British Suffrage Movement Research Articles

Modernity and Progress: The Transnational Politics of Suffrage in British Columbia (1910-1916)

Canadian historians have underplayed the extent to which theproject of suffrage and first wave feminism was transnational in scope. The suffrage movement in British Columbia provides a good example of the global interconnections of the movement. While BC suffragists were relatively uninterested in pan-Canadian campaigns they explicitly situated provincial suffrage within three transnational relationships: the ‘frontier’ myth of the Western United States, radical direct action by suffragettes in the United Kingdom, and the rise of modern China. By the second decade of the 20thcentury, increasingly confident women’s suffrage societies hosted international visits and contributed to global print culture, both of which consolidated a sense of being part of a modern, international and unstoppable movement. BC suffragists were attuned to American suffrage campaigns in California, Oregon and Washington, which granted female suffrage after referenda and situated political rights for settler women in the context of Western progress narratives. The emphasis on progress and modernity intersected with growing connections to non-Western countries, complicating racialized arguments for settler women’s rights to vote. BC suffragists were particularly impressed by the role of feminism in Chinese political reform and came to understand Chinese women as symbolizing modernity, progress, and equality. Finally, the militant direct action in the British suffrage movement played a critical role in how BC suffragists imagined the role of tactical political violence. They were in close contact with the militant WSPU, hosted debates on the meaning of direct action, and argued that suffragettes were heroes fighting for a just cause. They pragmatically used media fascination with suffragette violence for political purposes by reserving the possibility that unmet demands for political equality might lead to Canadian conflict in the future.

Book review: Kat Gupta, Representation of the British Suffrage Movement

Book review: Kat Gupta, <i>Representation of the British Suffrage Movement</i>

Suffrage Movement and the Subversion of the ‘Juridico-Discursive’ Power in the Victorian Period: Elizabeth Robins and The Concept of 'New Women'

This paper examines the socio-historical subversion of ‘juridico-discursive' power in the late Victorian period. It briefly investigates the rise of the British suffrage movement and highlights the role of ‘suffrage drama' as its social apparatus. The authors demonstrate how suffrage artists, especially the playwright/actress Elizabeth Robins, acted against the dominant patriarchal hegemony and were in frontline of social uprisings. It is argued that ‘Suffrage drama' as a ‘place of tolerance' functioned as an antithesis to the mainstream theatre and challenged the conventional dramatic forms practiced prior to its birth. Suffrage drama provided a space for women to have their collective voice heard in a social and political context in the early Victorian era. Elizabeth Robins, mostly acknowledged for enacting women heroines of Ibsen's plays, became an invaluable inspirational figure for suffrage women as she was the actress in whom the strong concept of the ‘New Woman' was incarnated.

