In the tradition of her father, EAD espoused strong Liberal views. She campaigned non-violently for women's rights and women's suffrage, and she participated in a woman's strike in 1911. She also worked to improve education and health services. After the Qualification of Women Act made women eligible for local government in 1907, she ran for election to the Swansea borough council, but was defeated. As the Cambrian Leader bluntly explained, she could be criticised on one point only, but that was decisive: She is a woman, not a man. The sex disability is, however, so real that her . . . administrative ability and freedom from the feminine idiosyncracies which might prove embarrassing at gatherings of business-men failed to remove it.

Since it appeared amidst heady discussions regarding the Woman Question, including questions about marriage, female employment, rational dress, and suffrage, the book's lighthearted, humorous tone belies its covertly subversive potential. MMD does not attempt a treatise on the equality of men and women; instead she describes female autonomy and self-sufficiency through her story of a woman travelling alone with no need for a gentleman's assistance. Her only overt statement about gender occurs in her preface to the fourth edition of the book, when she argues for the socially-constructed nature of men and women alike, writing: Men and women, grown in the same conditions of air, light, and nutriment, will be found of equal gifts if they be compared . . . for a practical experiment [let us try] to sell grass some day: pluck a handful for sample from the open meadow, and another from beneath a grey yard-tile; is there any one who will expect this latter handful to make good sweet hay?

View reference

Dowie, Ménie Muriel. A Girl in the Karpathians. Fifth Edition, George Philip & Son, 1892.

viii

SJD attended a Woman Suffrage Convention.

She also served as a vice-president of the West of England National Society for Woman's Suffrage .

GE was always ambivalent about the struggle for women's rights. This ambivalence may have been fed by the fact that her situation with Lewes made her peculiarly vulnerable to public attack of a personal flavour. The divided nature of her views is well captured in two comments she made to the same correspondent, prominent feminist Clementia Taylor . Having declared her sympathy with the desire to see women socially elevated—educated equally with men, she gently rebuked her friend years later for having failed to understand that I have grave reasons for not speaking on certain public topics. Her function, she said, was that of the aesthetic, not the doctrinal teacher—the rousing of the nobler emotions, which make mankind desire the social right, not the prescribing of special measures. She did, however, write in her meditation on the movement to improve women's lot: Unfortunately, many over-zealous champions of women assert their actual equality with men—nay, even their moral superiority to men—as a ground for their release from oppressive laws and restrictions. They lose strength immensely by this false position. If it were true, then there would be a case in which slavery and ignorance nourished virtue, and so far we should have an argument for the continuance of bondage.

View reference

Eliot, George. Essays of George Eliot. Editor Pinney, Thomas, Columbia University Press, 1963.

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She signed and sought further signatures for Barbara Leigh Smith 's Married Women's Property petition, which she saw as a counteractive to wife-beating and other evils. She attended some lectures at Bedford College for Women and supported the cause of women's education in practical ways (like small gifts of money to the fund being raised for Girton College ), but she held back from the suffrage question.

The text addresses a number of issues affecting women, including suffrage, inadequate incomes, divorce legislation, and attitudes toward motherhood. Farr's immersion in mysticism and the occult is often evident, as when she advises her women readers to look forward to the great century that is waiting for their alchemy, or encourages them to tap into their torpid or vegetative consciousness. The book suffers from its dependence on eugenic and racist theories; its preface, for instance, attributes the degradation of women to the white races' adoption of the Assyrian Semite's Scriptures and suggests that [w]omen have a very long score to settle with the Jews and the Mahommedans . . . I can only hope that it was ignorance and not malice that led the Jews and the Arabs to spread false doctrine on the subject of sex.

Katharine and Edith joined the University College debating society, where they tried out their arguments in favour of women's suffrage and the anti-vivisection movement—they were involved in both causes for several years.

Ford Madox Hueffer (later Ford) , as a self-styled ardent, . . . enraged, suffragette, published a suffrage pamphlet, This Monstrous Regiment of Women, with the Minerva Publishing Co. for the Women's Freedom League .

CFT 's first novel shows an interest in the position of the working classes that seems to have been intensified after her marriage and move to Jarrow. She found in her husband, the educated and book-loving Edward Thomas Liddell , a sympathetic partner. A Christian socialist, a liberal, a champion of the poor in his parish work, and a supporter of female suffrage, he persuaded her early in their relationship to read John Stuart Mill 's The Subjection of Women.

The impact of the exhibition, however, was lasting. Hermione Lee makes a link between the exhibition and Woolf's famous remark that in December 1910, human character changed. Lee also observes that the rhetoric of hostility to the suffrage movement and the Post-Impressionist exhibition was astonishingly similar . . . the shock of the new sprang from fears about sexual identity, racial and national survival.

Once back in America, FW began to lecture again on social questions, particularly slavery, female suffrage, and the evils of banks. These years in the USA, and her work there, were made difficult by those who not only opposed her political views, but also viewed and publicly presented her as a dangerous and deviant woman.

In her study of Golden Gates, critic Molly Youngkin notes that from 1892 it became increasingly concerned with gender and social issues. In a memorable response to Eliza Lynn Linton 's piece The Wild Women as Social Insurgents (in The Nineteenth Century), JSW agrees with Linton's anti-suffrage position, but takes issue with her portrait of a modern girl. This, Winter argues, constitutes a straw figure, an imaginary nine-pin created solely to be knocked down. Ashton describes Winter as being in her journal at least a cautious advocate of [women's] increased emancipation and participation in the public domain, and notes that she wrote against relegating middle-class women solely to the society treadmill, lest they become utterly narrow and cramped in . . . mind.

