862 results for suffrage

Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence

Militant suffragist EPL launched and co-edited the weekly journal Votes for Women with her husband, Frederick Pethick-Lawrence , in 1907. The journal began as the official publication of the militant suffrage organisation, the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) , but in 1912 the Pethick-Lawrences distanced themselves from the WSPU and began to publish it independently. During the first half of the twentieth century EPL published a number of suffragist pamphlets, many of them printed versions of speeches she had previously delivered. Speeches she gave in her own defence at the conspiracy trial of 1912 were published in 1913. From 1908 to 1950, she wrote many letters to the editor on a wide variety of national and international political topics. Her autobiography, 1938, largely focuses on the militant suffrage movement and the involvement in it of herself and her husband, as well as on her pacifist activities after World War One.

Millicent Garrett Fawcett

MGF was a very effective political writer. Early in her career, she was well regarded for her works on political economy, which included three successful books and numerous articles and reviews for periodicals including Macmillan's Magazine, the Fortnightly, and the Athenæum. Her writings and speeches on higher education for women were very influential. She wrote two novels; the first was a success, but second has been lost. Later, she became primarily known for her activism and considerable body of works (books, essays, lectures, and speeches) dealing with issues in the women's movement, particularly with women's suffrage.

Maude Royden

Maude Royden , famous as an early twentieth-century campaigner for women's status in the ministry of the Church of England , was also a preacher, suffragist, feminist, and anti-war activist. She published at least fifty works in forty years, most of them polemical. Her pamphlets, sermons, and speeches range in topic through religion and Christianity, women's role in the Church , sexual morality and birth control, female suffrage and women's rights, pacifism, and national and international politics. She established the interdenominational fellowship the Guildhouse in 1920, preached there, and published the monthly Guildhouse Fellowship. From the 1910s until the late 1940s, she published many letters to the editor of the Times as well as articles there. Her autobiography details her unconventionally shared life with the Rev. Hudson Shaw and his wife .

Isabella Ormston Ford

Isabella Ormston Ford was a dedicated labour activist, suffragette, and anti-war advocate at the turn of the nineteenth century whose writing advocates her socialist-feminist ideals. She wrote newspaper articles, pamphlets, short stories, and novels, all in the service of her ideas for social reform, and continually underlined the importance of keeping the labour movement and women's movement together. She also lectured widely on behalf of the causes near to her heart throughout Britain and occasionally in Europe. For several years she regularly contributed to the Labour Leader and the Yorkshire Factory Times, and maintained a column in the socialist Leeds Forward. She sat on the executive committee for several key national organizations in these movements: the National Administrative Council of the Independent Labour Party , the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies , and the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom .

Kate Parry Frye

KPF wrote prolifically throughout her life. Her most significant work was her diary, in which she meticulousy recorded her daily life from the age of nine until only four months before her death in 1959.
Frye, Kate Parry. “Introduction”. Campaigning for the Vote: Kate Parry Frye’s Suffrage Diary, edited by Elizabeth Crawford, Francis Boutle Publishers, pp. 9-34.
15
She also wrote numerous plays, only one of which, co-authored with her husband, was ever published.
Frye, Kate Parry. “Introduction”. Campaigning for the Vote: Kate Parry Frye’s Suffrage Diary, edited by Elizabeth Crawford, Francis Boutle Publishers, pp. 9-34.
21
Her archive contains the typescripts of many of her unpublished plays.
Frye, Kate Parry. “Introduction”. Campaigning for the Vote: Kate Parry Frye’s Suffrage Diary, edited by Elizabeth Crawford, Francis Boutle Publishers, pp. 9-34.
215
Selections of her 1911-1928 diary covering the campaign for the suffrage were edited and published by Elizabeth Crawford in 2013.

Emmeline Pankhurst

EP 's parents encouraged her intellectual development from an early age. Among the important first texts she read were Bunyan 's Pilgrim's Progress and John BunyanHoly War, and Carlyle 's French Revolution. Her mother introduced her to Harriet Beecher Stowe 's Uncle Tom's Cabin and took the teen-aged Emmeline to a suffrage meeting featuring Lydia Becker , which proved crucial in her political development.
Pankhurst, Sylvia. The Life of Emmeline Pankhurst. Kraus Reprint.
7, 9-10
Despite all this positive nurturing and encouragement, she was deeply and painfully impressed by overhearing her father say What a pity she wasn't born a lad. She had no desire to be a boy, but began to understand then that boys were felt to be worth more than girls.

Constance Lytton

Apart from her warm and witty private correspondence, CL is remembered as a writer solely in connection with her early-twentieth-century suffrage involvement, particularly her one-woman campaign to prove that the British government was treating political prisoners unequally according to their social rank or class status. She was a highly effective public speaker and a tireless writer of letters to the Times; she also published a pamphlet and a book about the same issues.

