The Women's Suffrage Movement in Britain and Ireland: A Regional Survey (review)

The breadth and depth of Elizabeth Crawford's knowledge of the women's suffrage movement is remarkable. Best known for The Women's Suffrage Movement: A Reference Guide 1866–1928 (1999)—now indispensable for suffrage researchers—she has now produced a new encyclopedic reference work that provides a much-needed "geographical dimension" to the suffrage campaign. The Women's Suffrage Movement in Britain and Ireland: A Regional Survey attempts to duplicate her earlier success and will, no doubt, prove itself essential for any solid research collection in modern British history. Yet, by comparison with the earlier book, which is well organized and impressively comprehensive, providing quick sketches of suffrage activists and societies, this companion volume is more cumbersome to use.

A guide to suffrage history organized by regions and counties is a marvelous idea. While some focused regional studies have recently appeared (see for example, Krista Cowman, "Mrs. Brown is a Man and a Brother!" Women in Merseyside's Political Organisations, 1890–1920 [2004]; Jill Liddington, Rebel Girls [2006]; and Cliona Murphy, The Women's Suffrage Movement and Irish Society in the Early Twentieth Century [1989]), most suffrage scholarship neglects regional and geographical categories of analysis and continues to focus on activity in and around London. As this volume makes abundantly clear, local economies and regional cultures shaped the movement in distinctive and unpredictable ways.

Thoroughly challenging the notion that "little happened outside the capital," Crawford begins her tour of England with the Northwest and ends in the Southeast, then moving on to Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. Along the way, we encounter a staggering amount of detail. For each of the thirteen regional sections, Crawford provides meticulous accounts of the activists, petitions, organizations, and major events pertaining to each county. We encounter all kinds of interesting nuggets: for example, Irish women were among the earliest advocates of suffrage, the Isle of Man granted women the right to vote in 1880, and the most spectacular fire attributed to the suffragettes took place at the Bath Hotel at Felixstowe in April 1914. Specialists will surely find much to explore here, as Crawford has tracked down what seems to be every meeting, speaker, and petition ever advanced on behalf of women's suffrage from Cornwall to the Orkneys.

Interesting patterns emerge from the material, to which Crawford draws our attention in a short, but helpful conclusion. Perhaps most intriguing, in light of the anti-suffrage reputation of many male politicians in the 1910s, is the extensive support given to the movement by the men of Britain's provincial towns. Clergy, small businessmen, and town councilors joined suffrage lecturers on the platforms, often playing leading roles in the organization of new societies. Their motivations are worthy of more follow-up research. Another surprise is the social inclusivity of the early movement. In 1872 the London National Society launched a campaign focused mainly on working-class women, sending suffrage lecturers to speak with the female students at the St. Andrews School Room in the Commercial Road. Elsewhere, suffragists not only lectured at working women, but actively included them in the campaign. In Batley, south of Leeds, Alice Scatcherd and Jessie Craigen drew hundreds of working women to their cottage meetings and grand demonstrations in the 1870s and 1880s. Another notable pattern is the overlap between those who supported suffrage and those who joined local temperance and anti-Contagious Diseases campaigns.

The style and organization of the entries, however, is not always accessible and engaging. The majority simply plod through a list of meetings and petitions, without much editorial comment, analysis, or indication of the relative importance. Occasionally, Crawford includes tidbits of information on specific regional characteristics, such as economic diversity, social landscape, or religious geography, but such details are scarce and not well-integrated into the narrative. Researchers looking for a particular town or organization will have to read carefully—references do not immediately jump off the...