghosh, Director General of the National Trust, political journalist Kerry-Anne Mendoza and chaired by Oxford East MP Anneliese Dodds.

Other events will include a suffragette sash making workshop and a tour retracing the history of the women suffrage activists in Oxford.

Ms Hollingsworth, who has been involved with the festival for more than a decade, said thoughts were already turning towards another anniversary.

She said: “It’s our 30th birthday next year so we are already thinking about how to mark the milestone.”

Originally funded by Oxford City Council as part of its events programme, the festival started small, but was a success right from the start.

The OIWF ‘Collective’, which would become its committee, included women of all backgrounds and ethnicities hosting their own events.

The first OIWF in 1990 included Thalia Campbells’s exhibition of 100 years of women’s banners and over 100 banners were hung in every public space in the Town Hall.

In subsequent years Waterstone’s, Blackwell’s, Modern Art Oxford, and the city museums joined in and put on events which enabled the Collective to include major figures such as Germaine Greer, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, and Yoko Ono in the programme.

Visit oxfordinternationalwomensfestival.co.uk