Long Island and the Woman Suffrage Movement by Antonia Petrash

107 Book Reviews Long Island and the Woman Suffrage Movement. By Antonia Petrash. Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2013, 157 pages, $19.99 Paper. Reviewed by Carrie Casagrande, University of Louisiana Monroe, LA When it comes to the women’s suffrage movement in the United States, New York’s grassroots efforts led the way in 1848 with the Seneca Falls convention. The women of Long Island worked tirelessly to see the dreams of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott become a reality with the passage of the 19th Amendment. New York librarian, Antonia Petrash investigates the struggle of a select group of Long Island residents as they contributed to the passage of both state and national women’s suffrage amendments. According to Petrash, the suffrage movement was not a united front but rather a loose coalition of strong willed and opinionated individuals. In such a group, it was only natural that disagreements often arose. Long Island resident, Harriot Stanton Blatch, for instance, grew up in the suffrage movement but disagreed with her famous mother, Elizabeth Cady Stanton. She felt in order for the movement to be successful working class women had to be included. Others, such as Alva Vanderbilt Belmont and Katherine Duer Mackay, moved in the same political and social circles but had contentious relationships. Clashing personalities and differing opinions did not end there; some suffrage leaders were proponents of state-by state legislation, while others found inspiration in the national agenda of England’s suffragettes. Rosalie Gardiner Jones, Lucy Burns, and Elisabeth Freeman all spent time incarcerated for their participation in suffragette rallies in England. Each woman found inspiration in Emmeline Pankhurst’s hands on approach to the British suffrage movement. When they returned to the states, they brought with them the courage to speak 108 ■ NEW YORK HISTORY openly in the streets organize public rallies and expand the American suffrage agenda to include a national amendment. Not all participants in the movement shared the same motivation. Elizabeth Oakes Smith, for example , became frustrated by her lack of legal rights when financial difficulties forced her into the workforce. Through this struggle, she became a writer and proponent of suffrage. Petrash uses the events in each of these women’s lives as a means for discussing the issues related to suffrage. Long Island and the Women Suffrage Movement is composed of twelve short biographical essays. The author provides a brief sketch of the background of each woman. Afterwards, she focuses attention on the woman’s contribution to the suffrage movement. Unlike Petrash, many were not native New Yorkers but called Long Island home at some point in their life. The majority of the women were from wealthy families who had the economic resources to travel around the United States presenting their perspective on suffrage. The author does include, however, four chapters on women who suffered economic hardships. Lucy Burns, Elizabeth Freeman, Edna Buckman Kearns, and Elizabeth Oakes Smith struggled to support themselves and their families by working as teachers or writers . Petrash also includes a biography of Theodore Roosevelt, who after his time as president changed his view on women’s suffrage and became an avid spokesman until his death in 1919. One chapter devotes a good deal of attention to James Lees Laidlaw and his wife, Harriet Burton Laidlaw. Laidlaw was one of the few men who publicly supported women’s suffrage and the only man recognized by the League of Women Voters in their bronze memorial tablets unveiled March 25, 1931. The biographies are organized alphabetically, which causes considerable overlap in content. Individuals such as Carrie Chapman Catt and Alice Paul are repeatedly introduced. The same is true of important events in the suffrage movement at both the state and national level. A chronological approach may have lessened this problem. In addition, the biographies of Elisabeth Freeman and Rosalie Gardiner Jones could have easily been combined since the two ladies worked almost exclusively together for the cause. The volume does have some factual errors. Petrash indicates that slavery was abolished with the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 and not the 13th Amendment in 1865 (13). Prior to 1951, there were no presidential term limits, which is why Roosevelt...

Infectious Innovations? The Diffusion of Tactical Innovation in Social Movement Networks, the Case of Suffragette Militancy

This paper explores the diffusion of a tactical innovation – militancy – within the British Suffrage Movement, 1905–1914. It concentrates upon the influences that arise from personal social networks and which affect ego's decision about whether to adopt the new tactic. UCINET is used to map and visualise the activist networks of two suffragettes who made different adoption decisions. This reveals that ‘weak ties’ to ‘innovation champions’ (i.e. suffragette ‘travelling organisers’) connected both women to opportunities to learn about, observe and adopt militancy. In order to explain why one suffragette adopted the tactic and the other did not, however, there is a need to link structural and cultural analyses of social networks together. Here, I do this by following up empirically what Fuhse [Fuhse, J. (2009). The meaning structure of social networks. Sociological Theory, 27, 51–73] has called the ‘meaning structure of the network’ consisting of interpersonal expectations and network culture. I propose that the ‘meaning structure’ of the network is linked to the structural patterning of social ties – and the subjective meanings of ego – through the communicative interaction in which they both are rooted [Mische, A. (2003). Cross-talk in movements: Rethinking the culture-network link. In M. Diani & D. McAdam (Eds.), Social movements and networks: Relational approaches to collective action (pp. 258–280). Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press]. Focusing on communicative interaction and intersubjective meanings indicates that there is value in approaching personal networks as socio-cultural ‘lifeworlds’ [Habermas, J. (1987). The theory of communicative action, volume 2: System and lifeworld. Boston, MA: Beacon Press; Passy, F., & Giugni, M. (2000). Life-spheres, networks, and sustained participation in social movements: A phenomenological approach to political commitment. Sociological Forum, 15, 117–144.). This approach is particularly valuable in highlighting the construction of a ‘moral point of view’ within networks, which fundamentally shapes the symbolic legitimacy of culturally controversial tactics.

