Emmeline Pankhurst could hardly have wished for better. Had she been alive to witness the boundless affection for the militant suffragettes one hundred years after the first British women received the vote, she would have discovered a legacy even she could never have imagined. While the suffrage victory was partial, granting female householders over thirty the right to vote, the exclusion of young working-class women was a compromise most suffragists reluctantly accepted.¹ That middle-class women would enjoy many of the same political privileges as middle-class men was a victory, even if not a total one. Though Pankhurst embraced the highly democratic ‘soldier’s vote’, she, like many more moderate suffragists, conceded that propertyless women would have to wait.² This omission cost her very little in the adulatory celebrations of the WSPU during Britain’s 2018 centenary extravaganza.³

Despite euphoria over the 1918 suffrage victory, the years after the partial enfranchisement of women were dispiriting for Pankhurst. Although still revered by her most loyal followers, she found herself under financial constraints, suffering from ill health due to hunger-striking in prison and burdened with three ‘war babies’ that she rashly adopted during a moral panic over illegitimacy.⁴ More galling, perhaps, her darling Christabel, destined (she believed) to be the first woman in Parliament, lost the 1918 Smethwick election after standing as the ‘coupon’ candidate for the right-wing Women’s Party in this solidly working-class district.⁵ Sadly, she herself died in 1928 while campaigning as a Conservative candidate for the constituency of Whitechapel and St George’s, less than a month before the Reform Act granting equal suffrage received Royal Assent. Avowedly anti-socialist, hierarchical and wedded to a nationalist agenda, many aspects of Mrs Pankhurst’s politics were probably diametrically opposed to those held by the artists, activists and young women bedecked in purple, white and green flooding the streets in gay celebration of the suffragettes during the events of 2018.⁶

Ironically, crowds that heralded Emmeline Pankhurst and the WSPU for their bold and self-immolating campaign worshipped their militancy without very carefully examining their politics. As Laura Mayhall has noted, admiration for suffragette ‘spectacle’ often overshadowed a realistic sense of the groundwork prepared by the constitutionalist campaign or a true reckoning with the xenophobic thrust of the Pankhursts’ movement by the end of the First World War.⁷ While several excellent centennial exhibitions acknowledged constitutionalist contributions by Millicent Garrett Fawcett and others, the flamboyance of the militants seemed to capture public imagination, often making them the focus of events undertaken to generate positive public ‘impact’.⁸ The American women’s suffrage centenary would unfold very differently. Occurring only two years later, the US centenary was reduced by COVID-19 lockdowns and overshadowed by renewed attention to the pernicious racial dynamics that tainted the US campaign in its later years – a sad betrayal of the movement’s early abolitionist roots.⁹ In the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement, it became much more difficult to celebrate a suffrage campaign that would leave many women of colour disenfranchised.¹⁰ While the British women’s suffrage centenary marked the 1918 victory as an unequivocal and inspiring triumph, the American centenary shrouded the decades-long campaign for the vote in its manifest failures – failures impossible to ignore during a bitter presidential election marked by pervasive voter suppression.¹¹

The Nineteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, ratified on 18 August 1920, stated that ‘the right of citizens to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex’.¹² Stated in the negative – ‘Shall not be denied … on account of …’ – rather than in positive language that explicitly granted women the specified right, the law allowed constituencies to find a myriad of other reasons by which to prevent those deemed undesirable from casting a vote. As they had done to African American men, similarly enfranchised in the Fifteenth Amendment (1870), many states erected barriers to voting that ostensibly had nothing to do with race or sex, but which disproportionately disenfranchised the poor, the dispossessed and the formerly enslaved.¹³

The tarnished legacy of the American women’s suffrage movement stems, in part, from Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony’s disparaging responses to the proposed enfranchisement of African American men at a time when ‘educated’ white women were still without the vote.¹⁴ In a bitter split, culminating in 1869, Lucy Stone’s American Women’s Suffrage Association embraced the extension of political rights to African American men, while suffragists led by Stanton and Anthony regarded the proposed legislation as an affront to white womanhood.¹⁵ Although many American women today revere the ‘suffragettes’, buying commemorative stamps, downloading a judicial cookbook and heralding suffragists’ fight for the vote, for historians, conflicts over the Fifteenth Amendment have often overshadowed the victories of the Nineteenth. Given the wording of legislation that prohibited one form of discrimination while never explicitly excluding another, the Nineteenth Amendment was destined to be as selective and discriminatory as the Fifteenth had been, leaving many Black women barred from the polls.¹⁶ The use of this subtly evasive language was a compromise that all too many white, middle-class suffragists accepted to facilitate passage in the South of a constitutional amendment that might otherwise have failed.¹⁷ Despite the fifty-year gap between these two franchise amendments, the triumph of women’s suffrage is thus imbued with the betrayal of freedmen’s ability to vote – a breach of faith which has adumbrated a more uncomplicated celebration of what de facto became middle-class white women’s political enfranchisement.¹⁸

