Suffrage Days: Stories from the Women's Suffrage Movement

Suffrage Days: Stories from the Women's Suffrage Movement, by Sandra Stanley Holton; pp. xiv + 309. London and New York: Routledge, 1996, 50.00, 16.99 paper, ;65.00, $24.95 paper.

A handful of books and articles have appeared in the past several years which open up innovative new lines of research on the women's suffrage movement in Britain. Ranging in focus from men's support for women's suffrage ( The Men's Share?, edited by Angela V. John and Claire Eustance [1997]) to the cultural production of militancy (Wisps of Violence, by Eileen Sypher [1993]), scholars of the suffrage movement are engaging ever more interesting interpretive frameworks to interrogate this familiar topic. Sandra Stanley Holton's work has been invaluable to these ongoing discussions, and her new book, Suffrage Days, is another welcome contribution. While not quite as provocative as some of her previous work (especially her 1994 article in the American Histocal Review), it makes accessible a wealth of new information and demonstrates that there are still fruitful lines of investigation for this important topic.

Holton's purpose is to reconstruct "stories that have become largely hidden in the patterns formed by previous history-making" (2), as well as to challenge the existing narratives of suffrage history between the 1860s and 1920. In keeping with her goals, Holton has adopted a hybrid methodology. At the core, her book is a collective biography of seven individuals whose contributions to the movement have been neglected: Elizabeth Wolstenholme, Jessie Craigen, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Hannah Mitchell, Mary Gawthorpe, Laurence Housman, and Alice Clark. Drawing on their autobiographical...