Book Launch tomorrow: Politics of Women's Suffrage

The Politics of Women's Suffrage, edited by Alexandra Hughes-Johnson and Lyndsey Jenkins (London: University of London Press, 2021)

I am really looking forward to the online launch of The Politics of Women's Suffrage tomorrow which I feel very privileged to be speaking at. I am so proud that my chapter is included in this volume along so many other inspirational suffrage historians.

The chapter I wrote draws on my experience of bringing Sylvia Pankhurst's manuscript about America to light. That text has usually been interpreted as containing Pankhurst's critique of top-down models of reform and thus anticipating her subsequent radical, grassroots organising in East London - and that's true. But when I read the text, I also saw that Pankhurst was praising other models of organising: ones that helped empower working-class women. 

The chapter shows that Pankhurst had hugely influential relationships with American women activists who practically, emotionally and financially helped her organise the East London Federation of Suffragettes. Those links had largely been forgotten up until now. 

I am very excited to share the stories that I discovered in research that took me far and wide, from Haskell Indian Nations University in Kansas to Henry Street Settlement in New York City, from East London's Bow Road to a reading room in Aberystwyth where I read the articles Pankhurst sent under a pseudonym from America to be published in Keir Hadie's Pioneer. 

You can sign up for the book launch here.

The first page of my chapter in The Politics of Women's Suffrage