6 February 2018 saw the largest ever gathering of women parliamentarians past and present, as they congregated in Westminster Hall in the Houses of Parliament to mark one hundred years since the Representation of the People Act had enfranchised the first British women. Joined by campaigners, professionals, young people and historians, a series of eminent politicians considered the achievements, significance and legacy of suffrage campaigners. The Prime Minister, Theresa May, for example, discussed Parliament itself as a focal point for suffrage activism, referring to the cupboard where Emily Wilding Davison hid on census night 1911, the statue to which Margery Humes had chained herself and the events of Black Friday in Parliament Square.¹ But it was seventeen-year-old Jordhi Nullatamby, a member of the Youth Parliament from Thurrock, who offered the most powerful and moving address. She spoke of the ‘passionate, principled and determined’ activists who had enabled women to vote for the first time, but also reminded the audience that equality had not yet been achieved, stating, ‘the vision [was] not yet realised’. Instead, she suggested that the centenary celebrations should inspire women to continue campaigning and fighting for ‘a better and more equal world for the women who follow us, just as those suffrage campaigners of 1918 fought to create a better world for us today’.²

For Nullatamby, as for many women before her, the way to create ‘a better and more equal world’ was through participation in politics. Yet this has frequently raised fundamental challenges for women activists. As Susan Pedersen has recently asked, ‘how does one enter a world built for men, and at once inhabit it, and change it?’³ This issue preoccupied women during the long campaign for suffrage. They understood their exclusion from the formal political system as the foundation for other forms of injustice and inequality. Vast numbers of women were, of course, already active in politics. Many of these were elite women who held informal roles as wives and hostesses.⁴ Increasingly, however, as the political system itself changed through the nineteenth century, women also became organizers, activists and campaigners on specific issues and within the broader context of electoral, party and class politics.⁵ Nevertheless, the political structure not only excluded but also subordinated and disadvantaged women. Drawing on a variety of justifications – philosophical, legal, economic, social, religious, cultural and nationalist – women claimed that, as women, they had both the right and the duty to participate not just in local but also in national and even international politics.⁶ They frequently argued that this would not only benefit women as a group, but society as a whole. Though women felt the consequences in particular and specific ways, they recognized women’s oppression as a structural, as well as an individual, experience.

The struggle for suffrage was not a straightforward demand for entry into the public sphere. Activists sought more than inclusion and incorporation into the body politic. More fundamentally, the campaign was a deliberate attempt both to utilize and reconstruct the political system as a means of transforming women’s place, status and prospects in other spheres. There is, of course, an ongoing and lively debate as to how far they achieved this objective.⁷ Certainly, they were not wholly successful. But it is important to understand their beliefs, priorities and strategies as well as their achievements.

The contributions in this collection examine how suffrage campaigners sought to achieve lasting structural change by navigating, interrogating, accepting, challenging and remaking the existing political system. Their concern was with power and its unequal distribution, and the ways that women could and could not exercise control over their own lives and in wider society. This starting point, with its emphasis on political structures and power, reaffirms Karen Offen’s insistence that the history of feminism is political history.⁸ It might seem obvious, and even redundant, to say this in the context of suffrage history. Yet while it is vital to do justice to the social and cultural dimensions of the suffrage movement, it is important not to lose sight of the fact that this was first and foremost a political demand. As a result, it was also primarily a political movement, and, as Pedersen has noted, ‘one of the most powerful consciously sex-based political movements ever’.⁹

As a political cause, it required a political solution. The enfranchisement of women could only take place through the parliamentary process. This represented the most significant and radical challenge to the constitution since 1832, seeking to fundamentally alter the terms on which politics was conducted, expanding and redefining the basis of citizenship. The suffrage campaign was not a single-issue campaign.¹⁰ Nor was it simply a means to an end, a stepping stone on the route to other crucial reforms. Women did not aim at piecemeal change, but at systemic structural transformation. Yet they knew that in order to achieve this, they needed to operate within the political system as well as seeking to remake it. Women worked within existing structures, institutions and organizations as well as seeking to lobby and influence change from outside by creating their own networks and organizations.¹¹ Suffrage activists were political actors and savvy operatives who developed a far-reaching analysis of the political system from the constitutional framework to local administrative structures.¹²