Long central to the historiography of American women’s suffrage, the standoff between white suffragists and the Black male beneficiaries of the Fifteenth Amendment has dominated journalism, documentaries and museum websites, becoming a major focal point of American coverage of the suffrage centennial.¹⁹ The ‘marginalization’ of Black women suffragists and the clash between the demand for sex equality and the need for racial justice emerged in force as the US debated how to honour the event. The 2019 insertion of a bronze likeness of Black feminist Sojourner Truth into a sculpture of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony planned for Central Park only highlighted the fact that Black feminists had been eschewed in such company and did little to improve the battered reputation of America’s women’s suffrage movement.²⁰ While the American public might once have enjoyed an unequivocal celebration of women’s rights as much as their British counterparts did, the public discussion of ‘systemic racism’ in 2020 left Americans much more inclined to accept the critical perspective on the suffrage movement.

Indeed, on both sides of the Atlantic, the crowds of 2020 showed far less interest in reverential celebration, focusing instead on an unseemly past drenched in racism, white supremacy and slavery. Following the murder of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police, British sympathizers, demonstrating solidarity with US Black Lives Matter protests, toppled a statue of philanthropist slave-trader Edward Colston, throwing him into Bristol harbour.²¹ More expressions of iconoclasm ensued; activists graffitied the words ‘Was a Racist’ on the base of Winston Churchill’s likeness in Parliament Square,²² protestors defaced statues of compromised dignitaries – echoing the toppling of Confederate monuments in the US – and even the staid administration of Edinburgh University agreed to re-name Hume Tower out of disgust for a passage where the philosopher opined that ‘negroes’ were ‘naturally inferior to whites’.²³ As a number of public institutions reconsidered the conflict between their professed humanitarian values and their financial indebtedness to slavery, many considered sacrificing historic monuments to discredited forefathers as a symbolic (and relatively inexpensive) way to bow to the demands of ‘anti-racist’ protests and escape embarrassing accusations of hypocrisy.²⁴

Compared with the ebullient celebration of the militant suffragettes in 2018, 2020 was not an auspicious moment for a centenary. America’s women’s suffrage centennial was thus muted, apologetic and often admonitory.²⁵ If 2018 had been a moment of feminist eruption, achieved in part by the momentum of #MeToo, 2020 was a year when the public scrutinized its painful racial past. The 1619 Project (linking Britain with its erstwhile colony in a bloody economic system founded on slavery), foregrounded the underlying ‘erasure’ evident in historical memory at the very moment police killings of young African Americans received more attention than ever before. Recognition of endemic inequality and hostility to reverential treatment of a tainted past triggered an international outburst, demanding national histories, foundational myths and public art be scrubbed of the vestiges of racism.²⁶ This shift left few historical figures with their reputations unscathed. Emmeline Pankhurst had escaped as the portcullis of historical commemoration slammed shut, but in America her white, middle-class counterparts would be judged for the indignant response of luminaries like Stanton and Anthony to the enfranchisement of male former slaves.²⁷

The gyrations of public engagement with history over the past few years have reversed themselves with astonishing rapidity. On one hand, Britain’s lugubrious commemoration of the First World War, seemingly impermeable to a more measured historical revisionism, gave way to the joyous finale of the women’s suffrage celebration, symbolized by the rebellion of the militant suffragettes.²⁸ In both cases, the public desired stories of tragedy and triumph, resistant to historical nuance. While academic historians had a major role in consulting on these events, eminent ‘talking heads’ often found their more circumspect messages swept away by a sensationalistic historical imagination that resonated with a new generation of centenary consumers.²⁹

In contrast to 2018, the zealous scrutiny of the past that emerged in 2020 left little room for heroes. The forgiveness once afforded historical figures for antiquated perspectives was no longer gamely bestowed by historians for whom ‘the past was a foreign country’ – socially, culturally and religiously different from our own and therefore to be judged on its own terms. If the British celebration can be faulted for uncritical pathos and ebullient lionization of flawed and under-analysed figures, the moral condemnation of yesterday’s heroes for their failure to meet contemporary ethical standards has left very little to celebrate during the centennial of the Nineteenth Amendment.³⁰

