An introduction to the women's suffrage movement in Britain from its origins in the mid 19th century to militancy, the First World War and victory in 1928.

While women were part of American history from the outset, they did not win the right to vote until 1920. Readers of this engrossing history of the women’s suffrage movement will discover its roots in the abolitionist movement. They’ll read about the Declaration of Sentiments from the 1848 women’s rights convention in Seneca Falls, New York, which stated, “all men and women are created equal.” The book also discusses how the fight for women’s rights continued after the right to vote had been won. An illustrated timeline, map, and treasure trove of historical photos enrich the learning experience.

This Seminar Study was the first book to trace the British women’s suffrage campaign from its origins in the 1860s through to the achievement of equal suffrage in 1928. In this second edition, Smith provides new evidence drawn from the author’s research on how the main post-1918 women’s organisation (the NUSEC) worked with Conservative Party women to persuade the Conservative Party to endorse equal franchise rights. Smith focuses on the actions of reformers and their opponents, with due attention paid to the campaigns in Scotland and Wales as well as the movements in England. He explores why women’s suffrage was such a contentious issue, and how women gained the vote despite opponents’ fears that it would undermine gender boundaries. Suitable for students studying the Suffrage Movement, modern British history and the history of gender.

In this comprehensive study, Elizabeth Crawford provides the first survey of women’s suffrage campaigns across the British Isles and Ireland, focusing on local campaigns and activists. Divided into thirteen sections covering the regions of England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland, this book gives a unique geographical dimension to debates on the suffrage campaign of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Through a study of the grass-roots activists involved in the movement, Crawford provides a counter to studies that have focused on the politics and personalities that dominated at a national level, and reveals that, far from providing merely passive backing to the cause, women in the regions were engaged in the movement as active participants Including a thorough inventory of archival sources and extensive bibliographical and biographical references for each region, including the addresses of campaigners, this guide is essential for researchers, scholars, local historians and students alike.

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.

Campaigning for the Vote tells, in her own words, the efforts of a working suffragist to convert the men and women of England to the cause of women's suffrage. The detailed diary kept all her life by Kate Parry Frye (1878-1959) has been edited to cover 1911-1915, years she spent as a paid organiser for the New Constitutional Society for Women's Suffrage. With Kate for company we can experience the reality of the `votes for women' campaign as, day after day, in London and in the provinces, she knocks on doors, arranges meetings, trembles on platforms, speaks from carts in market squares, village greens, and seaside piers, enduring indifference, incivility and even the threat of firecrackers under her skirt. Kate's words bring to life the world of the itinerant organiser - a world of train journeys, of complicated luggage conveyance, of hotels - and hotel flirtations - of boarding houses, of landladies, and of the `quaintness' of fellow boarders. This was not a world to which she was born, for her years as an organiser were played out against the catastrophic loss of family money and enforced departure from a much-loved home. Before 1911 Kate had had the luxury of giving her time as a volunteer to the suffrage cause; now she depended on it for her keep. No other diary gives such an extensive account of the working life of a suffragist, one who had an eye for the grand tableau - such as following Emily Wilding Davison's cortège through the London streets - as well as the minutiae of producing an advertisement for a village meeting. Moreover Kate Frye gives us the fullest account to date of the workings of the previously shadowy New Constitutional Society for Women's Suffrage. She writes at length of her fellow workers, never refraining from discussing their egos and foibles. After the outbreak of war in August 1914 Kate continued to work for some time at the society's headquarter, helping to organise its war effort, allowing us to experience her reality of life in war-time London.

Presents the best of recent feminist scholarship on the suffrage movement, illustrating its complexity, richness and diversity.