Looking back, CS described her own early-twentieth-century politics as patriotic or jingoistic. She then became a convert to the cause of women's suffrage, and even to the militant programme of the suffragettes; she did not entirely approve of their violent methods, but she thrilled to their devotion and courage, and was outraged by the suggestion that they were mere attention-seekers. In connection with a particularly horrifying experience of male rage and violence, jeering, spitting, and cursing at demonstrators, she voiced a belief that suffrage for women would benefit both sexes equally: that conviction of their own superiority was doing moral harm to the male sex. Her interest in women's issues once awakened, CS moved on to active support for other kinds of reform agendas.

GP belonged to the Women Writers' Suffrage League and the London Women's Suffrage Society . Much of her writing reflects a feminist viewpoint.

EB 's plays reflect her commitment to socialist and feminist ideas. Her involvement in the suffrage movement included contributing a one-act play, Edith, to a Women Writers' Suffrage League fundraiser and subscribing to the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies (NUWSS).

Much of LOC 's life was spent in social and political activism, particularly under the auspices of groups involved in working for women's rights (including the suffrage) and women's protection—that is, in favour of social purity. Her political leanings were Liberal, and she was a member of the executive of the Women's Liberal Federation of England and the National Society for Promoting Women's Suffrage . She belonged to the Ladies' National Association for the Repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts , and spoke in public for the group and its cause in Guernsey (Channel Islands) during the 1890s. She also advocated temperance, and women's preaching.

Critics are still divided on RHD 's attitude towards suffrage. Jean Pfaelzer explains: Although Davis was concerned about abolition, temperance reform, divorce law, and prostitution, it appears that she never joined groups or walked in any marches on behalf of these causes. If Davis participated at all in lobbying Congress for women's rights, she left no record of it. Critic Sharon Harris regrets that she advocated woman's suffrage, but she often demeaned the New Woman. Feminist writer Tillie Olsen somewhat similarly reproached Davis for her absence from the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exposition, when the leaders of the women's movement sat in and took over the platform to read their Women's Declaration of Rights. Pfaelzer on the other hand considers that this was not a well-organized protest, however, but rather a surprise move on the part of Susan B. Anthony , of which Davis was surely unaware.

Although celebrated as a New Woman writer and although highly critical of the sexual double standard, GE did not support the suffrage movement.The year after her successful and controversial New Woman short-story collection, Keynotes, she stated her position to an interviewer for The Idler: Surely the fact of my having written a little book, for the love of writing it, not with a view to usher in a revolt or preach a propaganda, merely to strike a few notes on the phases of the female character I knew to exist, hardly qualifies me to have an opinion, or present it to the average young man.

View reference

qtd. in

Ledger, Sally. The New Woman. Manchester University Press, 1997.

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She said she saw suffragettes as desexualised. Far from pursuing the vote, GE pursued an agenda of gaining not civil but sexual rights for women. She opposed the sexual double standard not only in her writing, but also in her personal choices. In a letter of 15 March 1891 she wrote on this subject: It is all humbug, part of the most positive British doctrine, of commit adultery, seduce any woman you can, in fact sin as you please but don't be found out.

Nevertheless, she involved herself in political movements: the suffrage and anti-vivisection campaigns. Her enthusiasm for the suffrage cause waned in later life, however, though she remained a committee vivisectionist and left her money to that cause at her death. She wrote on the subject of the Conciliation Bill, I have sadly and reluctantly given up my wish, which in former days was an endeavour, for Female Suffrage.

She also supported a number of feminist causes, and wrote forcefully against the cultural victimization of single women, fallen women, working-class women, and foreign women. She was particularly interested in the suffrage movement and also supported trade unionism.

Largely because of KBG 's feelings on the subject, the couple initially planned not to have children, so that they could both continue to devote their lives to the socialist cause. But KBG's mind was changed when she witnessed the youngest child of Emmeline Pankhurst run to embrace his mother after she returned from a court hearing in July 1896. She was also likely inspired by Pankhurst's ability to remain committed to the suffrage cause even though she was a mother. KBG had three children, and found that having a family did not much interfere with her socialist activities. For instance, in 1901, when her eldest was just three, she gave over thirty lectures. She was not a fastidious housekeeper and cared little for appearances.

MG wrote during the second half of the nineteenth century. Her early productions were literary: she collaborated with her sister on a narrative and a novel, and then produced a second novel independently. Her later writings were political, arguing the need for improvements to women's education, as well as addressing issues relating to the suffrage movement. Through her writings and through direct action, MG worked to ensure an improvement in opportunities for women's education.