Following the granting to women on 2 July 1928 of voting rights equal to those of men, AWE published a handbook for electors on exercising their suffrage rights: Why Should I Vote?

The title continues: To Retain Them in Political, and Thence in Civil and Domestic, Slavery. Wheeler's name did not appear on the original title-page, but Thompson claimed that she was responsible for the much of the text. The Appeal responded to James Mill 's 1824 article on government for the yearly supplement to the Encyclopaedia Britannnica. Mill denied women the right to suffrage on the grounds that their interests, similarly to those of children, were included in those of their fathers and husbands. Critic Dolores Dooley believes that AW was solely responsible for the searing critique and analysis of the institution of marriage.

Critics have considered ELV 's fiction unusual for the late Victorian period, particularly for her treatment of female protagonists and the focus on mental or physical pain. Her feminism shines through her work, but she generally eschews popular causes like the struggle for the suffrage to advocate through strong female characters more radical and extensive social change. She does not write of tender or romantic attachment between men and women leading to motherhood and family life.

LV 's father, James White , was a silk merchant during her childhood and adolescence. His career forced him to move to China in 1841, and his family followed shortly afterwards without the five- or six-year-old Linda. She remained in England instead, living with her great-aunt and a close friend of her mother. After her family returned, her father was elected as a Liberal MP to the British House of Commons for Plymouth in 1857 when Linda was twenty-one, and for Brighton in 1860. Brighton returned two members: James White's fellow representative from 1865 was Henry Fawcett , husband of the future suffrage leader Millicent Garrett Fawcett , who served as her blind husband's secretary while he was in parliament. As this association suggests, James White was a man of progressive opinions; he was a friend of Italian patriots such as Giuseppe Garibaldi . He died on 9 January 1883.

ST gave an address in New York at the first meeting of the American Equal Rights Association (an organization dedicated to securing suffrage rights irrespective of race or gender).

This book opens by looking back just over a century, when John Stuart Mill presented petitions to parliament on behalf of women's suffrage in 1866 and 1867. It relates the story of the suffragist movement, paying due attention to Emmeline Pankhurst and possibly more than her due to Emily Davison , who threw herself under the king's horse on Derby Day. The book comes close enough to the present day to mention the very early career of Germaine Greer .

It rests on the shoulders of a canvasser to persuade the citizens met in this play that their votes may make a difference. The play is reminiscent of some of the unashamedly propaganda plays of the early twentieth century, at the time of the battle for women's suffrage.

FT was a feminist and suffragist. (Lindsay further suggests that her third child's middle name, Redmond, may signal sympathy with the cause of Irish independence: he may have been named after John Redmond , a Home Ruler who died in 1918.) FT , to the unease of her husband, attended suffrage meetings in Bournemouth. In her writings she noted the need for the vote and the value of the bicycle. On the latter point, she quoted a popular poem which had the housemaid and cook out bicycling while Daddy was doing the cooking—which, FT observes, was very good for him.

In 1859 Mill reprinted this essay shortly after HT 's death in the second volume of his Dissertations and Discussions. He attributed the essay to its right author and claimed that she possesed a delicacy of perception, an accuracy and nicety of observation, only equalled by her profundity of speculative thought, and by a practical judgment and discernment next to infallible. The essay was also later printed as a pamphlet and circulated by the Women's Suffrage Society in 1868. An edition of 1983 from Virago calls the author Harriet Hardy Taylor Mill.

ASS did not join the Edinburgh suffrage society when invited: I had other things to do.

HBS is remembered above all as having contributed substantially with Uncle Tom's Cabin to the build-up of anti-slavery feeling in the North before the Civil War. The sense of her influence is encapsulated in the possibly apocryphal comment which Abraham Lincoln is supposed to have made upon meeting her in 1862: So you're the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war! Certainly the genre of anti-slavery narrative, of which she wrote the most powerful example, was hugely influential beyond the shores of her own country in proving that women's writing could legitimately address and materially affect matters of the greatest political importance. Elizabeth Barrett Browning , in a letter to Anna Jameson in 1855, argued that HBS , above all women (yes, and men of the age) has moved the world—and for good. In an earlier letter written in 1853, Barrett Browning drew an analogy, common in mid-Victorian Britain, between slavery and gender inequality: I rejoice in [her] success, both as a woman and a human being. Oh, and is it possible that you think a woman has no business with questions like the question of slavery? Then she had better use a pen no more. She had better subside into slavery and concubinage herself, I think, as in the times of old, shut herself up with the Penelopes in the women's apartment, and take no rank among thinkers and speakers.

View reference

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett. The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Editor Kenyon, Frederic G., Macmillan, 1897, 2 vols.

2: 110-11

Anna Leonowens placed Uncle Tom's Cabin at the centre of her attack on Thailand's harems and slavery system in The English Governess at the Siamese Court (1870). The novel helped maintain a connection between white middle-class feminism and abolitionism that extended from the British anti-slavery campaign of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century through to the abolitionist campaign against the Contagious Diseases Acts and the suffrage campaign, in which leaders such as Emmeline Pankhurst were influenced by HBS . In mid-twentieth century the US peace activist born Dorothy Rabinowitz but remembered as Dorothy Stowe (co-founder of Greenpeace ) changed her name and that of her family in honour of HBS , showing that reverence for her extended to supporters of causes not directly linked with that of slavery.

The National Union of Townswomen's Guilds is a charity formed after the success of the struggle for the suffrage, and devoted to advancing the education of women (as well as to providing social amenities). It is particularly interested in education for good citizenship, to enable women to make a positive contribution in public life.