In the context of such whiplash over the meaning of national histories, it is reassuring to engage with fascinating scholarship that neither praises nor buries the past, but brings to life the suffrage movement through rich, deep and ‘thick’ historical descriptions and contextualization. Editors Alexandra Hughes-Johnson and Lyndsey Jenkins have arranged a volume that offers both nuance and breadth. If the past is another country, The Politics of Suffrage gives us a passport to travel there and provides a Baedeker to the language, culture, fears and passions during incipient moments of emerging feminist activism. This detailed view of the suffrage movement carries us beyond both hagiography and vilification to an embedded understanding of brave and flawed figures contending with the issues of their own time and shaping our own.

Radicalism and respectability

In these chapters, past and present meet. If the celebrants of the 2018 Suffrage Centenary yearned for a relationship with an imagined past – often sartorially assuming the identities of Edwardian rebels through costume, pilgrimage and re-enactment – these chapters remind us that suffragists were viscerally engaged in an imagined future – one where the world would be transformed by the women’s vote. These two groups met imperfectly in the more flamboyant expressions of the centenary celebration, necessitating a historicized representation of those who lived before. Eschewing the ‘Downtonization’ of Edwardian history, The Politics of Suffrage takes us from Jennifer Redmond’s petitioners of the 1860s to Maurice Casey’s surprising revelations about interwar communist allies, Charlotte Despard and Maude Gonne, showing us the range and breadth of a movement far more subtle, persistent and inclusive than the sensationalistic centenary events were able to convey. For all their fun, enthusiasm, pride and noble sentiments, Britain’s suffrage centenary had a tendency to mould the past to the wishful thinking of the present. While engaging and informative – particularly about the material culture of the Edwardian years – centenary events often missed the obscurity, tedium and self-effacement in which many suffragists lived and worked.³¹

The chapters in this volume reveal how different that vision of transformation was for feminists, depending upon class, political sympathies, organizational affiliations, geographic situation and time. Rather than embracing the women’s suffrage movement as a radical, feel-good campaign, monolithic in its leanings and ambitions, or vilifying the movement itself for the venalities of its leading lights, these chapters illuminate the lesser-known history of the suffrage movement, showing its complexity, enthusiasm and anguish. Extending the meaning of the political, these contributions, as Hughes-Johnson and Jenkins remind us, reveal how suffragists at the local, national and international level worked both within and outside existing structures as they sought to transform women’s lived reality and the future through women’s citizenship.

Each of the insightful chapters in The Politics of Suffrage contends that suffrage was a profoundly political movement and that the ramifications of its politics were prolific, extending into the cultural, social and personal spheres as well. Foundational scholarship on women’s suffrage, such as the pioneering work of Sandra Stanley Holton, deftly reveals the way suffragists played the parliamentary game.³² Holton’s work on the Election Fighting Fund and the relationship between constitutionalists and the Labour Party demonstrates the symbiotic union of feminism and socialism in a marriage of convenience, where Labour pledged its commitment to the cause and access to the public sphere, while suffragists provided a broad political network and money to fight contested seats. This emphasis on the legislative and parliamentary history of suffrage is crucial to understanding how suffragists breached the ramparts of the law. By planting their flag, so to speak, in a compromise negotiated towards the end of the First World War, women over thirty gained a beachhead from which later generations would fight for the equal franchise, won ten years later in the ‘Flapper vote’ of 1928.³³

While this story is well known, the articles in this volume complicate the political narrative of women’s suffrage considerably, revealing the multifaceted suffrage relationship with class identity. As Katherine Connelly shows, adult suffragists insisted on the enfranchisement of working-class women and continued to struggle for equality well after the vote was ostensibly ‘won’ in 1918. Too many middle-class feminists, however, were willing to compromise on this point. Several chapters deftly explain how the seemingly innocuous embrace of suffrage on ‘equal terms with men’ in fact abandoned the mobile and propertyless working classes, who had suffered so much for the suffrage campaign. Commensurability between the patronizing attitude of ‘Antis’, who vowed to minister to the local poor, and the astonishingly similar perspective of ‘limited suffragists’, who believed votes for women of property would empower them to ‘help’ their less fortunate sisters, unmasks middle-class moral justification for their periodic abandonment of the political ambitions of the poor. Yet even the imperfect constitutional change enacted in 1918 transformed the electorate in powerful ways.³⁴

