Coming to Terms with Women's Suffrage: The British Movement's Significance for Broader Social Change

Susan Pederson. Eleanor Rathbone and the Politics of Conscience. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004. ill.; 488 pp. ISBN 0300102453 (cl).

Laura E. Nym Mayhall. The Militant Suffrage Movement: Citizenship and Resistance in Britain, 1860–1930. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. 232 pp. ISBN 0195159934 (cl).

Just as Progressivism generally was a transatlantic phenomenon, so was the woman suffrage movement of the early twentieth century. International in scope and in their objectives, movement adherents hoped to make women citizens of the world as well as of their own countries. As Patricia Greenwood Harrison and Christine Bolt have documented, both the mainstream and militant wings of the modern movement for female enfranchisement cross-pollinated and sustained each other, particularly in the years leading up to World War I, even as they remained institutionally independent.¹ Two recent books on the British effort to enfranchise women point up the need for U.S. suffrage historians to consider the larger international scene in evaluating both suffrage efforts and their own use of terms to characterize them. Susan Pedersen's valuable biography Eleanor Rathbone and the Politics of Conscience and Laura E. Nym Mayhall's trenchant analysis of the strategy of defiance in The Militant Suffrage Movement: Citizenship and Resistance in Britain, 1860–1930 provide thoughtful examinations of early-twentieth-century British feminism and alternative lenses through which to view larger notions of maternalist state welfare, citizenship, and political culture.

After taking on the development of the British and French welfare states in her earlier work, Pedersen focuses her attention on one of the primary actors in this realm, Eleanor Rathbone.² Pedersen expertly leads us through the complex life of this feminist, social investigator, and politician, providing lush historical context along the way. Clearly, Pedersen identifies with this, until now, poorly understood reformer. That serves both as an advantage and as a problem for Pedersen's narrative. Rathbone, the daughter of wealthy parents in Liverpool, England, came of age at a time when single females could emerge from, as Jane Addams termed it, the "family claim" on unmarried daughters to become self-supporting individuals in their own right. Rathbone's father believed that the wealthy had a moral obligation to serve their communities and to contribute to the common good through philanthropy. Raised in this altruistic environment, Rathbone left home at age twenty-one to further pursue her education and found that the teachings of Somerville College reinforced this ethic of social responsibility. The school's intellectually rigorous program, which was based in classical studies, promoted the ideal of a socially engaged state that encouraged its citizens to actively participate in its construction and to perform voluntary acts of service.

Pedersen documents that Rathbone also acquired a second education at Somerville: one in "friendship and feminism" (49). For the first time, Rathbone found herself among women with similar interests and aspirations. She and several other young women formed a discussion group called the Associated Prigs and challenged each other's grasp of philosophical and practical social issues. Buttressed by her membership in a homosocial community that provided both emotional support and intellectual stimulation, Rathbone returned to Liverpool after her graduation to assist her father, upon his retirement as a member of Parliament, in his philanthropic endeavors. She became a volunteer "friendly visitor" with the Liverpool Central Relief Society (LCRS), both to provide direct service to its clients and to observe its delivery of services. Rathbone found that clients received only direct aid but no further intervention that might provide job training and other forms of assistance. Her report to the LCRS was well received and Rathbone set out to implement some of the reforms she had observed in London during her college years. These early years in benevolence activity had the effect of introducing her to the work of social investigation...