Available in paperback for the first time, this important collection of essays illustrates the complexity, richness and diversity of the suffrage movement.

Combining historical reappraisal with lively accounts of the culture of the women’s suffrage movement, this volume offers a unique focus. It includes studies of the fascinating, but neglected groups that participated in the campaign: the Women’s Franchise League; the Women’s Freedom League; the Women’s Tax Resistance League and the United Suffragists. This is accompanied by feminist research on the poetry, fiction and drama that emerged from women’s struggle for the vote. In addition there are reappraisals of two leading figures in the Pankhursts’ Women’s Social and Political Union, an illuminating analysis of the relationship between suffrage and sexuality, and a discussion of what happened away from the metropolis, as well as of the little known campaign to extend the vote after 1918.

Maroula Joannou is Senior Lecturer in English at Anglia Ruskin University. June Purvis is Professor of Women's & Gender History at Portsmouth University and Editor of Women's History Review