The top 10 books about the suffragettes
The top 10 books about the suffragettes
As Hollywood gears up for a major film starring Meryl Streep about the struggle for women’s right to vote, novelist Lucy Ribchester chooses the best reading about this pivotal protest movement
Olympic suffragettes 'Turbulence, back-stabbing, bravery and brilliance' … a Suffragette protest as recreated for the London 2012 Olympic Games opening ceremony Photograph: Phil Noble /Reuters
It was my dad who first told me about the suffragettes. Aged 12 I was asked at school to prepare a talk on someone important in history. “Why don’t you do Emily Pankhurst?” he suggested. “She’s the one who threw herself under the King’s horse for women’s votes.” Looking back, I greatly appreciate his efforts to steer me in the direction of feminism. But in confusing Emmeline Pankhurst, founder of the Women’s Social and Political Union (the suffragettes), with Emily Wilding Davison, whose protest at the 1913 Derby caused her tragic death, he’d accidentally exposed a huge void in popular awareness when it comes to 20th-century women’s history.
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3. The Militant Suffragettes by Antonia Raeburn (1974)
This was the first book I picked up on suffragettes and as an introduction to the violent and imaginative activities of the WSPU it’s brilliant. Anecdotes include that of Isabel Kelley - a daredevil who concealed herself on the roof of Dundee’s Kinnaird Hall for 17 hours before breaking in via scaffolding and a skylight - and the creation of an armed guard, wielding wooden clubs for protection of high-level WSPU speakers.
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5. Falling Angels by Tracy Chevalier (2001)
Chevalier’s 2001 novel introduces the work of the suffragettes as part of a wider exploration of the changing role of women at the turn of the 20th century. As the Victorian era segues into the Edwardian, isolated and unhappy Kitty Coleman, mother of Maude, is introduced to the WSPU. There is no romanticising of suffragette activities here. The book deals head-on with the the choice then facing women between dedicating their time to a noble cause and their conventional role as mothers. The result is heartbreaking.
Emmeline Pankhurst, being arrested at a Suffragette protest in May 1914. Emmeline Pankhurst, being arrested at a Suffragette protest in May 1914. Photograph: Topical Press Agency/Getty Images
Votes for Women: The Virago Book of Suffragettes, edited by Joyce Marlow (2001)
This huge collection of documents, speeches, journals, extracts from books and letters relating to the women’s movement is invaluable for history detectives. Highlights include a stiffly worded letter from a gentleman complaining to the home secretary about the lack of sanitary towels for suffragettes in Holloway (while avoiding using the phrase “sanitary towels”) and a Daily Express article about Miss Muriel Matters who took to a dirigible to drop paper bills on parliament in return for their “dropping” of the women’s suffrage bills. Also illuminating is the Women’s National Anti-Suffrage Manifesto, a reminder of how many women were against the suffrage cause.
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9. The Suffragettes in Pictures by Diane Atkinson (2010)
“Deeds not Words” was the WSPU motto, but when it comes to piecing together their history, former London Museum curator Diane Atkinson knows the value of pictures. Documenting the work that went on in and outside suffragette HQ, the book (one of many Atkinson has written on suffragettes) contains photographs of press-room activities, packed marches and welcoming parties for newly-released prisoners, as well as brutal accounts of the abuse of women on what came to be known as Black Friday.
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• The Hourglass Factory by Lucy Ribchester is published by Simon & Schuster, priced £7.99. Buy it from the Guardian bookshop for £6.39
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jan/07/top-10-books-suffragettes-lucy-ribchester
