Key Books
The major resource on more than 800 individuals and local suffrage branches in Britain, which draws on local archives as well as national collections is:
The Women's Suffrage Movement: A Reference Guide, 1866-1928
by Elizabeth Crawford (Routledge, 2000)
'A landmark in the study of the women's movement. The book is at once an invaluable research tool and a source of fascinating information on its subject. Author and publisher are to be congratulated on its publication. – History Today
'A wonderful source for researchers and general readers alike. This is a book that you can consult with a purpose or browse through at random. It informs, but it also diverts.' – Financial Times
Elizabeth Crawford is also the author of an extensive survey of local and regional suffrage activity, listing keys events, activists and organisers in each region:
The Women's Suffrage Movement in Britain and Ireland
by Elizabeth Crawford (Routledge, 2008)
Other key studies with a regional focus include:
Rebel Girls: their fight for the vote
by Jill Liddington (Virago Press, 2006).
A close study of the local movement in Yorkshire in the later years of suffrage activism in the 1900s focusing on workers in the mills and clothing factories in towns like Huddersfield and Halifax and especially young women who got involved in the movement and often went to prison like Lilian Lenton, daughter of a Leicester. joiner who celebrated her 21st birthday by volunteering for window-breaking raids for the WSPU, Edith Key, Laura Wilson, a weaver from Halifax who told a reporter: 'I went to jail a rebel, but I have come out a regular terror' , Adela, the youngest of the Pankhurst sisters or Dora Thewlis, called by the Daily Mail 'the Baby Suffragette', who went to Holloway, aged 16.
‘Perhaps the first book to recognise that an entire generation of young women, born between 1881 and 1891, grew up with 'Votes for Women' ringing in their ears.’ (Alison Light, London Review of Books , Jan 2007)
One Hand Tied Behind Us: The Rise of the Women's Suffrage Movement
by Jill Liddington and Jill Norris (Virago Press, 1978)
Liddington and Norris uncovered a new group of 'radical suffragists', who lived and worked in Lancashire, the cradle of the movement in lthe North of England
Votes for Women: The Virago Book of Suffragettes
by Joyce Marlow
The Ascent of Woman: A History of the Suffragette Movement
by Melanie Phillips
The British Women's Suffrage Campaign: 1866-1928 (Seminar Studies In History)
by Prof Harold Smith
The Suffragettes -The Story of Emmeline Pankhurst
[DVD] [1994]
Votes for Women (Access to History)
by Paula Bartley
Votes for Women c.1900-28 (Modern World History for Edexcel)
by Malcolm Chandler