ABSTRACT
This article focuses on the provincial aspects of the Edwardian women’s suffrage campaign in Nottingham, a city in the East Midlands, UK. The article explores writing about suffrage life in a range of formats—biography, journals, letters and archived materials, including notes of speeches—in respect of local activists—the suffragette Helen Watts, the Women’s Social and Political Union organizer in Nottingham, Nellie Crocker and the suffragists Alice and Helena Dowson. Three distinctive pieces of writing have been selected. These include the speeches of Helen Watts; the diaries of Alice Dowson related by her granddaughter, Alix Meynell, which are presented as a biography entitled What Grandmother Said (1998); and the autobiographical writings of Nellie Crocker, entitled “Incidents in the Women’s Suffrage Campaign”, which she submitted to Girton College, Cambridge, in 1949. This personal testimony is important not only to aid understanding of the extent of the campaign for the vote in Nottingham, previously undocumented, but also for highlighting the interconnections between the protagonists under discussion and the wider suffrage movement during the period 1907–12.