Evelyn Sharp

Trained at home in prayers learned by heart, with some scope for improvising, and given a religious grounding in Anglican ism at school,
Sharp, Evelyn. Unfinished Adventure. John Lane, Bodley Head.
33, 37-8
ES realised that she was not an irreligious person only when her youthful reading of T. H. Huxley and other Victorian materialists did not make her an atheist. As an adult she felt, with deep respect for other world religions, that the Christian morality could not be surpassed,
Sharp, Evelyn. Unfinished Adventure. John Lane, Bodley Head.
173
and also that the only sect which was honestly endeavouring to live the Christian life in a non-Christian society was the Society of Friends . She never became a Quaker, but she worked closely with them,
Sharp, Evelyn. Unfinished Adventure. John Lane, Bodley Head.
174
and considered the Society, [n]ext to the suffrage movement, to have been the greatest outside influence on me and my life.
Sharp, Evelyn. Unfinished Adventure. John Lane, Bodley Head.
173

Mary Augusta Ward

Best known for her influential loss-of-faith novel Robert Elsmere, MAW was among the more prolific and popular novelists of the later Victorian and Edwardian periods. Her fifty-year career spanned an era of enormous transformation. During it she produced twenty-five novels, an autobiography, journalism (including reviews and literary criticism), a children's book, a translation, and several works of war propaganda. Her more serious earlier works were weighty novels of ideas in the tradition of George Eliot , which seek to chart the complex relationships among character, intellect, religion, and morality. Her work insistently takes up what she sees as the pressing social issues of her day, shifting in the early twentieth century to briefer works on a much wider geographical canvas and then taking up the war effort in both fiction and prose. It displays an abiding interest in the social, intellectual, and sexual relations between men and women. The education and occupations of women are recurrent themes, and Oxford with its intellectual ferment a common setting. Although MAW 's nationalism, imperialism, and anti-suffrage stance cast her as conservative to recent readers, she was a reformer, in her earlier years a democrat, and an acute analyst of gender who believed strongly in the currents of progress and the transformative power of texts.

Mary Gawthorpe: Biography

MG , from a working-class family with a tradition of self-education, became a remarkable speaker and writer on behalf of women's suffrage. She co-edited The Freewoman, working somewhat uneasily with Dora Marsden . Her memoirs, published in her old age after her emigration from England to the USA, give a vivid account of her early struggles.

Cicely Hamilton

CH 's early twentieth-century plays, novels, feminist prose, and travel writing are firmly rooted in her politics, and demonstrate her skill as political satirist. As a propagandist her method is often to take the views of the other side and render them ridiculous. Her earlier writings reflect her commitment to women's suffrage and economic independence, while her later work focuses primarily on war.

Lydia Becker

LB first established herself in the mid nineteenth century as a popularizer of scientific knowledge and a proponent of women's scientific education. She is best known for her work on the Women's Suffrage Journal, the major organ of the suffrage movement in the 1870s and 1880s; she also contributed papers and essays to the cause through other outlets.

Frances Power Cobbe

Firmly committed to doing everything in [her] power to protect the property, the persons and the parental rights of women,
Cobbe, Frances Power. Life of Frances Power Cobbe. Houghton, Mifflin.
2: 526
FPC was involved in the women's suffrage campaign from its inception in 1866 until her death. She was a member of several suffrage committees, including, briefly, the Executive Committee of the London National Society for Women's Suffrage , and the later Central Committee of the National Society for Women's Suffrage , she differed from more politically liberal suffragists in seeking to work through the Conservative Party.
She created a furore in the movement when she tried to persuade other suffragists, in a letter written on National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies letterhead, to follow her in joining the Primrose League .
Caine, Barbara. Victorian Feminists. Oxford University Press.
27-8
Caine, Barbara. Victorian Feminists. Oxford University Press.
113-14 and passim

Evelyn Glover

EG began her writing career by contributing several comic, polemical sketches to the suffrage cause. These one-act plays seek to demonstrate the relevance of the suffrage movement to working-class women. During the First World War one of her short plays, A Bit of Blighty, became popular entertainment for the troops. Her only full-length drama, Time to Wake Up, was produced in 1919. She also wrote pieces for a children's programme on BBC radio. EG probably wrote her memoirs (the attribution is not quite certain) in the unusual form of a desultory book mostly about photography and cats. EG 's A Chat with Mrs. Chicky has been recently and successfully revived.