The Politics of Suffrage picks up where legislative history left off, demonstrating how suffrage politics worked outside the walls of Parliament. From the quotidian drawing rooms of Glaswegian feminists, nervous to publish under their own names, to the international lecture halls where interwar activists spoke to large crowds in America, Finland and Russia, Sarah Pedersen and Karen Hunt reveal how moderates and radicals cross-fertilized the movement in unexpected ways. This range of action, both within and outside of conventional political structures – and taking place over the long expanse of suffrage history – offers crucial perspectives on women whose political tactics ranged from ostentatious respectability to outright rebellion.

This volume reminds us that suffrage unfolded with many contrasts. In girls’ high schools, Helen Sunderland demonstrates how pupils enthusiastically debated the pros and cons of women’s suffrage, respectably denouncing the militant campaign, while developing their own political perspectives alongside the reticent feminists who judiciously attempted to teach them without unduly influencing their views. These moderate feminists could hardly have contrasted more starkly with the passionate ‘birth-strikers’, vividly described by Tania Shew, who believed that in refusing to marry, ‘know’ men or give birth, they would bend patriarchal institutions to their will and win women the vote. While patient middle-class suffragists argued their case quietly in the feminist press, ‘sex-strikers’ embraced the idea of women’s sexual power, exaggerated women’s ability to withhold sexual consent and endorsed the transformative possibilities of separatist militancy, which contrasted profoundly with more maternalist, family-oriented claims justifying the need for women’s votes.³⁵ Faith in persuasion was a hallmark of constitutional suffragists, contrasting sharply with the militant stress on ‘deeds not words’, particularly as more lady-like feminism met with disappointment. In contrast to the popular conviction that women’s suffrage was primarily the result of militant radicalism, these chapters show the tremendous range of tactics that expressed feminist aspirations beyond the vote itself.³⁶

The varieties of political expression were by no means limited to middle-class feminists. In Canning Town, as Lyndsey Jenkins perceptively shows, working-class women looking for conviviality and a good tea frequented a short-lived but important suffrage club that ended each meeting by singing ‘The Red Flag’. Poignantly intertwining the aspirations of feminism with hopes for a socialist society where women could find steady work, common women sought community and a means to create for themselves and their families a better life through the vote. While sharing with Sylvia Pankhurst’s East London Federation of Suffragettes a desire for comradeship and a willingness to entertain suffrage militancy, the women of Canning Town were ultimately unable to resolve their fraying relationship with the increasing demands of the WSPU leadership. The East London Federation, as Katherine Connelly powerfully shows, thrived by adopting the settlement ideal and cultivating the aesthetic and personal aspiration of ordinary women. Sylvia’s intention to live among the working classes in the East End anchored her locally and freed the East London Federation from the kind of outside patronage that had caused such turmoil in Canning Town.

While working-class women often differed as dramatically in their personal political perspectives as their middle-class counterparts, suffragists of different stripes, as Anna Muggeridge reminds us, found commonality not only in their quest for the vote, but in unifying over social problems. In many cases, women who differed in their party sympathies shared a common interest in infant and maternal welfare, perhaps explaining why such campaigns gained particular prominence after women received the vote. As it became clear that women would not be politically monolithic, campaigns for the common good could knit together diverse groups of women in a common cause.³⁷ The question of tactics, however, could divide them as well.

In Ireland, feminist Unionists, Home Rulers and nationalists petitioned a Westminster Parliament, the legitimacy of which many did not accept.³⁸ As Jennifer Redmond reminds us, the radicalism of the Irish militants stood in stark contrast to the parliamentary petitioners of the early suffrage movement, careful not to stir disapproval. Instead, these respectable Anglo-Irish women, who favored liberal Home Rule, gently lobbied for the vote – part of the Irish story that has been eclipsed by the more dramatic militant movement that would emerge later on. Sharon Crozier-De Rosa reminds us, however, that imperial suffragists had a complex and fraught relationship with both the metropole and with each other. Racial dynamics and the question of imperial ‘responsibility’ towards non-European subjects ostensibly incapable of self-government were twisted to justify or negate the argument for women’s suffrage. The complexity of suffrage in local, national and imperial contexts perhaps helps explain the splintering of the suffrage movement, as locality, ethnicity and political affiliation all played out in narratives about why women needed the vote.

