Sandra Stanley Holton

Suffrage days : stories from the women's suffrage movement

This is a history of the suffrage movement in Britain from the beginnings of the first sustained campaign in the 1860s to the winning of the vote for women in 1918. The book focuses on a number of figures whose role in this agitation has been ignored or neglected. These include the free-thinker Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy; the founder of the womens movement in the United States, Elizabeth Cady Stanton; the working class orator, Jessie Craigen; and the socialist suffragists, Hannah Mitchell and Mary Gawthorpe. Through the lives of these figures Holton uncovers the complex origins of the movement and associated issues of gender.

To Educate Women into Rebellion: Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the Creation of a Transatlantic Network of Radical Suffragists

IN THE 1880s AND EARLY 1890s, Elizabeth Cady Stanton made three extended visits from the United States to Britain and Europe. During this decade, she spent in all some five years living in England, where her daughter, Harriot Stanton Blatch, had married. In this time, she renewed and extended friendships first made during a wedding tour in 1840, and she and her daughter became central figures in a transatlantic friendship network. This was a network that in Britain drew substantially on a kinship circle of women connected with the Brights, a radical reforming Quaker family among whom was the statesman, John Bright. Women of the Bright circle had helped in the formation of every major society and campaign on which the organized womens movement in Britain had been built in the late 1860s.1 The Bright circle also provided an important locus of radical suffragism in Britain. At the time of Elizabeth Cady Stantons return to Britain in the 1880s, however, a moderate current of suffrage opinion dominated the movement there, one whose viewpoint until recently has also informed prevailing understandings of British suffragism during the nineteenth century.2 Because the more moderate

The suffragist and the “average woman”

Abstract This paper questions the marginality of womens suffrage to the new social history of women in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Britain. In so doing, it seeks to challenge any notion of the suffragist and the “average woman” as absolutely distinct categories. Its argument draws on two major revisions underway in the historiography of this field: firstly, the growing recognition that “votes for women” was not simply a single-issue, equal rights demand, reflecting only a restricted liberal perspective; secondly, the equally significant insistence on the need to apply more extended definitions of both the “political” and the “public” to womens history in this period. The autobiographical writings of Helena Swanwick, Hannah Mitchell and Mary Gawthorpe, it is argued, suggest that the meaning of the vote lies in the mesh experienced by such suffragists between the politics of ordinary, everyday life and their subsequent involvement in the formal politics of parliament and political parties.

Segregation, racism and white women reformers: a transnational analysis, 1840–1912

Abstract This article tracks continuities between early nineteenth-century female abolitionism and the role of white women reformers in Britain in the campaigns against segregation and lynch law in the USA, and on behalf of black rights in British colonies in the early twentieth century. It argues the value of a transnational perspective to these questions. More particularly, it explores the working out of the ‘maternalist’ legacy of female abolitionism, and the increasing problematising of ‘blackness’ and ‘Africanness’ in the perspectives of a circle of white women reformers in Britain.

Silk dresses and lavender kid gloves: the wayward career of Jessie Craigen, working suffragist

Abstract Occasional references to Jessie Craigen occur in the literature on the nineteenth-century womens suffrage movement, generally emphasizing her importance as a working-class suffragist. Previously unknown material throws more light on her career, revealing the eddies of love and exasperation which flowed around her. This paper discusses the various representations of Jessie Craigen to be found in letters among her friends, representations which served to paint her – sometimes warmly, sometimes dismissively – as odd, eccentric, undisciplined. It also examines the more positive sense of herself which she attempted to convey in letters to several of her middle-class promoters – as a romantic authentic in the grip of unbrookable, passionate conviction. Her story confirms the existence of a current of radical-liberal opinion within the nineteenth-century womens movement, and the difficulties which confronted those who found themselves among its paid employees

Challenging Masculinism: personal history and microhistory in feminist studies of the women's suffrage movement

This article begins by discussing ‘masculinism’ in the field of history in terms of gender blindness. It then looks at a more particular usage of the term, as a resort to the ridiculing and demeaning of women historical actors, not least in some influential treatments of the twentieth-century campaigns in Britain for womens suffrage. It argues that masculinist history rests upon the use of stereotypes of women that, when they do not mock, either marginalise or altogether refuse them a place in the larger narratives of community, state and nation. It then looks at the adoption of various forms of ‘personal history’ in much of the ‘new womens history’, including feminist histories of the womens suffrage movement, forms which generally rely on private papers: letters, diaries, memoirs and other life-writing. Finally, it looks at the practice of ‘microhistory’ and suggests that the value of such forms and methods lies especially in their capacity to challenge the stereotypes on which masculinism rests, through a focus on the particular that aids recognition of the varieties and differences to be found among women within their shared subordination as a sex.

Vanishing For The Vote: suffrage, citizenship and the battle for the census, Jill Liddington

is, however, still very useful and highly accessible to students seeking to understand how the practices in which they currently engage developed over time. The discussion of parental involvement in early years education and care is a particularly strong thread throughout the text. I oriented to the book very much as a mother, in the sense that it powerfully evoked memories of ‘helping out’ at playschool during the 1980s; it was less successful at addressing me as a historical researcher in the area of early years theory and practice. I suspect those who have a history of professional practice in the early years field would orient similarly, in that the text would evoke memories of past practice. This makes it strong in the sense of oral history, and a unique resource in a field which is heavy with texts exploring the theories of historical pioneers such as Bowlby, Piaget, Froebel and Montessori. As such I am sure it will make a very useful addition to the libraries of all institutions which train and educate students who both practise, and aspire to practise, within early years education and care.

Friendship and Domestic Service: the letters of Eliza Oldham, general maid (c.1820–1892)

Eliza Oldham (c.1820–92) worked as a general maid in Rochdale and Halifax from the 1840s to the 1870s. A set of her letters to a wealthy relation of two of her employers, Helen Priestman Bright Clark (1840–1927), has been preserved, indicating their close friendship. This article asks what kind of friendship was possible in such a socially and economically unequal relationship, and what it might tell us about class identities and class contest. It locates the basis of this friendship in the emotional labour involved in domestic service, alongside the complex intersection of work, family and community life with larger arenas of radical and gender politics.