It is vital to understand the suffrage cause within its proper political context. Karen Offen also reminds us that ‘feminist claims are primarily political claims, not philosophical claims. They never arise in – or respond to – a socio-political vacuum. They are put forward in concrete settings, and they pose explicit political demands for change.’¹³ Women’s suffrage was inseparable from contemporary political debates around Home Rule, demands for workers’ rights, the politics of imperialism and, of course, universal male suffrage.¹⁴ It has long been recognized, for example, that Liberal women’s uneasy relationship with their party originated in the disputes over Home Rule in the 1880s, that many twentieth century suffrage activists had roots within the labour movement and that the Boer War galvanized a new generation of campaigners.¹⁵ Many suffrage activists had clearly defined views on these issues and were working simultaneously for other objectives. Women’s politics was not separate to other forms of politics. It was integral to, and constitutive of, these other political debates.

Similarly, suffrage societies did not exist separately from the political mainstream but operated within the existing political system. They often adopted the political norms and practices common to other political organizations, such as meetings, debates and resolutions. These strategies were essential in order to lobby those with political capital and power. To demonstrate their readiness for political citizenship, and to prepare others to do likewise, suffrage campaigners had a particular interest in political education, and invested a great deal in explaining political structures and practices to those who were not yet fully informed. Women developed the knowledge and skills which enabled them to operate within existing political systems, and deliberately and effectively pressed for change within the context of existing structures. They became well versed in the specificities of parliamentary procedures, of course, but also in the intricacies of party politics and electioneering. They understood local factions and interests, and the ways in which other institutions like the churches exercised political influence.

At the same time, women recognized the limitations of existing politics. They have often been rightly celebrated as pioneers of innovative campaigning, particularly when it came to incorporating artistic and creative practices.¹⁶ However, their intentions were more far-reaching and fundamental. Women recognized that politics did not only take place in the parliamentary chamber, the town meeting or on the street corner. Rather, politics was embedded in women’s everyday lives.¹⁷ Women’s activism was linked to their life experiences and negotiated in relation to their other commitments, including family obligations, friendship networks and the demands of paid work and domestic labour. As such, suffrage was inseparable from other claims around women’s rights, education, work and family life.¹⁸ Women understood these concerns as legitimate political issues.

Women therefore attempted to redefine the nature of the political itself, shifting not only how politics was conducted and how the political system functioned, but also what counted as political. They invested structures outside the conventionally political spaces – especially the home and the family – with political meaning.¹⁹ They asserted the importance of understanding these places as political. What went on within them – including the education and welfare of children, practices of violence and abuse and the distribution of power and resources – were political concerns which could not be understood as purely private.²⁰ In this, they were building on the efforts of the nineteenth century women’s movement, which had already recreated local politics as an acceptable and appropriate space for women. These efforts overlapped with other contemporary political concerns around poverty, housing and the health of the nation, and, as such, were instrumental in the construction of the welfare state. Their expertise and experience enabled women to assert their moral right and practical capacity to address these challenges, making common cause with other political reformers.²¹

The 2018 commemoration of the centenary of the passing of the Representation of the People Act and the 2019 Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act generated new public interest in the campaign for women’s suffrage, as well as offering scholars a chance to reflect on its meaning, impact and legacy. The intense debate generated through the year, which was also linked to the ongoing centenary of the First World War, was testament to ongoing interest and debate in this particular field of women’s history.²² This book is the result of a series of papers presented at an international conference, ‘Women’s Suffrage and Beyond: Local National and International Contexts’, held at the University of Oxford in October 2018. Convened by Alexandra Hughes-Johnson, Lyndsey Jenkins and Senia Pašeta, the conference sought to break down some of the disciplinary, geographic and periodical boundaries which have come to define but also in some instances to limit suffrage studies.