Indeed, national, regional and local case studies reveal how difficult the cause of the national suffrage movement would have been without the initiative and organizational direction of local women, who faced their own division based on class, faith and political traditions. While paid organizers, versed in local languages and with local connections, could be a help, grassroots initiatives, we learn, were central to sowing suffrage in what Beth Jenkins reminds us had once been thought of as ‘rather stony soil’.

Striking in these chapters is the contrast between local and international feminism.³⁹ If provincial suffragists tended to articulate their political perspective in terms of its ability to address local needs, the internationalists, as Karen Hunt deftly reveals, saw feminist aspirations as part of a global campaign. While Sylvia Pankhurst travelled to America, where she met a diverse group of collaborators who taught her about the cooperative settlement model, Dora Montefiore shuttled back and forth to Finland, the first European country to award women the vote. Like Pankhurst, she became wedded to the vision of adult suffrage, believing passionately in the need for socialist cooperation and oscillating between a desire to ‘elevate’ the working classes and belief in inter-class comradeship based on full moral equality.

The quest for communion with the working classes, framed in several chapters, reveals an egalitarian desire to overcome the patronizing stance of ‘Lady Bountiful’ and to engage with the working classes on their own terms. For Sylvia Pankhurst, the settlement ideal inspired her to open a cooperative home where women from all walks of life could live in an environment that promoted peace, beauty and justice. For most middle-class feminists, however, the quest to bring ‘salvation’ to the working class, while avoiding patronage, remained a constant challenge. Sos Eltis brilliantly shows how middle-class suffragists – the so-called ‘weakest link’ – enjoyed literary depictions of themselves that emphasized their beneficence and solidarity with the working classes, while preserving their elevated status as educated mistresses of the house. In their writings, middle-class feminist authors assumed the language of working-class characters, as they created sympathetic plebian figures who articulated feminist ideals in a common tongue. Women’s deftness with the pen, and their use of words to manipulate emotions and sentiment, was also evident as suffragists attempted to shame those metropolitan politicians who refused to follow the lead of white settler colonies, like Australia and New Zealand, which had given women the vote. As Sharon Crozier-De Rosa tellingly shows, both imperial and metropolitan women were adept at manipulating the language and emotions of suffrage for their own ends.

The emphasis on feminism in action and the dedication to aspirations beyond the vote has characterized some of the most important historiography on women and war.⁴⁰ It should not surprise us, then, that The Politics of Suffrage has used the opportunity of the dual centenaries to enrich the suffrage history of the First World War. Alexandra Hughes-Johnson vividly shows that suffragists neither abandoned the quest for the vote in 1914, nor uniformly turned into patriots or anti-militarist pacifists. The militant Suffragettes of the WSPU and the Independent WSPU, while limited in their tactics by wartime restrictions, nevertheless agitated for the vote, protested against the war and never repudiated militant tactics. While Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst disowned Sylvia for her anti-war work in the East End, British ‘Anti’ politicians used identical rhetoric to denounce the enfranchisement of Antipodean women, which they believed had resulted in the defeat of conscription. War made strange bedfellows, nowhere more so than in Ireland, where militant women who sympathized with the Easter Rising, Maurice Casey reminds us, were deeply attracted to the Russian Revolution, becoming part of a feminist wave of political tourism to Russia during and after 1917. While Mrs Pankhurst and Jessie Kenney travelled to Russia to review the Russian Women’s Battalion of Death and to convince Russian women to stay in the war, Sylvia Pankhurst, Charlotte Despard and others came to witness the establishment of a just society based on communist principles.⁴¹ That suffragettes turned into both Mosleyites and Marxist-Leninists reveals the radical poles of the suffrage movement and demonstrates that feminist engagement with international politics extended well beyond participation in Liberal interwar humanitarianism.⁴² Whether working on famine relief, maternal and child welfare or the liberation of the working classes, feminists carried their utopian vision of a just society into the public sphere. Their political aspirations – and the quest for meaningful paid work – dispersed feminists into an international environment that offered new opportunities.⁴³

