The Women's Suffrage Movement in Wales, 1866-1928

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An organized women's suffrage movement operated continuously in Britain for more than sixty years, from the mid 1860s until the achievement of equal voting rights with men in 1928. In the decade prior to the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, both militant suffragettes and law-abiding suffragists ensured that the issue came to the forefront of British politics. This book presents a comprehensive investigation of the movement in Wales, which participated in the agitation throughout the whole of the period.

Grounded in primary research of extensive archival material, The Women's Suffrage Movement in Wales assesses the impact of all the various campaigning organizations, highlighting the role of the many hugely committed but unsung individuals on whom local impact was dependent, and accounting for the stances adopted by various politicians as well as parliamentary developments. The book covers the dramatic and sensational actions of the suffragettes in Wales (including several of the most widely publicized clashes between demonstrators and authority outside London), and the more mundane work undertaken by the vast majority of campaigners across the decades with due consideration of the arguments and organized resistance of the opponents of women's suffrage. This is a study that focuses on the survival of the campaign in the face of wartime difficulties, detailing the much-neglected last decade of the campaign, between the granting of partial enfranchisement in 1918 and the triumph of equal franchise in 1928.

Reviews

'The publication of this pioneering volume undoubtedly represents a real breakthrough in the historiography of modern Wales. It also presents the Welsh dimension of a central theme in British history.' J. Graham Jones, Morgannwg. June Purvis, professor of women's and gender history, University of Portsmouth, is reading Ryland Wallace's The Women's Suffrage Movement in Wales 1866-1928 (University of Wales Press, 2009). "This lucidly written book offers the first comprehensive coverage of the women's suffrage agitation in Victorian Wales until the granting of equal voting rights in 1928. Drawing on extensive primary sources, it has chapters on the Women's Social and Political Union, the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies, the Women's Freedom League, the impact of the Great War and the campaign for equal suffrage. An invaluable read for all suffrage scholars." Times Higher Education "This book, claiming to be the first comprehensive study of this movement inWales, records the names of committed but lesser-known individuals, covering not only the sensational actions carried out by suffragettes in Wales but also the more mundane day-to-day campaigns for equal democratic rights for women and men." Internatonal Review of Social History

Author Bio

Ryland Wallace is a lecturer in History at Coleg Gwent, Pontypool. He has written one previous volume in this series, 'Organize! Organize! Organize!': A Study of Reform Agitations in Wales, 1840-1886, published in 1991.