The collection consists of thirteen chapters based on papers delivered at the conference, developed from a number of different intellectual and methodological techniques. They broadly analyse three themes: how women worked within existing political structures; how they sought to advance their political demands through social and cultural structures; and how they navigated international political structures in pursuit of their goals. These themes cut across the local, the national and the transnational, as well as extending well beyond a narrow chronology. The chapters reflect ongoing debates within suffrage history, and increasing recognition of, for example, the importance of Irish and imperial politics. They also engage with other historiographical concerns and practices, such as the history of childhood and media history. Some case studies offer hints of possibilities not pursued, while others show how what was once considered radical practice became incorporated into the political mainstream. They recognize dissent and disagreement, but do not consider that either necessarily signifies political weakness. Rather, they indicate the multiplicity of perspectives among women activists who participated in the suffrage campaign, and the different priorities which women brought to the cause. Together, these chapters are testament to the exciting and fruitful scholarship which continues to invigorate suffrage history.

Historiographical context

Early suffrage history developed as a clearly defined and demarcated field in its own right, with fixed dates for the beginning and end of the campaign: from the famous 1866 suffrage petition to the Representation of the People Acts in 1918, and occasionally 1928. Participants were often straightforwardly divided into distinct categories such as ‘suffrage’ and ‘anti-suffrage’, ‘militant’ and ‘constitutional’, ‘rational’ and ‘irrational’.²³ This contributed to the establishment of a dominant framework from which influential narratives of the women’s movement would be constructed. Historiographical attention was firmly focused on the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), which was frequently characterized and caricatured as an autocratic, even anti-democratic, single-issue pressure group.²⁴ This approach had the effect of divorcing suffrage activism from its wider political, social and economic context. It tended to marginalize suffrage, both politically and historically, and to downplay the significance of both the movement and the campaigners with it. It was all too easy for those working in other fields of history not to take suffrage seriously, seeing it as a discrete and limited movement.²⁵

Neither the emergence of social history nor the subsequent development of women’s history initially seriously challenged this perspective. Focused on histories ‘from below’ and of ‘the everyday’, a movement centred on parliamentary enfranchisement and apparently dominated by middle-class women seemed unpromising terrain for both social historians and women’s historians. Though the emergence of new political history sought to analyse political languages and cultures, the emphasis remained largely on men’s interests, efforts and lives.²⁶ Indeed, political history itself, concerned with leaders and institutions, seemed inherently exclusionary to women.²⁷

One of the first texts to insist on the wider significance of women’s suffrage to political history was Sandra Stanley Holton’s landmark text Feminism and Democracy. Here, Stanley Holton analysed the constitutional debates, institutional politics and electoral strategies of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS).²⁸ In doing so, she argued that division between so-called constitutionalists and militants had been greatly overstated, with both wings of the movement often working in symbiosis for women’s sexual, social and economic equality.²⁹ Like Jill Liddington and Jill Norris’s earlier ground-breaking work, One Hand Tied Behind Us – which highlighted the efforts of working-class ‘radical suffragists’, their campaigning methods, policy initiatives and connections to the labour movement – Stanley Holton rejected a focus on sensationalist militant tactics. Instead, she analysed what she termed ‘democratic suffragism’, and offered a new perspective on the relationship between the labour movement and the women’s movement.³⁰ Her later work has been equally influential in its insistence that historians need to understand the everyday nature of suffrage politics, rather than focusing on leaders and full-time activists.³¹

It has taken several decades of scholarship to dismantle the barriers which had fenced suffrage history into a neat and tidy narrative. The picture which has since been painted is far richer and more nuanced, allowing for a deeper and more comprehensive understanding of the suffrage movement and its wider significance. In turn, this has facilitated a greater understanding of how suffrage politics was integrated into, and central to, other prevailing political debates, social issues and cultural norms.

