Bettina Borrmann Wells

In the United States in 1908, Wells, Maud Malone, Christine Ross Barker, Sophia Loebinger, and others organized open-air meetings of the Progressive Woman Suffrage Union in New York City's Madison Square, Wall Street, Harlem, and Brooklyn,^[12][13] against significant resistance from the city's residents and business leaders.^[14][15][16] In spring 1908, Wells and Malone led a suffrage parade in New York City, without a permit.^[17] Later that year, Wells and three other suffragists attempted to meet with Theodore Roosevelt in Oyster Bay, New York, but they were rebuffed by the Secret Service.^[18]

She toured the United States and Canada^[19] with her husband, meeting with suffrage activists in various cities.^[20] "Women will only get the vote when they make men believe they are serious and will pay the price for it," she told an audience in Brooklyn, "They won't get it by arranging for pink teas and yellow bazars."^[21] In 1909 she published a pamphlet, America and Woman Suffrage, detailing suffrage activities in Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, and Idaho.^[22]

Wells also wrote pro-suffrage letters to the editor, both in Great Britain^[23] and in the United States.^[24] "I admit that 'better laws have passed without any vote of woman'," she conceded in one 1908 letter to the New York Times. "One can also get to California on foot, but most of us prefer speedier methods of traveling."^[25]

Wells traveled to Washington, D.C. in January 1917, to take a turn as one of the "Silent Sentinels" picketing the White House, in the early weeks of that protest.^[26][27]

Bettina Borrmann married English businessman Herbert James Clement Wells in 1900. She was a member of the Lyceum Club of London, and of the Society of Women Journalists of London.^[28]