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
Mrs Brown is a Man and a Brother: Women in Merseyside's Political Organisations 1890-1920
This book offers the first detailed regional study of women's politics in the United Kingdom in the period before the First World War. Its purpose is to investigate how women's politics functioned at the grass roots, away from the schisms and personality clashes of the national political scene. The book investigates the membership, activities and campaigning methodologies of a variety of formal political organizations ranging from branches of national auxiliary bodies such as the Women's Liberal Federation through women's involvement in local branches of the Independent Labor Party and on to the autonomous suffrage organizations. The impact of the all-female suffrage campaigns on older political groups in which women still competed with men for positions and policies is also considered. The book extends into the First World War, and investigates the new alliance that were formed when earlier societies contracted or closed
The Evidence of Experience
I am grateful to Tom Keenan for inviting me to the conference ("History Todayand Tonight," Rutgers and Princeton Universities, March 1990) where I tried out some of these ideas, and to the many people there whose questions and comments led to a first round of revisions and reformulations. The students in my graduate seminar at Rutgers in the spring of 1990 helped immeasurably in the clarification of my ideas about "experience" and about what it means to historicize. Criticism from members of the "History" seminar during 1990-91 in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study helped give this paper its final-and, I think, much improved-form. As usual, Elizabeth Weed provided the crucial suggestions for the conceptualization of this paper. I also appreciate the important contributions of Judith Butler, Christina Crosby, Nicholas Dirks, Christopher Fynsk, Clifford Geertz, Donna Haraway, Susan Harding, Gyan Prakash, Donald Scott, and William Sewell, Jr. Karen Swann's astute comments led me to rethink and rewrite the final section of this paper. I learned a great deal from her and from that exercise. In a letter he wrote in July 1987, Reginald Zelnick challenged me to articulate a definition of "experience" that might work for historians. Although I'm not sure he will find this essay the answer he was looking for, I'm indebted to him for that early provocation. 1. For an important discussion of the "dilemma of difference," see Martha Minow. "Justice Engendered," foreword to "The Supreme Court, 1986 Term," Harvard Law Review 101 (Nov. 1987): 10-95.