The Doctors’ Dilemma: medical women and the British suffrage movement

For professional British women in the early twentieth century, support for the suffrage campaign was often problematic, and risked provoking charges of lack of decorum. While women teachers, being numerous, were able to campaign actively, the contribution of the doctors was limited, because their numbers were small. They subscribed to suffrage societies and participated in the great processions, but tended to avoid other public demonstrations; tax resistance was their main form of protest. Very few were prepared to risk their reputations by engaging in more militant activities, and it was not until 1914 that they were finally able to make a significant contribution to the suffrage movement.

Public Histories of Australian and British Women's Suffrage: Some Comparative Issues

In this article I consider the ways in which activists in the British suffrage movement became the public historians of their own pasts. I analyse the different forms in which the history of suffrage feminism was created and the ways in which it both drew upon former traditions of the labour movement and conventions of public memorialisation. I consider the ways in which the Australian suffrage campaign has been memorialised and differences between this and the British position. I raise a number of questions about ways in which public historians might explore the creation of collective histories and the role of individuals within that process arising from this initial comparative analysis.

Literature of the women's suffrage campaign in England

During the British women's suffrage campaign of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, women wrote plays to convert others to their cause; they wrote essays to justify their militant actions; and they wrote fiction and poetry about their prison experiences. This volume is a diverse collection of these writings, focused on the women's suffrage campaign in England and written primarily during the brief period between the New Woman writers of the 1890s and the modernists of the twentieth century. Many of these works have not been reprinted since they were first published. This important collection includes essays reflecting a variety of opinions and political positions; excerpts from autobiographies by women involved in the movement; suffrage poetry; the song that became the official song of the British suffrage movement; several one-act plays that were written and performed specifically to advance the suffrage cause; and short stories and excerpts from novels about suffrage.

Justifying Their Modern Sisters: History Writing and the British Suffrage Movement

Justifying Their Modern Sisters: History Writing and the British Suffrage Movement Maria DiCenzo On the 25* there was a leading article in "The Nation" which makes one well-nigh despair of the intelligence of its author. Anyone so ignorant of the true history of the Suffrage movement might, one would mink, have had the modesty to refrain from commenting on it. The writer alludes to this "fiveyear -old agitation for securing the Padiamentary vote to some women." Has he, then, never heard of the great agitation started byJohn Stuart Mill, worked for by devoted men and women like Mrs. Wolstenholme Elmy, Lydia Becker,Jacob Bright, and others; of the petitions, one of them signed by over a quarter of a million; of the innumerable Bills and resolutions! ("How History is Written" 309) The remainder of this article, which expresses "grievous resentfmentj" on the part of members of the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies at such a "monstrous misrepresentation" which can only do "insidious, poisonous work," helps to clarify that it is the Women's Social and Political Union to which this uninformed commentator has referred and mistaken for the "general body of women Suffragists." Out of context, this brief front-page tirade on "history" might escape notice, but its importance lies in the fact that it signals the increasingly fraught relationship between suffrage organizations in the Edwardian period and the extent to which the history of "the movement" came to represent competitive ground as they worked to legitimate their demands and tactics, in the interests of solidifying and expanding support for the cause. In a roughly ten-year period between 1902 and 1912 there was a proliferation 40volume 31 number 1 Medea at the Fin de Siècle of full-length histories by women claiming to trace the feminist movement, women's suffrage, and more specifically, the militant suffrage movement1 Given the hostility to women's activism in these years, it is clear that these narratives of "women's history" constituted an oppositional discourse — challenging the status quo — but they were not informed by a singular approach. An analysis of the discourse in the context of other types of publications, such as the official organs produced by various leagues, reveals that these narratives were instrumental in constructing different feminist/activist identities which reflected, in turn, the organizational cultures in this period. At issue, particularly between the NUWSS and the WSPU, was the impact and efficacy of the "old suffrage movement" (the activities of nineteenth-century "pioneers") versus the forms of activism initiated by the "new suffrage movement" of the early twentieth-century. It is by now a given in the scholarship that the wave of histories, biographies and autobiographies published in the interwar years must be read as historically situated and politically/personally interested (Corbett, Dodd, Holton, Kean, Mayhall, Swindells). Kathryn Dodd builds a persuasive case forwhy Ray Strachey's highly respected and frequendy referenced The Cause:A ShortHistory of the Women's Movementin Britain (1928) must be read, not as "a transparent medium through which we can locate facts aboutwomen's history, the truth or even the past," but as an account deeply implicated in middle-class progressive liberal politics of the 1920s, the consequences of which are the marginalization of some groups and the vilification of others ("Cultural Politics and Women's Historical Writing" 127). Similarly, Antoinette Burton examines earlier Victorian feminist historiography as a strand or dimension of the traditional narrative of Whig history and demonstrates the ways in which feminists in the period accepted and employed national-imperial ideology in justifying their own emancipationist claims. Sandra Stanley Holton has undertaken the most extensive examination of the historiography of the British suffrage movement. She identifies major tendencies in the founding schools of suffrage history established by women historians and links them to subsequent Victorian Review (2005)41 M. DiCenzo approaches to and interpretations of the campaign right up to the present She oudines the chief characteristics of what she terms "constitutionalist" and "militant" histories.2 The first constitutionalist histories, an important example of which is Helen Blackburn's Women's Suffrage (1902), Holton argues were Whiggish and Anglocentric, taking a long view back (sometimes to...

