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The politics of women’s suffrage: The politics of women’s suffrage

The politics of women’s suffrage
The politics of women’s suffrage
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table of contents
  1. Cover
  2. Half Title
  3. Series Information
  4. Title Page
  5. Copyright Page
  6. Dedication
  7. Contents
  8. Foreword: the women’s movement, war and the vote. Some reflections on 1918 and its aftermath
    1. I
    2. II
    3. III
    4. IV
  9. List of tables
  10. List of contributors
  11. Acknowledgements
  12. Introduction
    1. Historiographical context
    2. Contributions
    3. Conclusion
  13. I. Working within existing political structures
    1. 1. The ‘success of every great movement had been largely due to the free and continuous exercise of the right to petition’: Irish suffrage petitioners and parliamentarians in the nineteenth century
      1. Introduction
      2. The ‘particular’ case of Ireland
      3. The early years of suffrage activity in Ireland
      4. Irish politicians at Westminster
      5. The founding of the Dublin Women’s Suffrage Association
      6. Petitions
      7. Conclusion
    2. 2. Singing ‘The Red Flag’ for suffrage: class, feminism and local politics in the Canning Town branch of the Women’s Social and Political Union, 1906–7
      1. A brief history of the Canning Town branch of the WSPU
      2. Membership and culture
      3. Beliefs and objectives
      4. Priorities and strategies
      5. Conclusion
    3. 3. Suffrage organizers, grassroots activism and the campaign in Wales
      1. Suffrage societies and Welsh identity: an overview
      2. Suffrage organizers, cultural clashes and regional centres
      3. Welsh language, Liberalism and rural communities
      4. Coalfield communities, the labour movement and suffrage
      5. Conclusion
    4. 4. Suffrage, infant welfare and women’s politics in Walsall, 1910–39
      1. Women’s suffrage in Walsall
      2. The infant welfare movement in Walsall
      3. Walsall in the aftermath of enfranchisement
      4. Conclusion
    5. 5. ‘Keep your eyes on us because there is no more napping’: the wartime suffrage campaigns of the Suffragettes of the WSPU and the Independent WSPU
      1. Suffrage responses to war
      2. ‘Reunite without delay’: the establishment of the Suffragettes of the WSPU and Independent WSPU
      3. Wartime suffrage campaigning
      4. Adult suffrage versus partial suffrage
      5. Wider concerns: National Registration Day and the Royal Commission for Venereal Disease
      6. The Speaker’s Conference and the Representation of the People Act
      7. Conclusion
  14. II. Working through social and cultural structures
    1. 6. English girls’ schools and women’s suffrage
    2. 7. ‘A mistake to raise any controversial question at the present time’: the careful relationship of Glasgow’s suffragists with the press, 1902–18
      1. The Glasgow and West of Scotland Association for Women’s Suffrage
      2. The oxygen of publicity
      3. Relations with the suffrage press
      4. Conclusion
    3. 8. ‘The weakest link’: suffrage writing, class interests and the isolated woman of leisure
    4. 9. Militancy in the marital sphere: sex strikes, marriage strikes and birth strikes as militant suffrage tactics, 1911–14
      1. The three tactics: sex-, marriage- and birth-striking
      2. Striking, militancy and gender
      3. Sex and birth strikes as women’s sacrifice
      4. Conclusion
  15. III. Navigating international structures
    1. 10. ‘East Side Londoners’: Sylvia Pankhurst’s lecture tours of North America and the East London Federation of Suffragettes
      1. Organizational models: the WTUL and settlement houses
      2. Emerson and the CWTUL
      3. The Lewisohns and Henry Street Settlement
      4. Recontextualizing 1912
    2. 11. Suffrage internationalism in practice: Dora Montefiore and the lessons of Finnish women’s enfranchisement
      1. Dora Montefiore visits Finland
      2. Telling the story of Finnish women’s enfranchisement
      3. Competing narratives of Finnish women’s enfranchisement
      4. Putting the Finnish example to work in the polarized suffrage politics of Britain
      5. New voices and new emphases
      6. Conclusion
    3. 12. Emotions and empire in suffrage and anti-suffrage politics: Britain, Ireland and Australia in the early twentieth century
      1. Introduction
      2. A history of emotions and politics
      3. Ireland and the complex dynamics of gender, shame and colonization
      4. Australian women voters, colonial anxiety and national pride
      5. British anti-suffragists and the embarrassment of colonial naivety
      6. Conclusion
    4. 13. From Votes for Women to world revolution: British and Irish suffragettes and international communism, 1919–39
      1. Introduction
      2. Engagement with Comintern front organizations
      3. Emigration to Soviet Russia and employment in Comintern institutions
      4. The view from the Comintern
      5. Conclusion
  16. Afterword: a tale of two centennials: suffrage, suffragettes and the limits of political participation in Britain and America
    1. Radicalism and respectability
    2. ‘I’d rather be a rebel than a slave’
  17. Index

