History And Legacy Of The Suffragette Fellowship

"History and Legacy of the Suffragette Fellowship provides a biographical account of the scope and depth of the memory work of the now forgotten commemorative group the Suffragette Fellowship, active from the 1920s to the 1970s. Richly illustrated with images of members, artefacts, and publications, this extensive study of the Suffragette Fellowship adds to transnational suffrage histories in the United Kingdom and Australia and will be of interest to scholars in memory studies and women's history"--

History and Legacy of the Suffragette Fellowship provides a biographical account of the scope and depth of the memory work of the now-forgotten commemorative group the Suffragette Fellowship, active from the 1920s to the 1970s. The Suffragette Fellowship comprised members from the militant suffrage groups known as the Women’s Social and Political Union, the Women’s Freedom League, and the Actress Franchise League. This research provides a comprehensive analysis of the Fellowship’s attempts to form and sustain a collective Suffragette identity across four decades of activity. It considers the legacy of contested histories attached to militant campaigning that pressured Fellowship leaders to take control of the public memory of suffrage history. With close attention given to a neglected piece of feminist history, this book highlights the cultural and political impacts that the Fellowship enacted in their memory of the women’s suffrage movement. Richly illustrated with images of members, artefacts, and publications, this extensive study of the Suffragette Fellowship adds to transnational suffrage histories in the United Kingdom and Australia and will be of interest to scholars in memory studies and women’s history.

The suffragettes are dead. Long live the suffragettes! As part of the Wonder Woman Radical Manchester events celebrating International Women’s Day, the one-day conference Suffragette Legacy brought together academics, artists, campaigners and activists to present and speak about how their work is affected by the suffragette legacy of feminism in 2014. The organisers welcomed academic papers, feminist theory, poetry and visual art to discuss this important, but often complex topic. It was found that the suffragette legacy is often hidden in private stories, in little-known projects, in art and in metaphor. In addition, the contributions to the conference showed that certain suffragette words, worries and worlds in gender politics still play out amongst humans. This edited volume will encourage more dialogue, discussions and future narratives for our feminist foremothers in both Manchester and beyond.

This book addresses the intersection between gender and colonialism primarily in German colonialism. Gender and German Colonialism is concerned with colonialism as a historical phenomenon and with the repercussions and transformations of the colonial era in contemporary racist and sexist discourses and practices relating to refugees, migrants, and people of non-European descent living in Europe. This volume contributes to the broader effort of decolonization, with particular attention to concepts of gender. Rather than focus on only one European empire, it discusses and compares multiple former colonial powers in context. In addition to German colonialism, some chapters focus on the role of gender in Dutch and Belgian colonialism in Indonesia, Africa, and the Americas. This volume will be of value to students and scholars interested in women’s and gender studies, social and cultural history, and imperial and colonial history.

Women’s Amateur Theatre in Rural Britain is the first book-length study of the National Federation of Women’s Institutes’ amateur drama groups, which served as an umbrella organisation for women’s amateur drama. This work addresses a key historical gap by covering the activities, lives, and labour of women in rural England, Wales, and Scotland. It challenges gender-based assumptions about the value of women’s amateur theatre, highlighting the need for leisure opportunities and social connections in rural villages. The rapid expansion of women’s amateur drama groups is assessed in conjunction with major developments of the period, including the effect of post-1918 reconstruction efforts in rural regions, the revaluation of informal adult education schemes, the law’s influences and restrictions on amateur performances, and the impact of the Second World War on the ability of the Women’s Institutes to carve out a space for all-women’s drama groups that empowered women through education and skill-building programmes to aid in personal and community development. The broad scope of this research will appeal to undergraduates, postgraduates, scholars, and non-specialists interested in cultural history and the lives of rural women after the First World War.

This volume examines the life of the remarkable woman, Susan Moody, and her travels to Iran in the early 20th century during seismic changes in the world. Dr. Susan I. Moody’s Travels to Iran 1909-1934: Courageous Odyssey captures a fleeting moment of arresting change and shimmering possibility. Exploring the fading values of the 19th century and the emergent understandings of the 20th century, the author shows how one individual navigated such challenging times. This book explores the Industrial Revolution, the rise of the women’s movement, advances in medicine and healthcare, and the start of a new religion – The Baha’i Faith – of which Moody became a devoted member. Susan Moody was a pathbreaking artist and educator who became a physician later in life. She made the bold decision to leave the United States and travel to Iran in 1909 to serve women who effectively had no access to medical care. In examining Dr. Susan Moody’s story, this volume seeks to reflect on our own changing moment and the ever-present possibilities of improvement and advancement. By tracing her own courageous odyssey, we are invited to more deeply understand our own. This book will be of value to students and scholars alike interested in Women’s and Gender history and Social and Cultural history.

This book examines property legislation and the actual position of women in receiving, holding and passing on family property as daughters, wives and as widows throughout history. Traditionally the prevailing view has been that women have been disadvantaged in the distribution of property and therefore less interesting as objects of study. This volume challenges this view and explores the securing of property for families or for individuals through transfers in the shape of dowries, marriage contracts, wills and other arrangements, as well as how women used and distributed the property they were holding.The scope of the volume is both urban and rural, analysing the position of women in relation to family property through contributions from a wide geographic area. The chapters investigate the situation in southern and northern Europe, across the Atlantic and Africa throughout the 18th to the 20th century. This volume will be of value to academics, undergraduates, postgraduates and scholars interested in gender and history and social history.

What happened in women’s history after the vote was won? Was the suffragette spirit quashed by the advent of the First World War, and due to the achievement of women’s partial (1918) and then equal (1928) suffrage thereafter, by having to wait to be reclaimed by the Women’s Liberation Movement only in the late 1960s? This collection explores how individual feminists and the feminist movement as a whole responded to the achievement of the central goal of votes for women. For many, the post-suffrage years were anti-climactic, and there is no disputing that the movement was in numerical decline, struggling to appeal to a younger generation of women who knew nothing of the sacrifices that had been made to secure their citizenship rights and new freedoms. However, feminists went in new and different directions, identifying pressing issues from pacifism to religious reform, from local activism to party politics. Women also organised around causes that were not explicitly feminist or were even anti-feminist, and this book makes the important distinction between women in politics and women’s feminist activism. The range of feminist activism in the aftermath of suffrage speaks for the successes and mainstreaming of feminism, and contributors to this volume contest the narrative of a terminal feminist decline between the wars. This book was originally published as a special issue of Women’s History Review.