Women And Power: The Struggle for Suffrage

I’m delighted to announce that the book Women and Power: The Struggle for Suffrage has been published by the National Trust. It’s available at a National Trust property near you, via The History Press/Amazon, and via the National Trust catalogue.

I co-wrote the book with the brilliant Rachael Lennon. Our foreword was by Laura Bates, founder of the Everyday Sexism project. The book is based on research I did as academic lead on the Trust’s Women and Power project for 2018.

Here’s some blurb:

Celebrating a year of ‘Women & Power’ programmes throughout the Trust, this book explores the roles of National Trust places in the women’s suffrage movement, through the people who lived and worked in them – from the Midlands kitchen-maid turned suffragette arsonist to the aristocratic dynasties split by a daughter’s campaigning. As well as offering a broad history of the Suffrage movement, readers will discover some of the debates heard in the drawing rooms, kitchens and bedrooms of National Trust places as the country fought over whether, and how, a woman might have a voice in public life. We continue to see the footprints of this intensely political argument in the places and collections cared for by the Trust across England, Wales and Northern Ireland.

Working on this book was a joy, and the end result is – thanks to the Trust’s art researchers, and our great editor, Claire Masset – a beautiful thing.

Read the book? Visited a National Trust property alongside it? Thrilled or outraged about the amount of suffrage and feminist history on display? Let me know.