Overview

The Kenney family grew up in Saddleworth, outside Oldham, in the last decades of the nineteenth century. In 1905, three of the sisters met Christabel Pankhurst, a turning point which changed the rest of their lives. Annie Kenney became one of the leaders of the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU), Jessie was an organiser at the heart of the organisation, and Nell campaigned outside the capital. Caroline and Jane used their connections within the suffrage movement as the springboard for careers in innovative education on both sides of the Atlantic. While working-class women are increasingly acknowledged in histories of the WSPU, this study is the first to make them the primary focus, and, in doing so, it opens up a new conversation around sex, class, and politics, and how these categories interacted in this period. This is a study of the possibilities for, and experiences of, working-class women in the militant suffrage movement. It identifies why these women became politically active, their experiences as activists, and the benefits they gained from their political work. It stresses the need to see working-class women as significant actors and autonomous agents in the suffrage campaign. It shows why and how some women became politicised, why they prioritised the vote above all else, and how this campaign came to dominate their lives. It also places the suffrage campaign within the broader trajectory of their lives to stress how far the personal and political were intertwined for these women. Although this is a book about 'working-class suffragettes', Lyndsey Jenkins also reveals what it says about women as workers and teachers, religious believers and political thinkers, and friends and colleagues, as well as suffragettes. Above all, it is a study of sisterhood.

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9780192848802

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Reviews

I really enjoyed this collective longitudinal biographical study and refreshing approach to history. * Janette Martin, University of Manchester, Labour History Review *

Author Information

Lyndsey Jenkins is a historian of nineteenth and twentieth century Britain with a particular interest in gender, politics, and social change. She is currently a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Queen Mary, University of London. Her doctoral research was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and undertaken at Wolfson College, Oxford. She holds degrees from the University of Warwick, the London School of Economics and Political Science, and the University of East Anglia. She has taught at Mansfield, Magdalen and St John's Colleges, Oxford, as well as the University of Reading, King's College, London, and Queen Mary. She was a civil servant for ten years, and spent most of that time as a government speechwriter, working for cabinet ministers on issues relating to education, housing, and local government.

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