In its political focus, this edited collection reminds us of the many ways in which the politics of women’s suffrage can be revealed culturally, socially and interpersonally. As suffragists pieced together inter-class alliances, feminists were often caught between a longed-for vision of an egalitarian future and a longed-for desire to distinguish themselves. For the women of Glasgow, middle-class women writers or the organizers of tea rooms for the poor, their self-fashioning as respectable members of society was key to their claim for citizenship in a society whose parameters and hierarchies they largely accepted. For those looking for a world transformed, rather than simply a world improved, the lure of internationalism would beckon during the interwar period, when more feminist activists than ever before worked in the international sphere. Whether feeding hungry children, resettling refugees or fostering communist transformation, women deployed skills acquired through years of suffrage agitation, and demonstrated a thick-skinned resilience to opposition, ridicule and deprivation as they embraced roles far outside the private sphere.⁴⁴

The adage of second-wave feminism was ‘the personal is political’, and clearly from this volume we see that the political was also deeply personal. While many extraordinary feminists engaged politically in the national or international arena, other women busied themselves on the local level, often working within existing political structures or formulating new ones to create community, promote ideas of electoral equality and to advocate for policies beneficial to women.⁴⁵ Radicalism and respectability remained in tension, as different constituents of the women’s suffrage movement saw the path to the franchise tied to tactics that either confirmed or destroyed socially accepted views of womanly conduct. Different perspectives could also lead suffragists down very different political paths. Not only did the Pankhurst sisters find each other on the opposite sides of the political centre, but some former militants embraced the radical right, while others committed themselves to international communism from the time of the Russian Revolution until 1939.

Despite the cross-fertilization of the British and American women’s suffrage movements, it is not surprising that such an important centennial was celebrated so differently in Britain and the United States. The strong connection between British and American suffragists, who travelled and learnt from one another, spoke in each other’s countries and occasionally intermarried, was forged long before women in both nations received the vote in the heady aftermath of the First World War.⁴⁶ Yet, the celebration of the two centenaries could not have been more different. Few ordinary Britons could have missed the suffragettes in 2018 or have been unaware of why young women roamed the streets in straw boaters, brandishing signs decrying gender pay-gaps and sexual harassment.⁴⁷ In contrast, few Americans probably even realized that a similar milestone had passed in the summer of 2020. Despite museum exhibits, articles, websites and an occasional handful of white-clad women trying to ‘get out the vote’, it would have been easy to miss an event treated by many American feminists with more embarrassment than joy.⁴⁸ At the hundredth anniversary of the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment on 18 August 2020, the President of the United States was already threatening to contest his re-election should he dislike the outcome of the vote.⁴⁹ As students, naturalized citizens, former felons and, most of all, African Americans faced the suppression of their votes, the Nineteenth Amendment seemed like just one more flawed attempt to embrace the democratic ideal that Britain so full-throatedly celebrated two years before.⁵⁰ A celebration of suffrage is difficult to rejoice in a crumbling democracy. While in retrospect such fears may appear overblown, the half-hearted celebration of women’s suffrage in the US grows out of America’s unresolved relationship with race and the increasingly apparent electoral legacy of Jim Crow.⁵¹ America’s most famous suffragists were complicit in the creation of a constitutional amendment that left states able to exclude not only African Americans, but many other ethnic groups summarily prevented from exercising the vote.⁵² Unlike Britain, where the deficiencies of the 1918 Act were resolved domestically, the centenary of the Nineteenth Amendment has taken place at a moment when the promise of universal suffrage seems more elusive than ever.⁵³

‘I’d rather be a rebel than a slave’

The wound Black feminists experienced at the hands of white suffragists was unexpectedly scratched open during the 2015 premiere of the British film Suffragette. ‘I’d rather be a rebel than a slave’, uttered by Mrs Pankhurst at a Women’s Rights rally in 1913, caused outrage when it appeared on a tee-shirt worn by Meryl Streep for a Time Out cover advertising the film. On Twitter, the photo inspired ire over the apparent racial insensitivity which for some ‘carried connotations of the American history of slavery and Confederate rebellion’. Critics of the Time Out cover felt that the publicity around the film constituted a ‘politics of erasure’ which excised ‘women of colour’ from feminist history.⁵⁴ As Twitter user Jamilah Lemieux noted caustically, ‘White women have said a lot of terrible things over the course of history, doesn’t mean you wear it on a shirt.’ Time Out responded defensively, noting that the article had been read by at least half a million people in the UK who did not complain. ‘The original quote was intended to rouse women to stand up against oppression’, noted the editors. ‘[I]‌t is a rallying cry and absolutely not intended to criticize those who have no choice but to submit to oppression…’⁵⁵