Eva Gore-Booth

In addition to her intense suffrage and labour activism, EGB wrote poetry, periodical essays, political pamphlets, religious criticism, plays, and an autobiograpical sketch. Her work was admired by her contemporaries Katharine Tynan , Æ (George Russell ), and W. B. Yeats . In 1935, critic Richard Fox wrote that EGB had an assured place in Irish literary history, but in the early twenty-first century all of her texts are out of print. She is now best known as the sister of Irish patriot and feminist Constance Markievicz , and for Yeats 's elegy In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markievicz.
Donoghue, Emma. “’How could I fear and hold thee by the hand?’: The Poetry of Eva Gore-Booth”. Sex, Nation, and Dissent in Irish Writing, edited by Éibhear Walshe and Éibhear Walshe, St Martin’s Press, pp. 16-42.
16-17

Helen Blackburn

HB wrote during the second half of the nineteenth century. She is seen today as a significant figure in the fight for women's suffrage, although during her own lifetime she was sometimes criticized as too moderate. Her writings include articles in periodicals, political pamphlets, and essays. Her scholarly history of the suffrage movement is still recognized by scholars today as a reliable and useful historical resource.

Eleanor Rathbone

Margaret Ashton , a Manchester cousin, resigned from the Liberal party over the issue of suffrage in 1906. Two years later she became the first woman elected to the Manchester City Council . She was a prominent member of the NUWSS (National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies) and then of the WILPF (Women's International League for Peace and Freedom).
Alberti, Johanna. Eleanor Rathbone. Sage Press.
31

Inez Bensusan

Inez Bensusan was an Australian-born actress who played a prominent role in the Actresses' Franchise League in London. Although she wrote only three one-act plays herself, as head of the AFL Play Department she actively encouraged several British women writers and actresses to write plays or sketches for the suffrage cause. She also wrote some short stories and articles promoting women's suffrage. Her commitment to feminist causes is evident in every aspect of her career.

Beatrice Harraden

Writing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, BH published seventeen novels, besides journalism and letters to the editor, short stories, a suffrage play and pamphlet, and children's books. Favourite topics with her, seemingly based in different ways on her personal experience, are female friendship, music and musicians, and illness.

Christabel Pankhurst

CP 's early writing career was devoted to advancing the cause of militant suffragism; the second half of her career marked a shift to religious radicalism formed in part by her experience of the first world war.

Eunice Guthrie Murray

EGM 's father, lawyer and antiquary David Murray , was also deeply interested in the suffrage movement. He died on 2 October 1928.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
under David Murray

Sylvia Pankhurst

SP had a serious falling-out with her mother and her elder sister Christabel when they supported Britain's military efforts during the First World War. Her views on socialism and feminism, which diverged considerably from her mother's and sister's political stance, created an unsurmountable barrier between them. Her younger sister, Adela , also developed into a socialist (in her case with Christian beliefs) and was virtually expelled from England at Christabel's insistence early in 1914. Adela went on to vigorous suffrage and pacifist activities in Australia at a date when few women there were publicly engaged in politics.
Winslow, Barbara, and Sheila Rowbotham. Sylvia Pankhurst: Sexual Politics and Political Activism. UCL Press.
75-7
Mitchell, David J. The Fighting Pankhursts: A Study in Tenacity. MacMillan.
47, 50-5, 61-2
Romero, Patricia W. E. Sylvia Pankhurst: Portrait of a Radical. Yale University Press.
123

Dora Marsden

Following a notorious suffrage career, DM founded, edited, and wrote for the highly influential journals The Freewoman, The New Freewoman, and The Egoist. She then wrote several books on the intersections among philosophy, religion, and science. Repeating the pattern of her lifetime, much of the critical attention accorded to Marsden in recent decades has focussed primarily on her early feminist activities and associations, rather than her pursuits in The Egoist or her monographs.

Ray Strachey

Though RS published three novels between 1907 and 1927 (and a volume of history in collaboration with her husband ), most of her writing is non-fictional and reflects her deep commitment to women's suffrage, women's employment, and other political issues. Her nonfiction includes biographies of suffrage leaders, countless essays and broadcasts, and The Cause, an excellent history of the women's movement, for which she is best remembered.
Chapman, Wayne K., and Janet M. Manson, editors. Women in the Milieu of Leonard and Virginia Woolf: Peace, Politics, and Education. Pace University Press.
257-8
Halpern, Barbara Strachey. “Ray Strachey--A Memoir”. Women in the Milieu of Leonard and Virginia Woolf: Peace, Politics, and Education, edited by Wayne K. Chapman and Janet M. Manson, Pace University Press, pp. 77-86.
86n4

Sarah Grand

In London, SG volunteered every Thursday night at the Girls' Guild run by Ethel Bertha Harrison (Mrs Frederic Harrison, who was like her husband a positivist and a writer, and who later took an anti-suffrage position). The guild met at the social centre run by the Harrisons at Newton Hall in Fetter Lane. There SG worked with London shopgirls.
Grand, Sarah. Sex, Social Purity and Sarah Grand: Volume 1. Editor Heilmann, Ann, Routledge.
213-14
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
under Ethel Bertha Harrison