The British Women's Suffrage Campaign: National and International Perspectives

This book brings together twelve chapters from feminist historians from around the world to offer new perspectives on aspects of the campaign for women’s suffrage in Britain. Although the focus is on Britain, this volume signals how the women’s suffrage campaign in Britain embraced both national and global aspects. The historical developments and structures that affected women’s lives and suffrage struggles were not limited to national contexts. Early chapters focus on particular individuals both well and lesser known, including Millicent Garrett Fawcett and Emmeline Pankhurst, as well as Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy, Princess Sophia Duleep Singh, Lady Isabel Margesson and Isabella Ford. Later chapters highlight the interrelationship between the British movement and suffrage campaigns across the globe with reference to Austria, Japan, New Zealand, Australia and the USA. The chapters deal with issues around strategies, social class, employment, religion, nationalism, empire and race and explore complex issues about women’s roles in campaigning for their democratic right to the parliamentary vote. Offering the reader a broad view of the British women’s suffrage movement, this is the ideal volume for students of women’s and political history in both its national and international contexts.

Table of Contents:
Introduction 1. Millicent Fawcett (1847–1929): the making of a politician 2. Emmeline Pankhurst (1858–1928): the making of a militant 3. ‘A particularly interesting kind of “heroine” to have’: marriage, motherhood and votes for women in the archives of Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy (1833–1918), feminist, rebel and radical 4. Isabella Ford (1855–1924) and women’s suffrage 5. Suffragette palace: Sophia Duleep Singh (1876–1948), Hampton Court Palace and votes for women 6. ‘Being militant in her own way’: using the individual life of Lady Isabel Margesson (1863–1946) as a prism to explore complex suffrage histories 7. The wrong kind of working-class woman? Domestic servants in the British suffrage movement 8. Class and adult suffrage in Britain during the Great War 9. A colonial for the cause: Lady Stout (1858–1931), suffrage and New Zealand as exemplar to the empire, 1909–1914 10. Narratives of democracy, the emotions of politics and memories of militant suffragism: Britain, Ireland, the USA and Australia 11. Covering the suffragettes: Austrian newspapers reporting on militant women’s rights activism in the United Kingdom 12. The influence of the British women’s suffrage movement upon the emergence and development of the Japanese women’s movement