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Friday 26 March 2021 11.00 - 12.15
N-9 WOM12 Suffrage ‘Grassroots’ in Great Britain: a Comparative Approach
N
Network: Women and Gender Chair: Birgitta Bader-Zaar
Organizer: Anne Logan Discussant: Birgitta Bader-Zaar
Ruth Davidson : The Local Context: Suffrage and After, East Surrey 1890s-1939
This paper will argue that we cannot fully comprehend the practices and discourses of women’s politics without understanding how these issues were refracted through the prism of the local. Local and regional identities were distinctive across this period, and how each woman understood her status would be as much shaped ... (Show more)
This paper will argue that we cannot fully comprehend the practices and discourses of women’s politics without understanding how these issues were refracted through the prism of the local. Local and regional identities were distinctive across this period, and how each woman understood her status would be as much shaped by this milieu as the pronouncements of national organisations or the media. It reminds us that for many women suffrage was only one part, albeit for many a significant part, of their public life. Local studies also allow us to trace the trajectories of women’s politics by looking at the period before suffrage and the shape of the suffrage movement to help explain women’s interwar public sphere.
These themes will be drawn out through a case study of East Surrey suffrage women. East Surrey, in the early twentieth century was a mix of small towns and villages. Much local suffrage work has focussed on urban women. Rural women had to negotiate different issues but were nonetheless as engaged in suffrage activism and social reform as their urban counterparts. This paper will explore their personal, social and political networks. It will demonstrate how suffrage was, for these women, intertwined with their wider activism. It will conclude that local studies are essential if we are to reach a more nuanced understanding of the shape, ambitions and trajectory of women’s activism in this period. (Show less)

Alexandra Hughes-Johnson : From Suffragettes to County Councillors: Rethinking Local Women’s Politics in Metropolitan England
In recent years there has been a wave of scholarship that has sought to challenge the traditional notion that the inter-war period was a stagnant time for feminist activism, with historians demonstrating the diversity and vibrancy of the women’s movement at a number of levels. While some of this scholarly ... (Show more)
In recent years there has been a wave of scholarship that has sought to challenge the traditional notion that the inter-war period was a stagnant time for feminist activism, with historians demonstrating the diversity and vibrancy of the women’s movement at a number of levels. While some of this scholarly attention has focused on the first generation of women MPs, there has been rather less research on the ways in which newly enfranchised women entered local politics after 1918. Women had an established tradition of involvement in municipal politics, which stretched back to their involvement in Poor Law guardianship and school boards, yet the extension of the franchise in February 1918 seemed to open up new possibilities for women at local as well as national levels. This paper seeks to build on this rich scholarship and add a different perspective to the historiography, by focusing on the election of newly enfranchised women, who were suffrage activists, to local county councils. The paper will focus specifically on the election of Wimbledon suffragette, Rose Lamartine Yates, to the London County Council and Women’s Freedom League Honorary Secretary, Edith How Martyn, to the Middlesex County Council. By exploring the connections between their suffrage campaigning and post-war activities, this comparative approach will suggest that municipal politics offered newly enfranchised women a more accessible method of gaining political power and influence. Furthermore, that the election of Rose Lamartine Yates and Edith How Martyn to local county councils provided them with a platform on which they, as a practical women and feminist activists, could use their voices and influences to shape the local political agendas and help improve the lives of women and children at grassroots levels. (Show less)

Beth Jenkins : Grassroots Activism, Suffrage Organisers and the Campaign in Wales
In 1908 suffrage organiser Helen Fraser was one of many campaigners who visited Wales and regions across Britain to bolster activity. Sent from London by the NUWSS, Fraser travelled from town to town, speaking at local meetings and distributing suffrage propaganda. She later recalled: ‘they chose me to go to ... (Show more)
In 1908 suffrage organiser Helen Fraser was one of many campaigners who visited Wales and regions across Britain to bolster activity. Sent from London by the NUWSS, Fraser travelled from town to town, speaking at local meetings and distributing suffrage propaganda. She later recalled: ‘they chose me to go to Wales because Wales had been difficult…I built up very, very good groups…mostly of the intelligent woman as it were, leading women’. Such narratives have shaped the framework of dominant accounts of suffrage in Wales: slow to develop and ignited by an outside middle-class leadership on ‘rather stony soil’. In this paper I suggest that the relationship between organising speakers and local women was never a one-way process. Whilst encounters between Welsh women and organisers from outside the community could and did lead to cultural clashes, they could also be fruitful exchanges which influenced and redirected the tactics of campaigners. I will examine why certain organisers were sent to Wales, how they were received by communities, and the different ways support for the campaign intersected with local cultures and socioeconomic structures. The historiographical contribution is twofold. First, to build upon recent scholarship which challenges the narrative that the women’s movement in Wales lacked an ‘indigenous’ base. More broadly, I consider how historians conceptualise the relationship between centres and so-called geographical peripheries in the early twentieth-century British suffrage movement: between London and the regions, and from Cardiff to Colwyn Bay. (Show less)

Anne Logan : Regional Suffrage Histories: towards a Comparative Approach
This paper is concerned with the researching and writing of suffrage history/histories from the perspective of regional studies. It focuses particularly on the developments of the last 25 years, in which English regional suffrage histories – and those of the different nations of the United Kingdom - have developed apace.
Over ... (Show more)
This paper is concerned with the researching and writing of suffrage history/histories from the perspective of regional studies. It focuses particularly on the developments of the last 25 years, in which English regional suffrage histories – and those of the different nations of the United Kingdom - have developed apace.
Over the period in question regional/national suffrage histories have played an important part in unveiling the richness and complexity of the British women’s suffrage movement. This paper focuses on some of the key insights of the regional/national approach, from pioneering studies in the 1990s such as Leneman’s monograph on Scotland, A Guid Cause (1995), through Crawford’s landmark The Women’s Suffrage Movement in Britain and Ireland (2006), to recent research which came to the fore in the centenary year of partial women’s suffrage in the United Kingdom.
The paper argues for an explicitly comparative approach to regional histories of the women’s suffrage movement in Great Britain and – hopefully – elsewhere in Europe. It draws on recent research on the suffrage movement in the county of Kent, an area with a varied mix of habitations: rural, seaside, industrial and spa town. Often overshadowed by histories of the movement in the nearby metropolitan area of London – which in turn is dominated by the UK central government perspective - the history of the suffrage movement in Kent has intrinsic significance, as well as illuminating some of the key themes in suffrage historiography, such as the nature and significance of the militant/constitutional division, and the influence of local gendered political cultures. To illuminate these themes further, this paper also draws out comparisons with ports and spa towns elsewhere in Great Britain. (Show less)



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