Despite such complaints, the centenary celebration three years later did little to remedy this omission or to reflect the critical depth of scholarship on issues of race and empire in the British suffrage movement.⁵⁶ While women of colour in the Empire may have received the beneficence of white British-born feminists, they enjoyed few of their rights.⁵⁷ In keeping with its celebratory ethos, centenary exhibits often acknowledged feminist diversity by focusing on the extraordinary career of such celebrities as Princess Sophia Duleep Singh – militant goddaughter of Queen Victoria, tenant of Hampton Court and feminist tax resister, who in 1913 threw herself in front of Prime Minister Asquith’s car while holding a poster reading, ‘Give women the vote!’ Her sari, on loan from a private collection, was one of the highlights of the British Library suffrage exhibit that year.⁵⁸ As Sumita Mukherjee has noted, however, the women of the British Empire were involved in a global movement, far more variegated and diverse than the focus on Singh would fully reveal.⁵⁹

Given that both Britain and the United States had fraught relationships with vast non-white populations, why did the failure of many white women suffragists to confront the issue of race play so much larger a role in the US celebration of 2020 that it did in the British suffrage centenary in 2018? In part, this was because, domestically, the British franchise was more clearly fractured by class than by race, and the obvious injustices of the 1918 restrictions were addressed relatively quickly. While the Representation of the People Act of 1918 enfranchised women along explicit lines of class and age, the British rectified this injustice ten years after, awarding the majority of women in the United Kingdom the vote on equal terms with men.⁶⁰ Although, as Susan R. Grayzel reminds us in this volume, many women of colour in the British Empire would have to wait for independence to gain the full rights of citizenship, consecutive Reform Acts gradually diminished the difference between domestic electors until the end of plural voting after the Second World War.⁶¹ Neither the 1918 nor the 1928 Reform Acts succeeded in giving women the kind of full equality many suffragists had dreamed of, but they did allow ever broader sectors of the female population to exercise the vote. They also began to roll back restrictive voter registration laws that had vitiated much of the power of British Reform Acts in 1867, 1884 and, for women, in 1918.⁶²

America’s omissions were not resolved with similar reforms. Despite consecutive constitutional amendments removing electoral disabilities, the US electoral system is plagued with inequalities ranging from hours-long voting lines in inner-cities to inscrutable bureaucratic ‘red tape’ that constitute, even today, what CNN’s John Blake calls ‘Jim Crow 2.0’.⁶³ In a conference on ‘Expanding Democracy: The Nineteenth Amendment and Voting Rights Today’, held at the Kennedy Library in Boston on 28 October 2020, several of America’s leading historians of citizenship inadvertently demonstrated why the constitutional amendment removing disabilities based on sex has not generated the same type of popular enthusiasm the suffrage centennial in Great Britain so manifestly did.⁶⁴ Despite the efforts of libraries and museums to honour the women who raised heaven and earth to extend women the vote, the centennial celebration in the US occurred during one of the most blatant moments of voter suppression since the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965.⁶⁵

Although both Susan B. Anthony and Sojourner Truth regarded the franchise as implicit in the ‘equal protection clause’ of the Constitution – each attempting to vote in 1872 – Anthony was arrested for successfully casting a presidential ballot in Rochester, New York, a crime for which she was pardoned by Donald Trump in one of his few acknowledgements of the suffrage centenary.⁶⁶ While the Fifteenth Amendment attempted to enfranchise Black men by removing disabilities based on ‘race, color, or previous condition of servitude’, with the abrupt end of Reconstruction in 1877, courts prioritized the states’ right to delimitate who should vote, allowing exclusions on a myriad of other grounds such as poll taxes, literacy tests, grandfather clauses or criminal history.⁶⁷ As one African American interviewee recalled of her experiences trying to register to vote in 1940s Georgia, the white men overseeing the voter rolls would ‘point to a jar of jelly beans on a nearby table and ask … “How many black jelly beans are in a jar? How many red ones in there?’” With each incorrect answer, she, like many other African Americans, lost the opportunity to register for a ballot.⁶⁸ Unlike the right to bear arms, stated unequivocally in the Second Amendment, the removal of disabilities based on race or sex could easily – and, the courts opined, legally – be replaced by some other excuse to deny people the vote.

