ABSTRACT
In British history there are relatively few topics of broad interest which have not, at some time, been written upon. The militant campaign of the Women’s Social and Political Union is certainly no exception; women’s fight for the vote has been described in numerous autobiographies, in secondary accounts of a popular nature, and in general works on the history of the women’s suffrage movement as a whole. The most important of the autobiographies written by those who were active in the WSPU have been Annie Kenney’s Memories of a Militant (1924), E. Sylvia Pankhurst’s The Suffragette Movement (1951), Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence’s My Part in a Changing World (1958), Frederick William Pethick-Lawrence’s Fate Has Been Kind (1945), and Dame Christabel Pankhurst’s Unshackled (1959). * Without doubt, the most widely-read secondary account of the suffragettes has been that contained in George Dangerfield’s The Strange Death of Liberal England (1956). † A more recent but less penetrating account is Antonia Raeburn’s The Militant Suffragettes (1975). ‡ Finally, the standard works on the women’s suffrage movement as a whole – that is, general works describing the movement from its inception in 1867 to either 1914 or to the winning of the vote in 1918-have been Ray Strachey’s The Cause (1926), Roger Fulford’s Votes for Women (1957), and, more recently, Dr Constance Rover’s Women’s Suffrage and Party Politics in Britain, 1866–1914 (1967). §
