This is an ambitious book. It attempts to foreground campaigning women activists, both working-class and middle-class, in the narrative about the struggle for workers’ and women’s rights in the long nineteenth century: a story which is usually seen through a masculine lens.It is ambitious, because the story necessarily needs to cover a great deal of political and legal ground. It is ambitious because it tries, with some success, to highlight, detail and describe the role of individual women and their commitment and passion for the ‘Cause.’
However, there is a sense that it may be over-ambitious, because the scope of the content leads occasionally to an oversimplification of a complicated and intricate history.
Nevertheless, Glynis Cooper has written an accessible and readable book about the Peterloo effect on the political landscape of the nineteenth century, and how that infamous massacre in Manchester in 1819 lit the fuse for ordinary working women’s fight for the Vote. She writes confidently about the Chartists and the ongoing struggle with ‘progressive’ men to recognise women as political agents. She leads the reader through the complicated political terrain of the mid 19th century and the endless wranglings over granting suffrage to women. The later chapters which cover the story of the suffrage movement are written competently, although there are some lazy editorial mistakes – mistaking the socialist Margaret McDonald for the trade unionist Mary McArthur (p.121) for instance.
The pen portraits of some of the leading campaigning women over the century, are thought-provoking. Although more could have been made of some of the radical networks between women trade unionists, socialists and suffrage women, for instance, while more could have been made of the geographical and neighbourhood links between some of the Chartist women, and perhaps between the Peterloo veterans as well. These nicely constructed details about individual women are really important, both to give the reader a sense of the ‘ordinary’ activist and also to create a sense of the ways in which political/feminist campaigns were organised, although some of these details could have been explored in more depth to make the point more explicit. While there is no doubt that the Peterloo story is fundamental both to the story of the political changes that happened after 1819 and to highlighting a key moment in the story of women’s rights in Britain, the constant references to the Peterloo story throughout the book, tends to obscure the importance of the other political movements covered in other chapters. Nonetheless, the book offers the general reader a useful summary of the complex history of the struggle for the Vote. It is written with a justified sense of outrage at the persistence of institutionalised sexism, recognising the continuing injustices and prejudices of the British class system, demeaning and patronising the working class, and women in particular. Women still have a long way to go politically, but this book offers a good, if basic, grounding in recent feminist history.
Alison Ronan