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This chapter considers who did and did not go to church (and why), at a time when the UK was at war at the beginning of the century. It notes various steps to bridge the gap between the classes — establishing ‘Settlements’ in big cities. It notes the problems of poverty but also the threat posed to the ‘Victorian Sunday’ by increased ‘leisure’. It examines the social gospel and different views on the nature and role of the state (for example, in relation to education). It observes the extent to which the male-dominated churches reacted to female militancy (Suffragettes). It notes the continuing struggles between the churches (and also within them) as well as interest in ‘unity’. It was time, some thought, to construct a new theology. The UK was itself in a political crisis which, in Ireland, had a religious dimension.

This chapter analyses and evaluates militancy which is designed to show it as a far more varied and in some ways subtle movement than is usually thought. Militancy is revealed as involving a wide spectrum of participation including purely nominal and temporary involvement by many women. The extent to which suffragettes and suffragists crossed the supposedly clear line between militancy and non-militancy, which suggests that the divisions over tactics assumed far less significance at local level than they did in London and among the leadership ranks, is emphasized. It also examines the character of the WSPU by juxtaposing the radicalism of its methods and its reputation with the reality of its members' position within the economic and social establishment, and by highlighting the inconsistency involved in attacking private property while simultaneously exploiting private wealth to sustain the campaign. The chapter concludes by explaining the decisive failure and decline of WSPU by 1914.

This book ends by showing how these traditions of gendered gifts and sacrifices finally promoted the fight for suffrage, which is typically discussed in terms of women’s arguments for equal rights instead. By establishing shops that promoted and sought women’s gifts, by offering themselves up as martyrs for the cause, and by eventually offering to sacrifice suffrage itself in the interests of Britain’s larger war efforts, suffragettes drew on varied gift strategies to gain popular support and ultimately achieve the victory that more openly militant techniques had failed to win.

Sylvia Pankhurst is better known for her connections to the suffragette movement than for her role in the establishment of the British Communist Party and her lifelong commitment to anti-colonial causes, most notably her enduring support for Ethiopia against Italy’s invasion in 1935. This chapter looks at Pankhurst’s “press activism” around the year 1919, in order to understand better the internationalism that flourished in the interwar period, of which Pankhurst was a notable representative. In 1917, Pankhurst renamed her feminist broadsheet, the Women’s Dreadnought, The Workers’ Dreadnought, as part of her increasing sympathy for Communism; she had previously made a radical split with mainstream suffragette activism, which she felt let down working-class women. Pankhurst was one of the first white editors to publish black writers, and in her broadsheet Claude McKay wrote critiques of socialism’s blindness to the racism among its associates. The Workers’ Dreadnought stood out among other radical newsheets for its distinctly internationalist viewpoint. In 1919, Pankhurst also became a foreign correspondent for Gramsci’s Communist journal, L’Ordine Nuovo. She is distinctive among her contemporary comrades for her insight that struggles for gender, class and racial equality could not be separated from one another and needed to be tackled together, thus always placing herself at the radical fringes of any political movement that she decided to join.

The status of food, as a source of nourishment and as a cultural signifier, underwent a transformation over the hundred years from the mid nineteenth to the mid twentieth centuries. During this period of change in production and consumption, food was also avoided by, or lacked by, individuals and communities for a variety of reasons: hunger and famine; colonial prohibitions and cultural differences; illnesses and dietary resistance; economic realities amid the moral and social intersection of class and the cost of food. In this essay, I consider a range of these factors and circumstances in order to describe the importance of the presence or absence of food to perceptions of cultural distinction and separation observed in the lives and writings of canonical modernist authors.

This chapter reviews the reasons for presenting a chronological biography of Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy, as opposed to a thematic or theoretical interpretation of her ideals. It also provides a brief assessment of current historiography relating to Wolstenholme Elmy. The development of Wolstenholme Elmy's feminism is then addressed. She was deeply appreciative of her transatlantic friendships. The object of this biography is to argue that Wolstenholme Elmy was foremost among the Radical suffragists of her generation and to interpret that radicalism as a force for change. Her life shows that there is no simple dichotomy between the suffragist and the suffragette. She did not consider her own sex ‘superior’, but equal, and her unshakeable belief in this equality demanded of her, from her twenties, that she live a public life. Finally, an overview of the chapters included in this book is shown.

