Suffrage Days: Stories from the Women's Suffrage Movement (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Suffrage Days: Stories from the Women’s Suffrage Movement Jacqueline R. deVries (bio) Suffrage Days: Stories from the Women’s Suffrage Movement, by Sandra Stanley Holton; pp. xiv + 309. London and New York: Routledge, 1996, £50.00, £16.99 paper, $65.00, $24.95 paper. A handful of books and articles have appeared in the past several years which open up innovative new lines of research on the women’s suffrage movement in Britain. Ranging in focus from men’s support for women’s suffrage (The Men’s Share?, edited by Angela V. John and Claire Eustance [1997]) to the cultural production of militancy (Wisps of Violence, by Eileen Sypher [1993]), scholars of the suffrage movement are engaging ever more interesting interpretive frameworks to interrogate this familiar topic. Sandra Stanley Holton’s work has been invaluable to these ongoing discussions, and her new book, Suffrage Days, is another welcome contribution. While not quite as provocative as some of her previous work (especially her 1994 article in the American Historical Review), it makes accessible a wealth of new information and demonstrates that there are still fruitful lines of investigation for this important topic. Holton’s purpose is to reconstruct “stories that have become largely hidden in the patterns formed by previous history-making” (2), as well as to challenge the existing narratives of suffrage history between the 1860s and 1920. In keeping with her goals, Holton has adopted a hybrid methodology. At the core, her book is a collective biography of seven individuals whose contributions to the movement have been neglected: Elizabeth Wolstenholme, Jessie Craigen, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Hannah Mitchell, Mary Gawthorpe, Laurence Housman, and Alice Clark. Drawing on their autobiographical writings, as well as an impressive array of unpublished materials (some previously unexamined), Holton reconstructs the kinship and friendship circles that undergirded the movement and reveals the ways in which suffragism became a lifestyle for these figures, informing both their personal lives and public commitments—whether to property reform, trade unionism, socialism, or Irish Home Rule. Through their stories, Holton dismantles once and for all the myth that the movement was dominated by only a few luminous personalities. Suffrage Days also expands well beyond the boundaries of a collective biography. Holton frames each of her biographical sketches with an examination of some wider theme, thereby providing useful analyses of some lesser-known organizations and currents in the movement. Her most illuminating discussions focus on the 1880s and 1890s, a period much neglected in suffrage history. Whereas many scholars (David Rubinstein is one notable exception) tend to treat this period as one of quiescence, Holton sees it as a period when suffragists pursued important new organizational directions and consolidated new, ever-widening constituencies. For example, Holton investigates the continuities between nineteenth-century radicalism and twentieth-century suffrage militancy in her chapter on Elizabeth Wolstenholme, an independent, fiery woman, who left a teaching position in Manchester in the 1860s to campaign for women’s suffrage (as well as a host of other causes, including women’s education and property rights, secularism and republicanism, and sex reform.) In a move that caused great friction among her suffrage colleagues, she lived in a free union with Ben Elmy before marrying him in 1874 when she was five months pregnant. In other chapters, Holton explores emerging sexual and gender identities in her narrative on Laurence Housman; interrogates the relationship between socialism and suffrage in her chapter on Hannah Mitchell; and, in her examination [End Page 517] of Alice Clark, uncovers how women with considerable social and economic stature in their communities, even ones raised in liberal Quaker traditions, could “long to go and break some windows” (161). One significant point emerging from Suffrage Days is that the roots of militancy extend much further back than previously acknowledged. Holton chronicles the near-forgotten Women’s Franchise League, an organization founded in the 1880s that reflected the perspectives of two generations of Radical suffragists who desired a single measure that would give all women, married and single, the vote, and who were willing to use aggressive methods to obtain it. Though the organization gradually gave way to the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies...