Women’s Suffrage in Word, Image, Music, Stage and Screen: The Making of a Movement

This collection of essays explores the myriad ways in which the women’s suffrage movement in Britain in the nineteenth century and twentieth century engaged with and was expressed through literature, art and craft, music, drama and cinema.

Uniquely, this anthology places developments in the constituent arts side by side, and in dialogue, rather than focusing on a single field in isolation. In so doing, it illustrates how creative endeavours in different artforms converged in support of women’s suffrage. Topics encompassed range from the artistic output of such household names as Sylvia Pankhurst and Ethel Smyth, to the recent feature film Suffragette. It also brings to light under-represented figures and neglected works related to the suffrage movement. A wide variety of material is explored, from poems, diaries and newspapers to posters, dress and artefacts to songs, opera, plays and film.

Published in the wake of the centenary of many women receiving the parliamentary vote in the UK, this book will appeal to scholars, undergraduate and graduate students, and members of the public interested in the broad areas of women’s history and the women’s suffrage movement, as well as across the arts disciplines.

Christopher Wiley is Senior Lecturer in Music at the University of Surrey, UK. He is the author of many journal articles and book chapters, and the co-editor of volumes including Researching and Writing on Contemporary Art and Artists (2020), Transnational Perspectives on Artists’ Lives (2020), Writing About Contemporary Musicians (2021) and The Routledge Companion to Autoethnography and Self-Reflexivity in Music Studies (2021).

Lucy Ella Rose is Lecturer in Victorian Literature at the University of Surrey, UK. She is the author of the book Suffragist Artists in Partnership: Gender, Word and Image (2018), and her work focuses on neglected women in nineteenth-century creative partnerships. She presents and publishes on Victorian literature, art, culture and feminisms, and is currently working on feminist networks at the fin de siècle.