Votes for Women and Public Discourse: Elite Newspapers, Correspondence Columns and Informed Debate in Edwardian Britain

Abstract

This article examines how three elite newspapers – the Daily Telegraph, The Times, and the Manchester Guardian – used correspondence columns to promote informed and balanced public debate, showing how this was independent of editorial arguments as part of extended commitment to conceptions of the ‘educational ideal’. It focuses on the campaign of the Women’s Social and Political Union, and particularly hunger strikes and the government’s response of forcible feeding, to evaluate how public figures with authority and institutional credibility engaged with each other in the press. With regard to the work of Jürgen Habermas, the article also considers how an effective public sphere was framed and maintained in elite newspapers, but also how access was partially circumscribed based on expertise and social status in line with the wider nature of Edwardian democracy.