List of contributors

Maurice J. Casey is the current Historian in Residence at EPIC The Irish Emigration Museum and the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs. He completed his DPhil at the University of Oxford in 2020, where his research explored the transnational networks of Irish radical women from 1916 to 1939. His research interests include histories of radical internationalism, the Irish Revolution and political emigration to the USSR during the interwar period.

Katherine Connelly is a historian and lecturer at the London centres of Arcadia and Lawrence universities. She is the author of Sylvia Pankhurst: Suffragette, Socialist and Scourge of Empire (London: Pluto Press, 2013) and edited and introduced Sylvia Pankhurst’s manuscript about her tours of North America, now published as A Suffragette in America: Reflections on Prisoners, Pickets and Political Change (London: Pluto Press, 2019). Kate is interested in the transatlantic links of the East End suffragettes and is currently researching the life of Zelie Emerson.

Sharon Crozier-De Rosa is Associate Professor in History at the University of Wollongong, Australia. Her research is situated at the intersections of feminist activism, emotions, imperial/colonial and violence histories. Her books include Shame and the Anti-Feminist Backlash: Britain, Ireland and Australia, 1890–1920 (2018), Remembering Women’s Activism (co-authored with Vera Mackie, 2019) and Sources for the History of Emotions (co-edited with Peter Stearns and Katie Barclay, 2020). She is Deputy Editor of Women’s History Review and is an International Federation for Research in Women’s History Board Member.

Nicoletta Gullace is an Associate Professor of History at the University of New Hampshire in the United States. Her first book, ‘The Blood of Our Sons:’ Men, Women and the Renegotiation of British Citizenship during the First World War (Palgrave, 2002) won the North American Conference of British Studies book prize and was selected as a Choice Outstanding Academic Title. Her current research deals with the commercialization of history in Britain and the United States through television, film, commemorative events, and merchandizing. Gullace has an ongoing research interest in suffrage culture and has frequent engagements speaking on the Edwardian Era, Downton Abbey, The Crown, and Britain’s royal family in a variety of public history forums.

Alexandra Hughes-Johnson is a Research Associate at the University of Oxford and a Research Portfolio Manager at the Economic and Social Research Council, UK Research and Innovation. She completed her PhD at Royal Holloway, University of London, where her research focused on the women’s suffrage movement in Wimbledon and the political career of Rose Lamartine Yates. Her research interests more broadly include women’s memorialization of the British women’s suffrage campaign and women’s interwar political activism.

Karen Hunt is Professor Emerita of Modern British History at Keele University, UK. She has published widely on the history of women’s politics in local, national and transnational settings. Suffrage has been a thread through her research from Equivocal Feminists (Cambridge University Press, 1996) and Socialist Women, co-written with June Hannam (Routledge, 2002) to ‘Class and adult suffrage in Britain during the Great War’ in J. Purvis & J. Hannam (eds), The British Women’s Suffrage Campaign. National & International Perspectives (Routledge, 2021).