This chapter explains who the Kenneys were, provides biographical detail about the family and the individual sisters, and sets out the political, economic, social, and cultural context in which they grew up. It shows that, despite the rhetoric of sisterhood which often characterizes feminist politics, friendship rather than family has been central to suffrage studies, and argues that the family needs to be given greater consideration. It also explains the place of class in suffrage historiography and the relationship between the women’s and labour movements as a way into understanding the relative lack of work on suffrage militants. The chapter sets out the source material which forms the basis for this study, explains the thematic biographical approach, and summarizes the chapters which follow.

This chapter shows that Annie Kenney’s suffragette career offers fresh insight into the way that class was represented, understood, and experienced within the WSPU. While WSPU activists frequently claimed that theirs was a classless organization, historians have often been sceptical as to whether this was reflected in their policies and attitudes. Class remained a significant source of tension in the organization even as women attempted to pursue a common goal. This chapter traces how Annie Kenney was first positioned as a representative of, and advocate for, working-class women, and later celebrated for her outstanding commitment to the cause, indicating that the meaning of class was fluid and shifting rather than fixed and static. The chapter raises ideas about the role and representation of working-class women within the WSPU, and demonstrates how women themselves attempted to navigate the complicated terrain of class hierarchies and gendered inequality.

In a move that reflects instinct’s position in civilization more generally, the rational citizen was sometimes the binary counterpart to the instinctive woman and sometimes a figure endowed with his own set of instincts that were different and ideally complementary to those of women. The suffragette hunger strikes tackled both of these positions simultaneously. Hunger helped define the models through which sexuating instincts—believed to occur phylogenetically later—could be shaped. As suffragettes mobilized the concept of the strike, they suggested that their instincts should be understood as forms of labor, a fact that implied a critique of the way that the sexual division of labor had become newly scripted as an instinct-based discourse of sexual difference. By reading suffrage literature by Christabel Pankhurst, Constance Lytton, and Constance Maud alongside the emerging literature on suicide, anorexia, and the birth-rate panic, the chapter investigates the mediations between the instinctive citizen and the instinctive woman.

This chapter talks about how Swan Kendrick had spent the week soaking up all the fanfare that accompanied Woodrow Wilson's inauguration. He was elated by the presence of black women in the suffragette parade and by “the colored soldiers (National Guards) and high school cadets, in the inaugural parade.” Howard University, too, had entered its students in the parade's college section. Black Washington was well represented in the city's most important political celebration, a reflection of both the prominence of African Americans in the capital and the new administration's desire to appear egalitarian. The politics of it all really mattered, Kendrick told Ruby Moyse. “Everybody who stays in Washington for ever so short a time gets saturated with it, and straightaway imagines everyone else is.” Middle-class clerks, supposedly rendered politically inert by civil service rules, were of course saturated like everybody else.

This chapter explores the commonly stated claim that Christabel Pankhurst was a Conservative. The claim, made by her socialist-feminist sister Sylvia in her influential book The suffragette movement, first published in 1931, has become part of the dominant narrative about the suffragette movement in Edwardian Britain. Such a claim is challenged and an alternative interpretation offered. It is suggested that we should see Christabel Pankhurst as a pioneer to what in the 1970s became known as ‘radical feminism’. For Christabel the subordinate position of women in Edwardian society was due to the power that men, including socialist men, exercised over women. She saw the struggle for the enfranchisement of women as a ‘sex war’ rather than a class struggle.

