Organizing for Citizenship and Democracy
Is there more to be said about the militant women's suffrage movement in Britain? Some readers might feel dubious. After all, there has recently been a slew of Pankhurst biographies notably Martin Pugh's The Pankhursts (2001), plus two in 2002 both entitled Emmeline Pankhurst, one by June Purvis and the other by Paula Bartley.1 Delving a generation further back, Antonia Raeburn's Militant Suffragettes (1973) included interviews with many surviving elderly suffragettes shortly before they died, while Andrew Rosen's Rise Up, Women! (1974) offered useful tabulations including age of women on arrest (so often under thirty) and arson targets (date, location, object, estimated value). Meanwhile, Virago Press republished Sylvia Pankhurst's 1931 The Suffragette Movement (1977), upon which the BBC had drawn heavily for its television drama series, Shoulder to Shoulder (1974).2 Alongside ran more articles on militancy than you could shake a stick at including most recently a heated debate on 'The Suffragettes: Heroes or Terrorists?' (2007).3 HWJ readers restive at the prospect of yet further accounts might prick up their ears at the track record of the two authors reviewed here, experienced suffrage historians both. Laura E. Nym Mayhall, an American academic, is already familiar to UK suffrage historians, initially through her influential article on 'Creating the "Suffragette Spirit"' (1995), which exam ined how from the 1920s onwards the Suffragette Fellowship's 'inclusion in the community of militant suffragettes rested upon the defining act of imprisonment' and slanted the suffrage narrative by privileging one 'sequence of events... arrest and incarceration'.4 More recently Mayhall discussed how, for the generation of women coming to political conscious ness during the Boer War, two competing understandings of women's citizenship emerged: one a gendered model of service, the other insisting
Creating the ‘suffragette spirit’: British feminism and the historical imagination1
Abstract Recent work on the militant suffrage movement in Britain suggests that the Edwardian ‘Votes for Women’ campaign promoted in its participants a common identity forged through the experiences of the suffragette hunger strike and forcible feeding. Critical scrutiny of the texts upon which these analyses are based, however, reveals a more complex relationship between suffragettes' experiences and their representations of the same. In the 1920s and 1930s, a small group of former suffragettes created a highly stylized story of their participation in the Edwardian suffrage campaign that equated militancy with service to the nation during the First World War. While this story drew upon earlier representations of women's martyrdom and passivity, it more consistently promoted the agency and comradeship of women in the movement. This aspect of the narration of the subject of suffrage has played a significant, yet unexamined, role in the self-fashioning of British and American feminist scholars since the 1970s.
THE METABOLISM OF AMINO ACIDS IN DIABETES MELLITUS.
The amino acid content of fasting human blood appears to be quite constant. Extensive surveys (1) have revealed only a few diseases in which the blood amino acid level is modified significantly. Acute yellow atrophy of the liver is associated with a rise in amino acids in the blood, whereas hypoaminoacidemia has been reported in patients with nephrosis and in pneumococcal pneumonia (2). Concerning the fasting amino acid level in diabetes mellitus there is little agreement. Several investigators (la, 3) have observed elevated amino acid levels in a few of their diabetic subjects. Greene, Sandiford and Ross (lb) studied 116 diabetics and observed that the average amino acid level was within normal limits. No accurate data on the condition or treatment of these patients were given. On the other hand, a high blood amino acid content has been reported in dogs with experimentally induced diabetes (4). Luck, Morrison and Wilbur (5) observed that insulin lowered the amino acid content of blood in both experimental animals and normal human subjects. These results have been confirmed by several investigators (6) using the Folin colorimetric method and by Farr and Alpert (7) using Van Slyke and MacFadyen's manometric ninhydrin method (8). Luck also studied two diabetic patients under insulin treatment and observed low normal fasting amino acid levels. The lack of agreement of existing data on the blood amino acid content in human diabetes mellitus, together with the paucity of data on the clinical condition and therapy of the patients, suggested the present study.