The Militant Suffrage Movement: Citizenship and Resistance in Britain, 1860-1930

Contemporary Review, May, 2004

The Militant Suffrage Movement: Citizenship and Resistance in Britain, 1860-1930. Laura E. Nym Mayhall. Oxford University Press. [pounds sterling]30.00. xiii 218 pages. ISBN 0-19-515993-4. The aim of this study is to look at 'suffrage militancy as a political idea and a range of practices'. The author sees militant suffragette action in the Edwardian era as not only an attempt at 'feminizing citizenship' but as 'the culmination of a much greater process ...

whereby individuals negotiated with the state to redefine citizenship' a process which included trade unionists, Irish and Indian nationalists. To these campaigners full citizenship as electors was 'an active practice, an engagement with family, local community, state and empire'. Far from being fanatics the militants had at the centre of the views 'a rational political calculus'. By showing the connexions between the suffragettes and the long established radical tradition in British politics the author hopes to 'reintegrate women's suffrage into broader treatments of British political culture'. The militant suffragettes not only helped to win the vote for women, she argues, but also helped to redefine the nature of liberal democracy in Britain.