All Those Revolting Women !

 

My review of A Century of Female Revolution: From Peterloo to Parliament, by Glynnis Cooper, (Pen and Sword Books, 2020).

This review first appeared in Who Do You Think You Are ? Magazine.

Review by Ruth A Symes

On August 16^th 1819, some of the marchers at the renowned political demonstration in St Peter’s Fields, Manchester, were wearing the long straight Empire-line dresses fashionable in the period. Such restrictive clothing hardly suggests that they were out to cause trouble for the Establishment, or that they anticipated having to run away from the sabre-wielding Yeomanry (who went on to kill and injure many) that afternoon.  Fascinating ‘feminine’ details such as this, encourage the reader to re-examine the arguments about the degree to which the crowd incited the ‘massacre’ of Peterloo.

This is a refreshingly accessible history. Cooper consistently foregrounds women’s contribution to the debates on enfranchisement, showing how these were always informed by the ‘key’ aspects of nineteenth-century politics: the Corn Laws, the shifts of power between Tories and Whigs, improvements in public health, the abolition of slavery and the slave trade, the rise of the Labour Movement and much more.  

The attainment of the vote for (many but not all) British women just after the First World War did not arise from nowhere: it was the result of (at least) a century-long struggle. This history adroitly joins the dots between women’s less well-publicised sorties into politics (early Female Reform Societies, and contributions to the male-dominated Chartist and Trade Union movements), and better-known elements (the Suffragettes, the work undertaken by women in the War, female MPs in the House of Commons).  It is satisfying to understand how each foray by women into the enfranchisement debate helped shape the next, ensuring, that that half of the population long deemed ‘too ruled by emotion and debilitated by menstruation and childbirth to be able to vote with a clear head,’ were eventually allowed to have their say.

women's history, women, history, genealogy, women and politics, representation, suffrage, suffragettes, females, feminist, revolution, riots, uprisings