A number of historiographical themes have emerged. One is an insistence on seeing the suffrage campaign as part of the political mainstream. Scholarship has demonstrated that suffrage organizations emerged from, and were recognizable within, existing political culture.³² Campaigning was marked by compromise and collaboration rather than continual disagreement and division between different groups.³³ There were a myriad of organizations beyond the WSPU and the NUWSS, often rooted in professional identities, with objectives that went well beyond achievement of the franchise.³⁴ The struggle also incorporated campaigning beyond specific suffrage organizations, frequently involved men as well as women and was met with a concerted resistance.³⁵ At the same time, historians have sought to situate suffrage activism within a longer tradition of feminist campaigning, rejecting narrow chronologies which privilege WSPU activism. Careful examinations of women’s activities during the First World War – rejecting simplistic assumptions that campaigning was suspended – has been integral to considering how gendered hierarchies were made and remade in wartime and postwar contexts.³⁶ A well-developed literature has reconsidered the legacy of suffrage. In contrast to older histories characterized by a tone of pessimism and disappointment about a supposed failure of feminism during the interwar period, more recent studies insist that women’s activism not only evolved into new forms but had frequent successes.³⁷

Another welcome development has been the proliferation of local studies, showing that the campaign was neither focused on, nor directed from, London (or Manchester), but thrived in distinctive ways around the country.³⁸ Local branches were often key sites for political activism and enjoyed a considerable amount of independence and autonomy, providing space for longstanding activists and new enthusiasts to develop alliances which could transcend other existing structures, institutions, organizational allegiances and affiliations. Elizabeth Crawford’s encyclopedic collections have provided an invaluable foundation for this effort.³⁹ Regional studies have likewise demonstrated how Irish, Scottish and Welsh campaigns were shaped by the particularities of their political cultures, particularly nationalist sentiment and movements.⁴⁰ Broader shifts towards comparative and transnational history have prompted a reappraisal of the place of the British campaign within similar struggles for women’s rights and enfranchisement around the globe. Women worked across multiple international political organizations, structures, networks and cultures in a long history of transnational collaboration and cooperation which was often grounded in personal connections and friendship networks and went well beyond suffrage.⁴¹ Other research has demonstrated the centrality of women’s suffrage and demands for citizenship in broader national histories of democracy and nation-building.⁴² Scholars have also explored the imperial assumptions and racial hierarchies which underpinned women’s demands for enfranchisement in Britain, serving as an important reminder that women’s claims were often grounded in the politics of exclusion as well as inclusion.⁴³

Suffrage historiography has also been greatly enriched by methodological developments in women’s history itself. The emphasis on women’s cultures, artistic output, creativity and professionalism, for example, has produced a series of critical interventions.⁴⁴ The religious turn in women’s history has also produced accounts of the suffrage campaign which demonstrate how far suffrage activism was informed by established religious structures and faith, as well as esoteric belief, and secular discourse.⁴⁵ This work has demonstrated how far the suffrage cause enabled women from different religious faiths – as well as freethinking and secular women – to unite in pursuit of a shared goal.⁴⁶ Other research has revisited the ongoing debate around the relationship between class and suffrage politics. Suffrage scholars increasingly recognize working-class women’s participation in the suffrage movement – not as marginal figures but as significant political agents, operating within many organizations and central to shaping different campaigns.⁴⁷

