A Suffrage Reader: Charting Directions in British Suffrage History

This reader contains a mixture of new narratives on suffrage, together with reinterpretations of some long-established "truths" about the campaign by British women for the vote. Some chapters shift the focus from "the great and the good" based in London, and explore the issues which motivated supporters in other parts of Britain. Other chapters illuminate the lengths some men were prepared to go to see women become voters - and the lengths others were prepared to go to stop them. A variety of topics is covered by the contributors, who include both established scholars and writers relatively new to the field. "A Suffrage Reader" provides an opportunity to push back the boundaries of suffrage history, enabling us to think again about the diverse and sometimes contraditory motives for, and outcomes of, involvement in the long campaign by women for the vote in Britain. The book also makes it possible to pause and reflect upon recent developments in writing on suffrage history, and the extent to which this has been bound up with developing attitudes towards politics in the latter decades of the 20th century.