This book tells the story of the women's suffrage movement in Britain beginning with John Stuart Mill's proposal of a women's suffrage amendment to a reform bill. It ends with the victory of 1928, concluding more than 50 years of repeated defeats, anti-suffragism, militancy, imprisonment, hunger strikes and forcible feeding, and multiple internal splits and their only partial victory of 1918. It is not intended to break new ground in academia, but to provide an introduction to the general reader that covers the entire relevant time period and introduces major themes and issues.

Emily Davies was a central figure in the mid-Victorian women's movement. Formidably intelligent, fiercely determined, and an indefatigable campaigner and organiser, the socially and politically conservative Davies directed the first campaign for female suffrage in 1866-7. She was one of the first women elected to public office in 1870, campaigned successfully for the admission of girls to school leaving examinations, played a significant part in the reform of girls' secondary school provision, and established Girton College, Cambridge, Britain's first university-level college for women. This book combines the first scholarly biography of Davies with a radically new account of the mid-Victorian women's movement. From the late 1850s to the mid-1870s and through the life, work, and writing of Davies, the book traces the growth, influence, and division of the movement, including its institutional origins; its social, political, religious and intellectual allegiances; and its relation to other major social and intellectual developments. Drawing on Davies' published correspondence and a range of unused archival sources, the book explores the overlapping contexts that enabled the growth of the movement and the diverse motivations that brought women into it but then led them to pursue quite different paths. As the movement developed, these interacted with political differences, strategic disagreements, and personality clashes to split the movement into separate strands, all sharing the same broad objectives but with different practical foci. This is the story of how a group of exceptional women, Emily Davies at their centre, challenged conventional ideas and created new opportunities for women. Situated in its broader social, cultural, and intellectual contexts, it will appeal to all those interested in Victorian social history, the history of feminism, and the history of education.

This novel was the major inspiration for the Women's Movement and continues to be a powerful and illuminating analysis of the position of women in Western society___

In the nineteenth century, no assumption about female reading generated more ambivalence than the supposedly feminine facility for identifying with fictional characters. The belief that women were more impressionable than men inspired a continuous stream of anxious rhetoric about “female quixotes”: women who would imitate inappropriate characters or apply incongruous frames of reference from literature to their own lives. While the overt cultural discourse portrayed female literary identification as passive and delusional, Palacios Knox reveals increasing accounts of Victorian women wielding literary identification as a deliberate strategy. Wayward women readers challenged dominant assumptions about “feminine reading” and, by extension, femininity itself. Victorian Women and Wayward Reading contextualizes crises about female identification as reactions to decisive changes in the legal, political, educational, and professional status of women over the course of the nineteenth century: changes that wayward reading helped women first to imagine and then to enact.

The Englishwoman’s Review, which published from 1866 to 1910, participated in and recorded a great change in the range of possibilities open to women. The ideal of the magazine was the idea of the emerging emancipated middle-class woman: economic independence from men, choice of occupation, participation in the male enterprises of commerce and government, access to higher education, admittance to the male professions, particularly medicine, and, of course, the power of suffrage equal to that of men. First published in 1979, this thirty-first volume contains issues from 1899. With an informative introduction by Janet Horowitz Murray and Myra Stark, and an index compiled by Anna Clark, this set is an invaluable resource to those studying nineteenth and early twentieth-century feminism and the women’s movement in Britain.