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5 New views of the women’ suffrage campaign: Liberal women and regional perspectives This chapter seeks to reveal hitherto hidden facets of the British women’s movement by focusing on Glasgow suffragists’ view of a London-led campaign and the contribution of the SWLF to constitutional suffragism. An analysis of the minute books of the GWSAWS reveals the influence of early twentieth-century trends towards Scottish Home Rule on the relationship of suffragists in Glasgow and London and on the character of the women’s movement in Scotland. The GWSAWS was established
Along with the suffrage campaign, women's liberation activism is one of the most renowned aspects of women's political history. The women's liberation movement (WLM) has often been linked with the 'big city'. This is the first book-length account of the women's liberation movement in Scotland, which charts the origins and development of this important social movement of the post-1945 period. In doing so, it reveals the inventiveness and fearlessness of feminist activism, while also pointing towards the importance of considering the movement from the local and grassroots perspectives. This book has two central arguments. First, it presses for a more representative historiography in which material from other places outside of the large women's liberation centres are included. Second, it highlights that case studies not only enrich our knowledge about women's liberation but they also challenge the way the British movement has been portrayed by both participants and historians. The book commences with contextualising the subject and summarising recent research into the movement in the United Kingdom. It looks at the roots of the movement by offering portrayals of the women who went on to form women's liberation groups in Scotland. The book then analyses the phenomenon of 'consciousness-raising' (CR) and the part it had to play in the WLM's development. The focus then moves to exploring where, when and why women's liberation groups emerged. The campaigns taken up by the WLM were to defend abortion rights and campaign against violence against women.
audience is presented with a tableau of theatrical sisterhood both past and present that proves her struggle was not in vain. One of the most well known and popular suffrage plays embraces the idea of collective action by women. How the Vote Was Won is based on an original short story by Cicely Hamilton, a spoof history described as ‘Some short Extracts from Prof. Dryasdust’s “Political History of the Twentieth Century,” published in the year 2008 A.D.’ (see Figure 2.1).72 The play imagines a general women’s strike, called by suffrage campaigners to take the government
activism, more than any other aspect of the WCTU’s agenda, challenges McWhirter’s affirmation of the union’s organisational and ideological coherence. In Australia and New Zealand, the union’s centrality to the women’s suffrage campaigns has been thoroughly documented. Whatever its exact role in each colony, historians agree that between the 1880s and 1900s, the union channelled suffrage propaganda and ideas about women’s emancipation between branches and to and from that great ‘rim’, the World’s WCTU. 14 Indeed, the WCTU’s omnipresence in the Australasian suffrage
4 The women’s movement and female temperance reform Female temperance reform in Scotland is most strongly differentiated from sister movements in the rest of the United Kingdom by its role in the women’s suffrage campaign. In contrast to women’s temperance societies in England and Wales, the BWTASCU officially supported women’s parliamentary enfranchisement, and the BWTASCU prosecuted its own constitutional-style campaign for women’s right to vote.1 The BWTASCU’s distinctive position in British suffragism can be attributed to two main factors; temperance reform
effect. 22 As Figure 4.1 shows, Dawn was a vanguard for the myriad newspapers concerned with women’s emancipation that blossomed in the 1890s. As occurred in the United States and Britain, a feminist press developed alongside the colonial suffrage campaigns, binding activists into a coherent movement. 23 After experimenting with petitions and rallies, suffragists realised that to convert sympathetic politicians into reliable allies, they needed to demonstrate mass support for the reform. As Scott attested, the belief that expanding an activist organisation
6 Women’s suffrage and theatricality Sos Eltis P erformance was at the heart of the women’s suffrage campaign. It was, as Lisa Tickner declares in the title of her study of the imagery of the campaign, a ‘spectacle of women’.1 By 1907 the Home Secretary, Herbert Gladstone, had acknowledged that the suffragists had won the ‘political argument’, but had yet to win ‘the political day’, for that they must learn the lesson from men who ‘know the necessity for demonstrating the greatness of their movements, and for establishing that force majeure which actuates and
alliance a natural one and their personal losses merely coincidental. Perhaps the most surprising element of Elizabeth’s life at this moment, when little in her world was constant or stable, was her continued and dedicated support for the women’s suffrage campaign. The Guardianship of Infants Act had provided a catalyst to rejuvenate the campaign for the parliamentary vote. Suffragists, however, proved unable to agree on the best way to proceed. Elizabeth had an ambivalent relationship with the Central Committee of the National Society for Women’s Suffrage, which had
Women outside marriage between 1850 and the Second World War were seen as abnormal, threatening, superfluous and incomplete, whilst also being hailed as ‘women of the future’. Before 1850 odd women were marginalised, minor characters, yet by the 1930s spinsters, lesbians and widows had become heroines. This book considers how Victorian and modernist women's writing challenged the heterosexual plot and reconfigured conceptualisations of public and private space in order to valorise female oddity. It offers queer readings of novels and stories by women writers, from Charlotte Bronte, Elisabeth Gaskell, Ella Hepworth Dixon and Netta Syrett to May Sinclair, Radclyffe Hall, Clemence Dane, Winifred Holtby and Virginia Woolf. This interdisciplinary study tracks diverse representations of the odd woman in fiction and autobiographical accounts in relation to the rise of feminism. It illuminates singleness in the context of the suffrage campaign, women's work, sexual inversion and birth control as well as assessing the impact of the First World War. It draws on advice literature, medical texts, feminist polemic and articles from the new women's magazines. Developing debates within queer theory about gender non-conformity, heteronormativity and relationships between women, this genealogy of the odd woman shows how new conceptualisations of female singleness and lesbianism troubled, and ultimately transformed, social norms.
Distant Sisters offers a new history of the connections that women in Australia and New Zealand made with one another, and suffragists across the world, in their pioneer pursuit of the vote and subsequent struggle to sell its merits overseas. Although the Australasian suffrage campaigns occurred side by side and shared a commitment to international outreach, this book is the first to take these parallels seriously. Beyond recovering a forgotten regional history, it uses antipodean stories to explore the rise of suffrage internationalism in the late nineteenth century and, importantly, to understand its political, geographical, and racial limits. Covering the period 1880–1914, it charts the development of an international consciousness among elite and ordinary suffragists alike. Following the conduits that allowed them to think and act across borders, it shows how Australasian suffragists positioned themselves within the emerging international women’s movement and shaped organisations like the International Woman Suffrage Alliance and World’s Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. Simultaneously, Distant Sisters unveils the intimate dimensions of internationalism, showing how sentiments ignited by the exchange of letters and newspapers, and preserved in scrapbooks, led the Australasian suffragists to grace British concert halls and receive invitations to the US Oval Office. While often frustrated, their attempts to forge meaningful intercolonial and international connections complicate insular national histories of suffrage and the orthodox Euro-American narrative of fin-de-siècle feminist internationalism. Written in an approachable, case-study driven style, this book will appeal to undergraduates and academic specialists in the fields of feminist history, British imperial history, and Australian and New Zealand studies alike.