In 1821, Heinrich Heine famously and prophetically wrote, “’When they burn books, they will also, in the end, burn human beings.’” In January 1933 Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany. On May 10th, university students in Berlin and Hitler’s brown shirts sang Nazi anthems, gave the Nazi arm salute, and flung onto bonfires thousands of books containing ideas considered unGerman. During the 1930s and 1940s, as many writers fled and concentration camps combined forced labor and genocide, Nazi confiscations and burnings of books and manuscripts went on throughout Germany and in occupied countries. On both sides books also were sacrificed to meet shortages of paper and fuel. Collateral damage from German and Allied bombings destroyed, along with soldiers and civilians, many more vulnerable books and libraries. Traveling in France and Italy in May 1933, Leonard and Virginia Woolf did not record any experience or knowledge of “libricide” in Berlin. Leonard Woolf notes that even in 1935, “people were just beginning to understand something of what Hitler and the Nazis were doing in Germany.” Still, the Woolfs were more aware than most. This essay will include 1) a brief look at two lesser-known books published by the Hogarth Press to inform British readers of threatened physical and cultural destruction by the Nazis; 2) a glance at selected research on the causes and goals of book and library burning; and 3) an examination, in these contexts, of some complex personal and cultural roles books played, especially in Virginia Woolf’s life, during a decade when people and their libraries lived under threat.

Eltis explores the ways in which the women’s suffrage campaign was performative, surveying the connections between suffrage activism, theatre, and protest. The campaign for Votes for Women was the first political movement to use the arts deliberately and strategically. The theatricality at the heart of women’s political activism from the last decades of the nineteenth century until the First World War was not, however, simply a matter of making clear the popularity of their demands. Feminist activists and writers were also deploying spectacle and performance tactically to challenge notions of woman’s ‘true nature’, her ‘natural’ sphere of activity, and what constituted ‘womanliness’. Militant acts of civil disobedience and symbolic violence against property were inherently theatrical, not designed to instil fear or seriously to undermine the infrastructure of government, but rather to command public attention to the passionate commitment of the suffragettes, and their rejection of existing male-controlled systems of law and justice.

Myths of the spinster as asexual, barren and dowdy are challenged in the second chapter, by an exploration of the figure of the New Woman or bachelor girl, and the alternative glamorous identity of the mistress. Women's autobiographies locate the single woman within the dangerous excesses of Bohemianism. The enabling singleness of the professionalised New Woman in novels by Netta Syrett and Ella Hepworth Dixon is explored in relation to her occupation of her spinster flat, in which her modernity is guaranteed by her celibacy. This is considered in relation to the enviability of the spinster's occupation of public space in New Woman and suffragette autobiography by Cecily Hamilton, Violet Hunt and Evelyn Sharp.

Ideas of land settlement have a long historyin Britain. By the 1880s, a number of groups had developed proposals for alternative utopian colonies that would become the kernel of a new way of living. Ruskin's ideas had a lasting and direct influence, particularly through the small colony associated with his Guild of St George. In 1892, Herbert V Mills launched his small Christian socialist colony at Starnthwaite, near Kendal. It was followed by a series of utopian colonies, including those associated with Tolstoy and Kropotkin, as well as a later Women's Training Colony launched by supporters of the suffrage movement. Most of these ventures were under-capitalised, and suffered from interminable internal disputes, and failed to take root.

This chapter addresses the significance of social movements in accelerating women into the public sphere as public intellectuals. Indeed, the role of social movements was important in defining women public intellectuals politically. The growth of social movements has to be set alongside the expansion of higher education for women, as well as the expansion of the print industry. This led to an expansion and broadening of the base of women's participation in political activity, particularly around specific campaigns and causes. Women were actively involved, individually and collectively, in a number of campaigns prior to the emergence of the suffrage movement. Ultimately, the intersection of gender and class was an important factor leading to the growth of both political activism and, more specifically, the emergence of the suffragettes and later women's liberation movement (WLM). Analysis shows that the motivation of most women was pragmatic and issue based as opposed to ideological. Issue-based politics covered all social classes and thus brought women together in social activism and within social movements.

This chapter revisits two major points in Woolf's essay 'Mr. Bennet and Mrs. Brown' - that human nature changed in or about December 1910, and that novelists have become too caught up in 'things' as they try to understand human character.