Suffragettes

Don’t call them Lympne-pets: the suffragettes at Lympne Castle

On Sunday 5 September 1909, suffragettes Vera Wentworth, Elsie Howey and Jessie Kenney assaulted prime minister Herbert Henry Asquith when he was staying at Lympne Castle in Kent. Lympne (pronounced …

Mary Neal and the Suffragettes Who Saved Morris Dancing, Kathryn Atherton (Pen & Sword, 2024)

On the face of it, any connection between the suffragette movement and the folk dance revival seems a tenuous one. If all there is to connect them is that some …

Jack and Eve: Two Women in Love and at War, Wendy Moore, Atlantic Books, 2024

Jack and Eve is an enthralling biography of Vera (Jack) Holme and Evelina Haverfield, the actress and the Hon who met and fell in love during the militant suffrage campaign. …

A Woman’s Place is in the Home

One of the arguments against women having the vote was that women who dabbled in politics would neglect their homes and families. Bristol Liberal MP Charles Hobhouse, a prominent member …

Hidden Heroines: The Forgotten Suffragettes, Maggie Andrews and Janis Lomas (Robert Hale, 2018)

Hidden Heroines: The Forgotten Suffragettes is a collection of short biographies of forty-eight women who were involved in the struggle for the women’s franchise. The book was published in 2018, …

The House on Hunter Street, David Ebsworth (SilverWood Books, 2022)

I was particularly delighted to receive my copy of The House on Hunter Street from David Ebsworth because I’d seen an early draft of the novel and we’d discussed aspects …

Forcible feeding the kind way: Dr Helby of Winson Green Prison

Many suffragettes went on hunger strike in prison and were forcibly fed by prison doctors. A number of the hunger strikers published descriptions of their experiences in horrifying detail: the …

Fanny Fields, the Bristol Favourite: Dutch Girls, Suffragettes and Music Hall

My postcard collection includes this picture of Fanny Fields, a music hall star whose song The Suffragette was one of many music-hall references to the militant suffrage campaign of the …

‘Those wanton imbecile women’: the Gatty Laboratory and the Militant Suffragettes

This article is based on research and conversations with Edward Warington Shann’s daughter, Hebe Welbourn. Quotations by Edward Warington Shann are from his letter to his mother dated 22 June …

No Surrender: Constance Maud and the Suffragette Novel

Constance Maud’s 1911 suffragette novel No Surrender tells the story of a group of suffragettes, particularly Jenny Clegg, Lancashire mill girl, and aristocratic Mary O’Neill. It’s unashamedly a propaganda novel, …

My Month in Books: February 2021

It’s been a women’s-history themed month for both my non-fiction and fiction reading with Wendy Moore’s Endell Street: The Trailblazing Women Who Ran World War One’s Most Remarkable Military Hospital …

“The suffragette who beat Win C”: Theresa Garnett and the International Alliance of Women

I’ve always been interested in the “after life” of the suffrage campaigners in Britain – what they did after the campaign for the vote – especially since so many histories …