The edited collection has long played an important role in the methodology of suffrage history. The chapters in June Purvis and Maroula Joannou’s The Women’s Suffrage Movement offered an important re-examination of suffrage militancy, examining its creative and cultural implications, extending it beyond the WSPU and its leadership and considering its emergence from contemporary British political culture.⁴⁸ Purvis’s collaboration with Sandra Stanley Holton, Votes for Women, highlighted new case studies on both significant and lesser-known activists, as well as seeking to shift historiographical attention beyond the WSPU and London.⁴⁹ Clare Eustance, Joan Ryan and Laura Ugolini’s Suffrage Reader was a key text in placing suffrage within broader political, social and economic developments.⁵⁰ Collaborations were crucial in reappraising and resituating the British campaign in an imperial and global context.⁵¹ More recent essay collections have also facilitated a thorough investigation of particular dimensions of the campaign, such as the role of men or the legacies of suffrage.⁵² It is therefore appropriate and welcome that several of the publications resulting from the centenary return to this collaborative methodological approach.⁵³

This text has also benefited from technological progress. Recent advances in digital history – not only online access to the 1911 census, but also improvements in the accessibility of local and international newspapers – have made it far easier for historians to identify and pursue subjects through the archives as well as opening up the possibility of large-scale data analysis.⁵⁴ In these chapters, digital approaches are deployed alongside more conventional uses of the historical archive, including minute books, committee papers, correspondence and lectures together with suffrage periodicals, local, national and international newspapers, suffrage plays, autobiographies and oral interviews.

Recent advances in cultural and social understandings of suffrage need to be matched with a similar focus not only on the politics of suffrage but on the political significance of suffrage. It remains a challenge for historians to insist that suffrage is central to accounts of the development of British modernization, citizenship and democracy without either replicating linear triumphalist narratives of progress or simply rewriting existing political histories with women added in. Here, as elsewhere, the contribution of feminist historians is not only to ensure that women are included in historical narratives, but to transform the narratives themselves, introducing new concerns and alternative perspectives and questioning the gendered nature of male experience in the past as the default and universal experience.

Contributions

The first set of chapters in this collection examines how women worked within existing political structures to advance their cause. Jennifer Redmond analyses how the Irish Women’s Suffrage and Local Government Association and other early suffrage activists attempted to influence Irish representatives in Parliament in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Her contribution demonstrates women’s firm and subtle grasp of the broader political context in which they worked, including the Irish question. She shows that women activists understood and utilized conventional political strategies, closely examining the use of petitions as a political tactic which aimed to raise public awareness and influence political decision making. She also analyses how Irish MPs themselves also contributed to the debate at a far earlier moment than is usually recognized.

The next chapter, by Lyndsey Jenkins, uses a case study of the Canning Town branch of the WSPU to examine how working-class women sought to exercise political agency through the suffrage cause. She demonstrates the dissatisfaction that unemployed women workers felt with existing political structures which failed to meet their needs, ranging from the paltry formal local welfare systems, to well-meaning but inadequate philanthropic provision, to national policy on the unemployed. While embedded in local socialist culture, the women did not seek to use the labour movement as a means to press for political change, but instead formed their own society which aimed to bring about both short- and long-term improvements in their lives. She indicates how women developed a particular kind of political practice, adopting direct action, prioritizing political education and creating an intensely sociable political culture. In highlighting these women’s political capabilities and identities, the chapter illustrates the broad attraction of the suffrage cause, which many women later pursued in the better-known Adult Suffrage Society and the East London Federation of Suffragettes.

In contrast, Beth Jenkins’s chapter indicates that the failure of women’s suffrage societies to fully grasp the realities of the political situation impeded Welsh women’s engagement with the broader national movement. While suffrage societies are often perceived as masters of communications and public relations, here their efforts were more heavy-handed, often grounded in stereotypes, and hence less effective. Jenkins argues that the relatively late and patchy emergence of suffrage societies does not mean that Welsh women lacked an interest in suffrage. Rather, building on scholarship which has asserted the importance of ‘suffrage outside suffragism’, she demonstrates the extent to which women actively worked for suffrage within the existing political structures, particularly Liberal and nationalist institutions, to press for change.

