In 1928, in the preface to her history of the British women’s movement,The Cause, Ray Strachey observed that

The sudden development of the personal, legal, political and social liberties of half the population of Great Britain within the space of eighty years… [has meant that] the true history of the Women’s Movement is the whole history of the nineteenth century: nothing which occurred in those years could be irrelevant to the great social change which was going on.¹

Twentieth-century historiography shows Strachey’s enthusiasm to have been somewhat misplaced. Early participatory accounts of women’s part in achieving these liberties were...

‘Merseyside’ is a recent conception, a product of 1970s local government reorganisation. At the start of the nineteenth century the area covered by today’s county boundaries belonged to south-west Lancashire and northwest Cheshire, two counties separated by the River Mersey. Yet a definite sense of ‘Merseyside’ is discernible in the 1890s, and the term itself was in common use after the First World War.¹ A sense of corporate identity emerged among the inhabitants of the Lancashire and Cheshire banks of the Mersey, helped by demographic relocations of the later nineteenth century, when wealthy individuals left the urban centre for the...

The final decade of the nineteenth century witnessed two important developments in attitudes towards the organisation of working-class women. The rise of New Unionism among unskilled and casual workers brought many women into trade unions where they received their first taste of public work.² In unions they united with other working-class women but often found that their first battles were fought not against capitalist employers but against male trade unionists fearful of the whole idea of women’s employment.³ Simultaneously, increasing public concern about sweated female labour encouraged many upper- and middle-class feminists to act to improve the lot of working...

By the end of the nineteenth century, the political party was an important site for women.¹ Liberals and Conservatives alike had been forced to reconstruct their organisations’ appeal in the face of a rapidly expanding electorate. Both realised the potential of women campaigners and began to formalise female space within their ranks.² Simultaneously socialist parties were forming, influenced by ideologies that radically challenged existing orders of class and gender. From the outset they gave women and men equal membership rights. In Liverpool, women found that party politics now offered accessible routes to public activity. The local Liberal and Conservative parties...

By the turn of the century, women’s parliamentary enfranchisement had become a ubiquitous issue. It was one that all politically active women had to face, regardless of their personal party affiliation. In local government and within trade unions women had implemented parliamentary legislation devised by men, or patiently lobbied the men who were able to alter it. Beyond the municipal arena they had campaigned and canvassed to elect men to parliament. The increasing prominence of suffrage campaigns threw into stark relief many of the circles that loyal party women were trying to square. These campaigns questioned women’s very presence in...

Early interest in suffrage on Merseyside coincided with the growth of socialism. In April 1905, both collided at the annual general meeting of the LWSS when an argument about organisation developed. Although the society was attracting attention, it had made no effort to extend its committee or alter its working practices. Concerned with the limitations of this approach, two socialist supporters brought an amendment to the AGM suggesting that, instead of automatically re-electing the committee en bloc, there ought to be a ballot of members. Mr Buxton, the proposer, explained that wholesale re-election was

calculated to deprive the members of...

Both the constitutional campaigns of the LWSS and the flamboyance of the WSPU demonstrate the richness of suffrage politics, as practised at a local level. They also emphasise that suffrage was not just a campaign for the vote but a catalyst that politicised Edwardian women and drew them into the public arena. There was a steady entry of women into public political life on Merseyside as the suffrage campaign progressed. Women directed their suffrage activity not only through the WSPU and LWSS but also into a myriad of smaller groups dedicated to the issue. Some of these formed from splits...

The campaign for parliamentary suffrage provided local Conservative women with the organisational base that the Primrose League had failed to deliver. It also had far-reaching effects on the local political development of the Liberal and socialist parties. For women who continued to work within parties there were difficult and painful choices between their personal wish for the vote, the official attitudes of their parties towards the question, and the perceived political opportunities that their parties continued to offer them. The WLF eventually split over the Liberal government’s repeated attempts to avoid the issue in Parliament, while socialist women attracted to...

Previous chapters have ended abruptly with the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914. This break is unavoidable. The social effects of the war cannot be denied, especially within a port city. Liverpool’s docks saw their share in national imports rise from 25 per cent in the three years before the war to 33 per cent between 1915 and 1920.¹ Thousands of troops poured into camps near the port, raising concerns for the virtue of local girls, and murmurs of the need for a new Contagious Diseases Act. There were demographic changes too. Thousands left the city to...

By 1920, Merseyside women had seen their situation and their region undergo several permanent changes. Geographical expansion had brought new districts to the east and west into the city boundaries, while cross-river transport continued to open up the Wirral. The local political map had also altered. In 1918 the extension of the parliamentary franchise to all men and most women over 30 quadrupled the electorate to 344, 816.¹ There were also more subtle alterations. Many of the ‘old families’ who dominated the political and social circles of pre-war Merseyside found that heavy taxes and changing social mores altered their position....