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“My Part in a Changing World”: Women’s Struggle for the Vote and the Autobiographical Subject

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posted on 2023-08-30, 15:51 authored by Maroula Joannou
This essay is concerned with some 20 autobiographies by participants in the women’s suffrage movement with differing backgrounds and beliefs. Their writings reveal similarities and differences between autobiographical subjects. The author addresses the importance that some autobiographers attached to pain, the problems attendant on its representation, and their determination to make women’s pain count politically. The autobiographical accounts of Helena Swanwick, Millicent Garrett Fawcett, Edith Picton-Turbevill and other suffragists are contrasted to the suffragette autobiographies of Emmeline Pankhurst and her supporters, with their emphasis on law-breaking, imprisonment and patriotic support for the war effort. The struggle for the vote was the apogee of some women’s lives, while for others a mere stepping stone; their life achievements lay elsewhere—in the peace movement, the theatre, social reform, music, religion, the police service or journalism. However, the autobiographical subjects look back on the excitement of the suffrage struggles as life-changing—the crucible in which their subsequent political understanding was shaped. In paying critical attention to the writings of militant and non-militant, Christian and secularist, socialist and fascist alike, the author shows how these autobiographies create a variegated, complex and diverse picture of the “cause”, its fault lines and its supporters.

History

Refereed

  • Yes

Volume

25

Issue number

3

Page range

294-313

Publication title

Women's Writing

ISSN

1747-5848

Publisher

Taylor & Francis

File version

  • Accepted version

Language

  • eng

Legacy posted date

2018-11-26

Legacy creation date

2018-11-27

Legacy Faculty/School/Department

ARCHIVED Faculty of Arts, Law & Social Sciences (until September 2018)

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