Anna Muggeridge’s chapter likewise demonstrates that a limited local suffrage movement does not mean an absence of politicized women. Her analysis of the infant welfare movement in Walsall is a reminder that, for many women, suffrage was by no means the most pressing or relevant concern. Women in the infant welfare movement were able to further their political agenda by establishing a broad, inclusive and collaborative approach which facilitated political participation from women from a wide range of backgrounds. Reasserting the importance of the locality as a crucial site of women’s political practice, her intervention not only complements the many important studies of local suffrage activity, but connects them with a broader history of women’s work in local government and welfare which is often overshadowed by the historiographical focus on suffrage.

The final contribution in this section, from Alexandra Hughes-Johnson, represents the first sustained historiographical analysis of the Independent Women’s Social and Political Union and the Suffragettes of the Women’s Social and Political Union. The determination of these women to continue to fight for suffrage throughout the First World War was, as she argues, a striking act of political resistance against a government which sought to co-opt women into the war effort while refusing to grant them citizenship. She shows that these organizations sought to remake existing structures and networks in order to form new feminist communities. Disgruntled former members of the WSPU used the strategies and skills which they had developed within the suffrage campaign in a new political context. They tackled concerns around venereal disease and the Defence of the Realm Act while furthering debates around women’s suffrage versus adult suffrage. Above all, they continued to assert the relevance of their political priorities, refusing to accept that their demands could be set aside.

The next set of chapters examines how women sought to advance their political demands through social and cultural structures beyond the conventional political arena. Sarah Pedersen demonstrates how Glaswegian suffragists sought to use the press as a means of political communication. Their relationship with the local press was fraught with difficulty. Local papers often proved hostile to militancy and sought to tar all suffrage activists with the same brush. More surprising, perhaps, is the troublesome relationship that the branch had with the editors of the Common Cause. This illuminates the tensions between the ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’ which is familiar to suffrage scholars from other contexts, and illustrates how they could be manifested in mutual incomprehension despite their shared goals.

In the following chapter, Sos Eltis analyses how women brought their knowledge of suffrage and class politics to literature and the arts, using their writing and performance as a campaigning tool to confront the class structure as well as the gender order. On the page and on the stage, women displayed and deployed their political knowledge as a means to create and sustain political commitment. Yet here, as elsewhere, middle-class writers and performers strove to reconcile propagandist ideals of women’s solidarity with the realities of class difference and divided interests. Suffrage writers struggled to celebrate cross-class alliances while acknowledging the often complex and contested relations between class and gender.

Helen Sunderland’s chapter then takes the politics of suffrage into the school. She conceptualizes the girls’ school as a political community which encompassed not just teachers but also pupils and alumnae. She argues that like other all-female spaces which have long been recognized as sites for women’s politicization and socialization, schools were crucial in introducing girls and young women to the suffrage debate. Girls’ suffrage education occurred less through formal processes of education than in informal social activities like debating and school magazines which allowed girls a window into suffrage campaigning elsewhere. Crucially, she demonstrates that girls were not the passive recipients of ideas introduced by teachers and former students, but, drawing on new histories of childhood which assert the political capabilities and agency of children and young people, illustrates that girls had their own ideas about politics and their own strategies for contributing to debates.

Concluding this section, Tania Shew examines how some of the most radical feminist affiliates of the WSPU and Women’s Freedom League (WFL) sought to explore the impact of marriage-, sex- and birth-strikes as explicit forms of political protest and as a way of securing the vote. Feminists had, of course, long been critical of the ways that marriage, domesticity and maternity restricted and confined women. Increasingly, suffrage activists believed that political equity was a prerequisite for a change in women’s domestic status, explicitly linking their enfranchisement with the ongoing sexual double standard. In the immediate prewar period, as women developed new forms of militant protest, some, as Shew illustrates, sought to use their sexual power as a campaigning strategy and a way of increasing pressure on men to grant the vote. In doing so, they politicized not only the home but also the bedroom, and linked even the most intimate of relationships with the need for structural change.

