The Women’s Suffrage movement

Maroula Joannou is Senior Lecturer in English at Anglia Ruskin University. June Purvis is Professor of Women's & Gender History at Portsmouth University and Editor of Women's History Review

Available in paperback for the first time, this important collection of essays illustrates the complexity, richness and diversity of the suffrage movement.Combining historical reappraisal with lively accounts of the culture of the women¿s suffrage movement, this volume offers a unique focus. It includes studies of the fascinating, but neglected groups that participated in the campaign: the Women¿s Franchise League; the Women¿s Freedom League; the Women¿s Tax Resistance League and the United Suffragists. This is accompanied by feminist research on the poetry, fiction and drama that emerged from women¿s struggle for the vote. In addition there are reappraisals of two leading figures in the Pankhursts¿ Women¿s Social and Political Union, an illuminating analysis of the relationship between suffrage and sexuality, and a discussion of what happened away from the metropolis, as well as of the little known campaign to extend the vote after 1918.

Introduction: The Writing of the Women's Suffrage Movement: A 'Coming of Age'1. 'Now you see it, now you don't': The Women's Franchise League and its place in contending narratives of the women's suffrage movement2. A truly national movement: the view from outside London3. Meanings of militancy: the ideas and practice of political resistance in the Women's Freedom League, 1907-19144. Pay the piper, call the tune: the Women's Tax Resistance League5. 'A party between revolution and peaceful persuasion': the United Suffragists6. Six Photographs7. Suffragette fiction and the fictions of suffrage8. Suffrage and poetry: radical women's voices9. Women's suffrage drama10. 'A better world for both' - men, cultural transformation, the stage, and the Suffragettes11. Christabel Pankhurst and the Women's Social and Political Union12. 'No surrender!': the militancy of Mary Leigh, a working-class suffragette13. Suffrage, sex and science14. The old faith living and the old power there: the movement to extend women's suffrage15. British suffrage repositories