Creating the ‘suffragette spirit’: British feminism and the historical imagination ¹

Abstract

Abstract Recent work on the militant suffrage movement in Britain suggests that the Edwardian ‘Votes for Women’ campaign promoted in its participants a common identity forged through the experiences of the suffragette hunger strike and forcible feeding. Critical scrutiny of the texts upon which these analyses are based, however, reveals a more complex relationship between suffragettes' experiences and their representations of the same. In the 1920s and 1930s, a small group of former suffragettes created a highly stylized story of their participation in the Edwardian suffrage campaign that equated militancy with service to the nation during the First World War. While this story drew upon earlier representations of women's martyrdom and passivity, it more consistently promoted the agency and comradeship of women in the movement. This aspect of the narration of the subject of suffrage has played a significant, yet unexamined, role in the self-fashioning of British and American feminist scholars since the 1970s.