The final chapters examine how women worked within international political structures to achieve their objectives. Karen Hunt’s chapter uses Dora Montefiore’s experience and analysis of Finnish enfranchisement as a way to analyse broader debates within the suffrage and labour movements. Frustrated by what she saw as the limited and tentative objectives of British progressive politics, Montefiore attempted to highlight the Finnish experience in her political work to demonstrate that more radical and revolutionary change – including but not limited to adult suffrage – was possible with sufficient ambition. Hunt’s analysis illustrates how some women recognized that whatever contemporary activists might have liked to claim, Britain was not the ‘storm centre’ of an international struggle, but merely one among many stages upon which a global political debate on citizenship played out, and British campaigners could learn a great deal from developments elsewhere. Montefiore’s politics illustrates a feminist internationalism which often struggled to gain a hearing when faced with the forces of nationalism, imperialism and class politics.

Pursuing the politics of suffrage in the East End of London into the later Edwardian period, Katherine Connelly places the East London Federation of Suffragettes (ELFS) in the context of a radical transatlantic dialogue. Though the ELFS is often narrowly conceived as the result of Sylvia Pankhurst’s tremendous energy and particular politics, Connelly demonstrates how much it was indebted to Pankhurst’s positive assessment of women’s grassroots activism in settlement houses and the Women’s Trade Union League that she had encountered on her lecture tours of the United States. Moreover, she shows that American women involved in these institutions assisted the ELFS’ efforts to create a genuinely grassroots, bottom-up movement, embedded in the politics of the local community and their shared desire for truly democratic political practice. Her approach thus affirms the significance of positive institutional models, rather than solely individual conviction, in feminist institution-building.

In the following chapter, Sharon Crozier-De Rosa examines how activists in different parts of the British Empire attempted to put imperial politics to use in their campaigns. Considering Ireland and Australia alongside Britain, she demonstrates how both suffrage and anti-suffrage campaigners utilized the emotional dimensions of imperialism, manifesting as shame and embarrassment, anger and indignation, sympathy and solidarity, in the language and tone of their campaigns. Emotions were not only felt, but constructed and deployed in strategic and effective ways as part of political campaigns. Focusing on the emotions of nationalist and anti-colonial as well as suffrage politics, her chapter points to new ways of writing political history, in which emotions are recognized as central.

The final contribution, by Maurice J. Casey, considers the later careers of some of the most radical British and Irish suffrage activists, who sought to further revolutionary change through advancing the cause of international communism. While communist parties were often resistant to the demands of supposedly bourgeois feminist causes, many women succeeded in forging careers within satellite organizations associated with international communism, promoting a range of causes, from humanitarianism to pacifism. Some women also found employment in Moscow’s revolutionary institutions. The political campaigning and administrative skills that these women had developed within suffrage activism were relevant and transferable to these organizations, enabling former activists to pursue the most fundamental structural upheaval of all: world revolution. However, Casey also demonstrates that the lack of communist interest in women’s specific concerns meant a failure to attract a new generation of activists, breaking the tentative link between suffrage and communism.

The collection is bookended by two contributions which consider the political context and its implications for women’s politics in 1918 and 2018. Susan R. Grayzel’s foreword reflects on the myriad ways in which women’s activism was remade in the crucible of, and in opposition to, new kinds of warfare, especially the destructive force of airpower. Her insistence on understanding British women’s enfranchisement in relation to the ongoing denial of similar rights elsewhere in the British Empire offers a new reading of the relationship between the national and the international, the local and the global, in histories of citizenship and democracy. Finally, the afterword, by Nicoletta F. Gullace, compares the British commemorations of the suffrage centenary in 2018 with the equivalent anniversary in the United States in 2020. Gullace argues that sidelining imperialism in one case and foregrounding race in the other helps account for the outpourings of joy and muted acknowledgement on different sides of the Atlantic. A call to understand the legacies of suffrage activists in all their rich complexities, this chapter is also an important reminder that democracy itself remains a work-in-progress rather than a state which can be taken for granted.

