1. Parts of this article have been presented at meetings of the North American Conference on British Studies, in March and October, 1992. It has benefitted from the comments of Antoinette Burton, Michael Dunn, Ian Fletcher, Larry Joseph, Susan Kingsley Kent, Mary Sheila MacMahon, Robyn Muncy, Paul Seaver, Harold L. Smith, Chris Waters, and Richard Wetzell. I would also like to thank David Doughan and Susan Cross of the Fawcett Library, and Diane Atkinson of the Museum of London, for their invaluable assistance in completing this work
2. PankhurstRita‘Introduction’ to the 1987 Cresset Library edition of Unshackled: the story of how we won the vote PankhurstChristabel(1959)HutchinsonLondon1959While published after Christabel Pankhurst's death in 1958, the manuscript for what would become Unshackled was written much earlier, probably in the 1930s, as noted by Pethick-Lawrence in his introduction to the 1959 edition. I am following the established usage of referring to members of militant organizations such as the women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) and the women's Freedom League (WPL) as suffragettes, and members of the constitutional National Union of women's Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) as suffragists. However, suffragists is also used here when referring to all those engaged in political activism directed at gaining the parliamentary franchise for women in Britain
3. Many scholars have come to take the WSPU as emblematic of woman suffragists; for example, seeLongenbachJamesThe men and women of 1914 Arms and the Woman CooperMHMunichAASquierMSUniversity of North Carolina PressChapel Hill and London198997124
4. For example,HirshfieldClareA fractured faith: Liberal Party women and the suffrage issue in Britain 1892-1914 Gender and History 19902194LyonJanetMilitant discourse, strange bedfellows: suffragettes and vorticists before the war, differences 19924100133FowlerRowenaWhy did suffragettes attack works of art? Journal of women's History 19912110125Two studies that carefully document the existence of multiple perspectives on militancy within the pre-war movement are Liz Stanley with Ann Morley (1988) The Life and Death of Emily Wilding Davison (London: The women's Press), and Sandra Stanley Holton (1986) Feminism and Democracy: women's suffrage and reform politics inBritain, 1900-1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)
5. In 1936, Eleanor Rathbone, president of the National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship (formerly NUWSS), speculated that “sensational methods always impress the popular imagination more than those which are quieter”. SeeRathboneChanges in public life Our Freedom and its Results StracheyRayThe Hogarth PressLondon193624The most thorough exploration of the WSPU's monopoly on the historical imagination occurs across the corpus of historian Brian Harrison's work on the suffrage movement. These include (1982) The act of militancy: violence and the suffragettes, 1904-1914, inHarrisonB Peaceable Kingdom: stability and change in modern Britain Clarendon PressOxford19832681women's suffrage at Westminster, in High and Low Politics in Modern Britain BentleyMichaelStevensonJohn Clarendon PressOxford1987 Prudent Revolutionaries: portraits of British feminists between the wars Oxford University PressOxford While Harrison can and should be criticized for excessively lauding the political ‘prudence’ of certain feminist activists, his work has stood virtually alone in its willingness to evaluate critically suffragettes' post-war self-memorialization. A recent and notable engagement with suffragettes' uses of the past is Hilda Kean (1994) Searching for the past in present defeat: the construction of historical and political identity in British feminism in the 1920s and 1030s, women's History Review, 3, pp. 57-80