Beth Jenkins is a Senior Policy Manager of Children’s Rights at the Welsh Government. She recently completed a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Essex and has research interests in women’s education, work and political cultures across nineteenth and twentieth-century Britain. Her first monograph, Graduate Women and Work in Wales, 1872-1939: Nationhood, Networks and Community, will be published in 2022. She is also co-editing a collection of essays titled Gender in Modern Welsh History from 1750 to 2000.

Lyndsey Jenkins is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Queen Mary, University of London researching post-war Labour women MPs. She is a historian of women, politics, and social change. Her first book, Lady Constance Lytton: Aristocrat, Suffragette, Martyr, was a Sunday Times biography of the year and shortlisted for the Slightly Foxed/Biographer’s Club Best First Biography Prize. She earned her PhD from Wolfson College, Oxford, in 2018, and the resulting monograph, Sisters and Sisterhood: The Kenney Family, Class and Suffrage c.1890-1965 was published by Oxford University Press in 2021. She was awarded the Caroline Spurgeon Award from the British Federation of Women Graduates in 2017. She is a former civil servant and government speechwriter.

Anna Muggeridge recently completed her doctorate on women in politics and public life in the Black Country in the first half of the twentieth century, at the University of Worcester. She works as an Associate Lecturer in History at the University of Worcester and in the heritage sector, and is a Visiting Research Fellow at the Mile End Institute at Queen Mary, University of London. She is currently embarking on a new research project, which examines women’s experiences with and in local government more widely.

Sarah Pedersen is Professor of Communication and Media at Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen. Her research focuses on women’s engagement with the media for political purposes, including historical and contemporary source material. Her book, The Scottish Suffragettes and the Press, was published in 2017 by Palgrave Macmillan. The same year she was awarded funding by the Heritage Lottery Fund to produce an edition of the correspondence of Aberdeen suffragette and journalist Caroline Phillips. She was the Director of the Rise Up Quines! festival in Aberdeen in 2018 which both celebrated the centenary of (some) women achieving the Parliamentary vote and aimed to encourage women and girls to become more involved in political leadership. Her work on the Scottish suffrage campaign has been praised in a motion to the Scottish Parliament. Her book, The Politicization of Mumsnet, was published in 2020.

Jennifer Redmond is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History, Maynooth University. She has previously held positions in University College Dublin, Trinity College Dublin and Bryn Mawr College, USA. Her research interests lie in the social history of Irish women, migration and citizenship. Her book, Moving Histories: Irish Women’s Migration to England from Independence to Republic(Liverpool University Press, 2018) was longlisted for Michel Déon Prize of the Royal Irish Academy and the Académie française. She is currently writing a monograph on the Irish writer, philanthropist and botanist, Charlotte Grace O’Brien.

Tania Shew is a final-year PhD candidate at the University of Manchester with a thesis entitled ‘Fraternising with the enemy: sex strikes and birth strikes as tactics in the British and American women’s suffrage movements, 1890-1920’. She spent a year of her PhD as a visiting doctoral fellow at Harvard University on a Fulbright scholarship. Tania has lectured at the New College of the Humanities and is currently a Scouloudi Fellow at the Institute of Historical Research. She is particularly interested in gendered intellectual history and histories of internationalism and transnationalism.

Helen Sunderland is currently a Stipendiary Lecturer in History at St Catherine’s College Oxford. She recently completed her PhD at the University of Cambridge on the political socialization of schoolgirls in England between 1870 and 1914. She has published on schoolgirls’ debating societies in The Historical Journal and her article in Victorian Periodicals Review on parliamentary politics and empire in the girls’ periodical press won the 2018 VanArsdel prize. Her wider research interests lie in the intersections between the histories of childhood, education, gender, and political culture in modern Britain.

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