A Century Of Female Revolution
From Peterloo To Parliament
Some of the marchers at the renowned Peterloo political demonstration on 16 August 1819 were wearing the long, straight empire-line dresses fashionable in the period. Such restrictive clothing hardly suggests that they were out to cause trouble for the Establishment, or that they anticipated having to run away from the sabre-wielding Yeomanry (who went on to kill and injure many). Fascinating details such as this encourage the reader of
A Century of Female Revolution to re-examine the arguments about the degree to which the crowd incited the massacre.
This is a refreshingly accessible history. The author consistently foregrounds women’s contribution to the debates on suffrage and rights for the working class, showing how these were always informed by the key aspects of 19thcentury politics: the Corn Laws, improvements in public health, the abolition of slavery and the slave trade, the rise of the labour movement, and much more.
The attainment of the vote for many British women just after the First World War did not arise from nowhere: it was the result of (at least) a century-long struggle. This history adroitly joins the dots between women’s less well-publicised sorties into politics – early Female Reform Societies, and contributions to the male- dominated Chartist and trade-union movements – and
better-known elements: the suffragettes, the work undertaken by women during the war, and female MPs in the House of Commons. Cooper explains how each foray by women into the enfranchisement debate helped shape the next, ensuring that the half of the population long deemed “too ruled by emotion and debilitated by menstruation and childbirth to be able to vote with a clear head” were eventually allowed to have their say.