Conclusion

Commemorations of women’s enfranchisement in Britain took place against a tumultuous political and social backdrop in which women’s rights were contested and attacked. In the wake of revelations against the Hollywood filmmaker Harvey Weinstein, the trials of the actor Bill Cosby and the doctor Larry Nassar and, of course, the election of Donald Trump, questions of power, exploitation and harassment were ever more present in public debate. The #MeToo and #TimesUp campaigns made many men uncomfortable, some question their behaviour and others complain that the movement had gone ‘too far’. New terms for old forms of behaviour, such as ‘mansplaining’, ‘toxic masculinity’ and ‘himpathy’, signified women’s exasperation with cultural norms which still required them to tolerate the intolerable. Significant advances in women’s rights, such as the successful campaign to repeal the Eighth Amendment in Ireland, were matched by devastating losses, such as the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the US Supreme Court in the face of the dignified testimony of Christine Blasey Ford. In Britain, publication of pay data by major companies demonstrated how – one hundred years after women’s suffrage and fifty years after the Equal Pay Act, businesses were not yet paying men and women equally – a point underlined by the case of Carrie Gracie at the BBC. There were concerns about the disproportionate impact of austerity, tax and welfare policies on women, especially those with caring responsibilities, epitomized by the notorious ‘rape clause’ attached to eligibility for child benefit. Campaigns against period poverty and for women’s pensions rights highlighted the concerns of young and older women alike. Women of colour continued to experience multiple and overlapping discrimination, with high-profile women such as anti-Brexit campaigner Gina Ford and Diane Abbott MP facing violent and racialized threats. The experience of women migrants and refugees at Yarl’s Wood Immigration Centre demonstrated how the most vulnerable and marginalized women of colour are all but dehumanized in degrading conditions.

Yet the hostile political climate often seemed to invigorate and energize women activists fighting for positive change. Many activists took inspiration from the struggles of suffrage campaigners, positioning their work for women’s equality as part of a feminist inheritance from these earlier struggles while also recognizing some of their limitations. While individual women were often instrumental in creating and driving particular campaigns, once again they recognized that collective action aimed at lasting structural change was the only route forward. Women did not seek to remove individual men from power, but to change the practices across entire industries. The women’s marches in 2017 were aimed not only at the incoming American president but expressed broader concerns about misogyny, homophobia, racism and other forms of structural inequality. Women’s feminist priorities were often interwoven with concerns about environmental degradation and climate change, the plight of migrants and refugees, the consequences of neoliberalism, the rise of far-right movements and, in the UK, Brexit. These concerns were often global, and, as a result, international structures and collaboration became even more important. Some of these, notably the internet and specifically social media, represented both major challenges and important opportunities for women, on the one hand offering places for connection and inspiration, and on the other facilitating a climate in which it became ever more difficult for women to express political opinions without facing online and offline threats.

It is too soon to determine what the legacy of the suffrage centenary will be. The limited and specific nature of government investment in the centenary hardly seemed designed to bring about significant and lasting change. Local campaigns seemed, unsurprisingly, more effective at engaging local communities, though those tied into broader efforts to promote democracy, participation and citizenship appear to promise more than those which were simply geared towards constructing a statue. Nevertheless, one important legacy may be a greater awareness and understanding of women’s suffrage, especially among a generation increasingly politicized by local, national and global injustice. Another will surely be the many partnerships and relationships built between those working in the academy and those working in community and grassroots organizations to share and develop resources collaboratively.⁵⁵ But the scholarly advances made during the year will also be a crucial outcome. Some of the publications which have already emerged during and following the centenary show how the conversations which characterized that year are reshaping the debate on suffrage.⁵⁶ In many cases, these are characterized by a conversation between those scholars who have defined the field for decades and the perspectives of emerging scholars.⁵⁷ We hope that this collection will also prove an important contribution to that conversation. The chapters here serve as a reminder of the power of the collective and the need for long-term commitment to structural change.