Hearts and Minds: The Untold Story of the Great Pilgrimage and How Women Won the Vote
( Doubleday, 400 pages, £20) We think that the story of women’s fight for the vote at the turn of the 20th century is familiar to us, but this thorough and entertaining history of the movement, released to mark the 100th anniversary of the Representation of the People Act, shows that there is much to discover.
For a start, there was an important difference between the suffragists – campaigners who believed in peaceful demonstration and persuasion – and the suffragettes, who were willing to use militant and criminal tactics to achieve their aims. The suffragists were frequently exasperated by the window-smashing and postboxburning of the suffragettes, believing that it damaged the cause while drawing all of the attention away from their reasoned arguments. In the summer of 1913, the suffragists organised the ‘great pilgrimage’ – a peaceful procession of women from all over the country to London – to demonstrate to the media that they were a separate movement with widespread public support.
Robinson dedicates three chapters to this extraordinary and forgotten event, bringing it to life thanks to extensive research among newspaper cuttings, diaries, letters and first-hand accounts. She uncovers many individual stories of the women, who defied the strict social restrictions of the time to march across the country by foot (although some had caravans or bicycles for part of the journey), both winning converts and facing down hostile crowds.
Elsewhere she provides a good general history of suffragism, although more information about women’s lives at the time, to give a sense of why they were driven to fight for the vote, would have been useful.
Hearts and Minds provides an important insight into how social change would have affected your Edwardian ancestors, and will inspire you to trace the suffragists and suffragettes in your own tree.