As Ellen Carol DuBois has noted, while the Nineteenth Amendment eliminated sex as a legal disqualification for the vote, it allowed African American, Native American and many immigrant women to be excluded from the franchise, thanks to other bars erected in lieu of an explicit barrier based on sex.⁶⁹ Although white women across many western states had been able to vote in presidential elections, thanks to progressive state constitutions, the federal amendment was ratified only when the mother of a young Tennessee politician admonished him to vote accordingly, winning Tennessee by one vote. As enormous as this victory appeared to contemporaries, it only prohibited a sex bar to enfranchisement and never guaranteed an unassailable right to vote on the firmer grounds of US citizenship.⁷⁰

The US women’s suffrage centenary, coming on the eve of a highly contentious presidential election, was thus difficult to celebrate unequivocally. Fought in a legal environment where the Civil Rights protections of 1965 had been recently undone by a conservative Supreme Court, the prospects of American democracy had rarely seemed bleaker. As Eric Foner notes, the 1965 Voting Rights Act ‘restored the suffrage to millions of black southerners’, following a history of targeted voter suppression in the Jim Crow South. Emanating from the Civil Rights-centred jurisprudence of the liberal Warren Court (1953–1969), the Act held states accountable for interference with the voting rights of their Black citizens. In 2013, however, the Supreme Court ruled that such oversight was no longer necessary. In the Shelby County v. Holder decision, the court ‘invalidated the Voting Rights Act’s requirement that certain jurisdictions with long histories of racial discrimination in voting obtain prior federal approval before changing voting rules’.⁷¹ Almost immediately, photo-ID laws sprung up, often biased towards the presumed politics of the holders – in Texas, for example, allowing gun licences, but prohibiting student IDs.⁷² In the midst of a tight presidential race, state legislatures, with the help of the courts, allowed Alabama to prohibit curb-side voting for the disabled, upheld Texas’s decision to allow only one official ballot drop-box for counties the size of a European country and negated Florida’s referendum to allow voting rights to felons who had served their sentences.⁷³ Indeed, in recent US elections, voters who queued for hours found they had been ‘culled’ from the rolls, ostensibly because they had not voted recently. This tactic for reducing ‘fraud’ by eliminating the names of dead or re-districted electors in fact disenfranchised thousands of legitimate voters, falling particularly heavily on the young and minorities, who changed address more frequently.⁷⁴

As record numbers of people signed up for absentee voting due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Donald Trump vociferously questioned the validity of mail-in ballots.⁷⁵ During the 2020 presidential election, Democrats and Republicans wrangled over whether ballot envelopes must be notarized, the acceptable post-mark date for mailed ballots and the arrival date by which a ballot could be counted, which varied state by state. To make matters worse, Trump’s postal appointee slowed delivery of mail with a series of budget cuts, which stripped the US Post Office of its ability to deliver ballots promptly.⁷⁶ Although House Speaker Nancy Pelosi tried to halt the removal of essential postal sorting machinery, millions of mail-in ballots poured into polling centers, causing official tallies to come in late. Donald Trump encouraged armed militias to act as election ‘observers’ and eventually contested the election, claiming that thousands of ballots had come in late and should be rejected.⁷⁷ Amid court rulings that allow states to police their own electoral laws, to practise shameless gerrymandering based on party lines and to make it difficult for minorities to cast their votes, it is perhaps not surprising that the centennial of the Nineteenth Amendment has been a muted affair.⁷⁸

While Emmeline Pankhurst might have been gratified with the encomiums to WSPU radicalism during the height of the centenary, none of the chapters in this impressive volume focus on the militant campaign of Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst. Instead, the volume avoids both the most sensational and the least progressive manifestations of the British suffrage movement, making room for something more subtle and arguably more meaningful.⁷⁹ Despite the tremendous success of the British women’s suffrage centenary, by 2020 Americans were largely unable to unequivocally embrace even worthy suffrage efforts. Lacking the flamboyance of the British militants and grappling with the embarrassing implications of white chauvinism in a society revolving on the axis of race, the US failed to launch anything that could be called a celebration. Although female Democrats sported suffragette-inspired white pantsuits and young women in Rochester, New York proclaimed reverence for Susan B. Anthony by placing their ‘I voted’ stickers on her gravestone on election day, the perceived ‘sellout’ of African Americans by the suffragists has left a bitter taste.⁸⁰ The two suffrage centennials, marking the achievements of a pair of deeply entwined political movements, illustrate the eventual success of one nation to produce a functioning modern democracy, while the other still struggles to do the same. Despite their many shortcomings, the heirs of British suffrage deserved their party; sadly, their American counterparts can only imagine what a celebration of unfettered democracy must be like.