Krista Cowman

This book is the first investigation on how official organizers built and sustained the national militant campaign of the Women's Social and Political Union between 1903 and 1918. While the overall policy of the Union was devised by an ever-decreasing circle of women, centered around the mother-daughter team of Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst, much of its actual activity, including its more extreme militant actions such as arson, was devised and implemented by these organizers who worked in the provinces and in London.

Paid Organisers of the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU), 1904-18

Women of the Right Spirit

Louise Ainsley Jackson

By focusing on the experiences of British women between c.1850 and 1950, this collection highlights the ways in which the concept of gender operated as an organizing principle in the construction and negotiation of identities and practices in British society.

Britain C. 1850-1950

Women and Work Culture

Ian Packer

This edited interdisciplinary collection draws together recent original work on the connections between radicalism and localism in a variety of international locations over the last two hundred years. The areas covered include the United Kingdom, North America, South Africa, the Caribbean, Germany, Italy and Spain. The book questions whether certain political issues have more impact at a local level and whether common radical responses can be discerned across space and time. The contributors’ essays also consider to what extent the local offers a space in which new political possibilities can be explored, and especially the extent to which radical participation from groups who are under-represented in many national campaigns appears more easily available at the local level. Finally, the essays in the collection examine the distinctiveness of local political radicalism. This involves looking at the activities of communal organizations and political parties that defined themselves against nationally-situated sites of power, but also at how the many cultural manifestations of radicalism, such as music, theatre and art, were shaped distinctively at local level and how radical ideas were spread across wider areas from local bases.

Radical Cultures and Local Identities

This book offers the first detailed regional study of women’s politics in the United Kingdom in the period before the First World War. Its purpose is to investigate how women’s politics functioned at the grass roots, away from the schisms and personality clashes of the national political scene. The book investigates the membership, activities and campaigning methodologies of a variety of formal political organisations ranging from branches of national auxiliary bodies such as the Women’s Liberal Federation through women’s involvement in local branches of the Independent Labour Party and on to the autonomous suffrage organisations. The impact of the all-female suffrage campaigns on older political groups in which women still competed with men for positions and policies is also considered. The book extends into the First World War, and investigates the new alliance that were formed when earlier societies contracted or closed

Women in Merseyside’s Political Organisations 1890-1920

Mrs Brown is a Man and a Brother

Angela K. Smith

This volume aims to provide a wider view of First World War experience through focusing on landscapes less commonly considered in historiography, and on voices that have remained on the margins of popular understanding of the war. The landscape of the western front was captured during the conflict in many different ways: in photographs, paintings and print. The most commonly replicated voicing of contemporary attitudes towards the war is that of initial enthusiasm giving way to disillusionment and a sense of overwhelming futility. Investigations of the many components of war experience drawn from social and cultural history have looked to landscapes and voices beyond the frontline as a means of foregrounding different perspectives on the war. Not all of the voices presented here opposed the war, and not all of the landscapes were comprised of trenches or flanked by barbed wire. Collectively, they combine to offer further fresh insights into the multiplicity of war experience, an alternate space to the familiar tropes of mud and mayhem.

Landscapes and Voices of the Great War

Krista Cowman's highly approachable survey examines some of the areas of women's political activity in Britain from the period of the Glorious Revolution to the election of the first female Prime Minister. Cowman shows how women had worked in a variety of locations and organizations in the decades before the suffrage campaign, and that women's politics did not begin with the demand for a parliamentary vote. The volume also demonstrates how women's political activity continued after equal suffrage in 1928 in a number of directions within and beyond Parliament. Key topics include: - court politics in the age of Queen Mary and Queen Anne - Victorian 'pressure group' politics - Suffrage campaigns from 1867 to 1928 - the Women's Liberation Movement. Clear and wide-ranging, this is an essential book for anyone with an interest in the history of British women's involvement with politics over nearly 300 years.

Krista Cowman

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