As part of her suffrage activities, Bateson became the Cambridge organiser for the Central Society for Women's Suffrage in 1888. The following year she was elected to the executive committee Cambridge Women's Suffrage Association.[5] In 1906 she participated in a deputation to Parliament where she presented Prime MinisterHenry Campbell-Bannerman with a petition on behalf of ‘women who are doctors of letters, science and law in the universities of the United Kingdom and of the British colonies, in the universities also of Europe and the United States’. The petition declared that the signatories ‘believe the disenfranchisement of one sex to be injurious to both, and a national wrong in a country which pretends to be governed on a representative system’.[6]