Laura E. Nym Mayhall

Household and Market in Suffragette Discourse, 1903—14

Over the past two decades, a tremendous volume of scholarship across the disciplines of history, literature, and politics has been generated with the goal of understanding the historical relationship between public and private. By now, it has become axiomatic that, in practice and in theory, late Victorian and Edwardian feminists challenged classical liberalism’s opposition between public and private spheres by illuminating interconnections between the domains of home and politics. Historians now understand women’s work as social reformers and political activists to reveal the contours of the public and private even while demonstrating the permeability of those domains. The social and political have been delineated well by this scholarship. Much less attention has been paid to the realm of economics, a perplexing development, as political economy originated within domestic economy and household management. Historians have largely adopted the liberal script, whereby political economy emerged as a concern of law and the public sphere, and the private sphere became conceptualized as the realm of “those aspects of male life that are omitted from the public world ... family, home, and reproduction.” Disentangling the public and private in Edwardian suffragist discourse, however, reveals ongoing debates about the workings of the market economy and suggests important connections between social critique and economic change.

The Rhetorics of Slavery and Citizenship: Suffragist Discourse and Canonical Texts in Britain, 1880–1914

This article examines the pivotal role played by two canonical texts in shaping the political subjectivities of suffragists in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain. Read and discussed by three generations of British feminists, John Stuart Mills Subjection of Women and Giuseppe Mazzinis Duties of Man shaped suffragist thinking on relationships between family, state, and citizenship and provided impetus for the creation of new kinds of argumentation and organisations for womens political activism.

Reclaiming the Political: Women and the Social History of Suffrage in Great Britain, France, and the United States

F many historians of women’s suffrage, the subject remains rooted in the intellectual and political concerns of social history. This is not surprising, as the development of women’s history as a field owes much to new social history. Early works on women’s suffrage drew inspiration from social history’s emphasis on experiences of ordinary women, a trend alive in the historiography on suffrage to this day.1 Indeed, much recent work on women’s suffrage in Britain, France, and the United States seeks to recover and establish women’s agency in their attainment of the vote, and to demonstrate the existence of a separate women’s culture among suffragists. Such scholarship continues the vital task of documenting the contributions women made to their political enfranchisement. Yet, it also celebrates women’s achievements as part of a progressive, triumphal acquisition of rights. As a consequence, women’s suffrage remains resolutely outside overarching scholarly and pedagogical political narratives, a “special case,” rather than an integral part of understanding transitions to democracy.

The Past and Present of European Women's and Gender History: A Transatlantic Conversation

Ida Blom, Mineke Bosch, Antoinette Burton a.o., Facilitated and edited by Birgitte Soland and Mary Jo Maynes,

Anglo-American Media Interactions, 1850–2000. Edited by Joel H. Wiener and Mark Hampton.

interactions between European nations and the wider world – say, Spain and South America, or Britain and the United States; however, a history of crime that encompasses the whole globe is some way off I think(!). Until (and even) then Emsley’s volume will remain a hugely important reference point for historians and criminologists who wish to escape their national preoccupations in order to better inform those national studies. I therefore think the author should be congratulated on his considerable achievement.