One cause, two paths: Militant vs. adjustive strategies in the British and American women's suffrage movements

Although the suffrage movement in Britain and the United States shared a common goal and collaborated in an international effort to enfranchise women, they differed in rhetorical tone and protest tactics. This essay examines the ideological and material conditions that led to the strategic use of militancy by the British suffrage movement and non‐violence by its American counterpart. It further explores the role of class in shaping early women's movement rhetoric.

'Deeds and Words': The Woman's Press and the Politics of Print

The political and constitutional impact of the early twentieth-century British women's suffrage movement has been the subject of extensive research since the advent of second-wave feminism, yet the broader cultural impact of the movement remains a developing scholarly area. Murray examines the role of the Woman's Press, the publishing house established in 1907 as a strategic component of the Pankhursts' influential Women's Social and Political Union. The press is located within multiple and interpenetrative analytical contexts: examined in turn are its role in the various power struggles of the WSPU and the broader British suffrage movement; its significance as an independent means of cultural production around the contested site of the suffragette; and its ambiguity as a feminist publishing house run by male pro-suffragist and lobbyist, Frederick Pethick Lawrence. The Woman's Press and its central London retail outlet figured prominently in WSPU administration as a material concern-as literature packing department, revenue raiser and recruiting centre. Yet, symbolically, the Woman's Press was also integral to the campaigning of the WSPU to an extent that has generally remained under-examined. As an independent publishing house the press constituted a vital conduit guaranteeing the entry of suffrage arguments into public discourse, and a crucial tool for appropriating and refashioning the contested image of the suffragette in the wider politico-cultural landscape of the day. Acknowledging the significance of the Woman's Press provides both a necessary historical context for the post-1970 feminist press boom, as well as a counterpoint to the ongoing political-financial conundrums that beset its modern descendents.

The Actresses' Franchise League Prepares For War: Feminist Theatre in Camouflage

In the third week of December 1908, a group of 300–400 prominent actors, actresses, and dramatists gathered at the Criterion Theatre in London to celebrate the formation of the Actresses' Franchise League. The inaugurating resolution, passed with one dissent, read: “That this meeting of actresses calls upon the Government immediately to extend the franchise to women, that women claim the franchise as a necessary protection for the workers under modern industrial conditions, and maintain that by their labour they have earned the right to this defence” (Votes for Women 24 Dec. 1908, p. 211). The resolution's emphasis upon labour as the enabling criterion qualifying women for the franchise reflects the roots of the British suffrage movement in the working class industrial north, where, as David Rosen notes, the Independent Labour Party had supported early suffragists (57).