Separate Spheres – the Labour Movement and the Women’s Suffrage Movement

2017 ◽  
pp. 5-19
2007 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hilda Kean

In this article I consider the ways in which activists in the British suffrage movement became the public historians of their own pasts. I analyse the different forms in which the history of suffrage feminism was created and the ways in which it both drew upon former traditions of the labour movement and conventions of public memorialisation. I consider the ways in which the Australian suffrage campaign has been memorialised and differences between this and the British position. I raise a number of questions about ways in which public historians might explore the creation of collective histories and the role of individuals within that process arising from this initial comparative analysis.


Author(s):  
Ben Epstein

This chapter explores communication innovations made by American social movements over time. These movements share political communication goals and outsider status, which helps to connect innovation decisions across movements and across time. The chapter primarily explores two long-lasting movements. First is the women’s suffrage movement, which lasted over seventy years of the print era from the mid-nineteenth century until the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. Next is the long-lasting fight against racial discrimination, which led to the modern civil rights movement starting in the print era, but coming of age along with television during the 1950s and 1960s. Both the women’s suffrage movement and civil rights movement utilized innovative tactics with similarly mild results until mainstream coverage improved. Finally, these historical movements are compared with movements emerging during the internet era, including the early Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, and the Resist movement.


Author(s):  
Christopher Grasso

After serving in Congress, Kelso resolved to open his own academy in Springfield. He supported the women’s suffrage movement in town. But he had borrowed heavily to build a large school building, and when few students enrolled, he was financially ruined. He ran for Congress again in 1868, but in a bitter campaign focused on monetary policy and filled with dirty tricks, he floundered and was badly beaten by his old nemesis, Pony Boyd. All of this only added to the strain of his marriage, already plagued by sexual problems and mutual jealousies. Kelso’s great tragedy, however, was not financial, political, or marital. In early September, 1870, his five-year-old son died suddenly from tetanus after stepping on a rusty rake. Only two weeks later, his fourteen-year-old son committed suicide. Kelso was shattered. The following year, his marriage in ruins, he took his eldest daughter Florella and headed west.


2019 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 299-320 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Pedersen

Abstract Given on the centenary of women's suffrage, this lecture explores the tensions and conflicts the claim for the vote raised among elite women already enmeshed in parliamentary and political circles. Drawing on the unbuttoned and sometimes angry correspondence among A.J. Balfour's suffragist sisters-in-law Lady Frances Balfour and Lady Betty Balfour, Frances' collaborator (and suffragist leader) Millicent Fawcett, Lady Betty's militant suffragette sister Lady Constance Lytton, and their old friend (and wife of the anti-suffragist Prime Minister) Margot Asquith, it explores the appeal but also the costs of this democratic claim for such “incorporated” women - and explains why some nevertheless supported it.


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