VH shared a self-described passion for women's suffrage with Sinclair, her longtime friend. Sinclair introduced her to the Women's Suffrage League , the Women's Freedom League , and the Women's Social and Political Union , or WSPU, and she also became a founding member of the Women Writers' Suffrage League , launched this same year. But Hunt found the collecting experience, which was held in support of Self-Denial Week, highly traumatic. She wrote, Much has been said of our heroism in standing outside to beg, and I fancy [Sinclair] felt as I did—as if we had suddenly been stripped naked, with a cross-sensation of being drowned in a tank and gasping for breath.

SM (who began publishing under her birth name of Ursula Roberts) was a poet and novelist of the earlier twentieth century, who also published a suffrage pamphlet, an admiring biography of her Christian-socialist husband, and a striking verse-novel. Remarkably, her highly imagistic and symbolic prose fiction (set largely in a timeless, primitive countryside) is obscure and occasionally turgid, while her novel in poetry (set largely in London), while still imagistic and symbolic, is crystal-clear and full of the observed detail of daily life. Poems published late in her life represent at least a fair degree of continuity with earlier work, and may even have been written well before they appeared.

She came from an upper middle-class business family whose background included Quaker and Anglican elements. She staunchly upheld the class system, identifying herself with the upper classes. As an adult, she assumed an anti-suffrage stance, as did her sisters.

During the late 1950s and early 1960s MB became involved with several political causes. She joined the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), and was arrested and roughed up by the police on a demonstration of a thousand people outside the airforce base at Ruislip. She sent a long letter to Nye Bevan and Jennie Lee on 8 July 1958 (later in the year CND was founded), asking them to clarify their position on nuclear disarmament. She was also elected to the general council of her union, the Association of Cine and Television Technicians , and she went as their delegate to the Women's Labour Party conference at Blackpool. She was, however, opposed to holding a separate women's conference, and believed that after forty years of suffrage women should feel free to speak while standing shoulder to shoulder with men. She also became a member of the Married Women's Association and the Six Point Group , which she later chaired. It is therefore a mistake to suppose that she did not belong to any explicitly feminist organisations or networks. She also made her feminist opinions plain in both her life and her writing. After her second marriage she became an increasingly active campaigner for women's rights, and an ally of Edith Summerskill in attempting divorce reform.

Despite her ill health, JB began in the spring of 1869 to direct her energies towards a new cause, the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts. Perhaps following the advice of Princess Victoria , who urged her to consult with wise and experienced men, she wrote to John Stuart Mill in hopes of discussing the possibility of an internationally-based society to promote the interests of women. Mill's reply of 22 March 1869 suggested that she ought to interest herself in the suffrage movement if she genuinely wished to see advancement for women. He also suggested that an international organization was impossible, on the grounds that the states of Europe were too disparate and multifarious to think of imposing a universal set of legislative demands. Despite this lack of encouragement, and not without some trepidation, she redoubled her efforts, following the extension and amendment of the Contagious Diseases Act in August 1869, to combat the Acts. Although she did receive support from her friend Elizabeth Elmy , she felt somewhat hesitant to wage a battle against formidable odds, pitting the poor and female against the rich and male. She wrote in her prayer book in September 1869, this thing fills me with such an anger, and even hatred, that I fear to face it. . . . I pray Thee, O God, to give me a deep, well-governed, and lifelong hatred of all such injustice, tyranny and cruelty; and at the same time give me that divine compassion which is willing to live and suffer long for love to souls, or to fling itself into the breach and die at once.

View reference

qtd. in

Butler, Josephine, and James, 1843 - 1913 Stuart. Josephine E. Butler: An Autobiographical Memoir. Editors Johnson, George W. and Lucy A. Johnson, 3rd ed., J. W. Arrowsmith, 1928.

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Journalist and editor of the newspaper The Provincial Freeman in the northern US and Canada during the mid nineteenth century, MASC also wrote a short book advocating emigration to Canada for free blacks living in the United States and lectured on abolition, emigration, and women's suffrage.

MC published, in Harper's Bazar, Man's War against Woman, in which she refuses to sympathize with the suffrage movement, blaming women themselves for yielding men the power of which they later unjustifiably complain.

The women's right to enter was put to a vote, and delegates voted them out. One speaker said that admitting them would be subversive of the principles and traditions of the country and contrary to the Word of God. This was a formative event for AS . With a seed of discontent planted in her mind, she resolved to oppose this indignity and to help her sex to take their proper place in the body politic. In her time she gave support to the campaigns for suffrage, for a mother's claim to her own child, for married women's control of their own property, for higher education of women, and against the Contagious Diseases Acts.

Viva was the widow of Harry Jeyes , Assistant Editor of the London Standard; she served as Honorary Secretary of the Women's National Anti-Suffrage League .