Repudiating women’s traditional subservience to man, the Suffragette’s embodied an alternative female, one with the courage to confront the patriarchal society, and the resilience to endure the repercussions. In the radical pursuit for the parliamentary vote, the Suffragette Movement is often regarded as a single-issue campaign. However, the subversion of gender roles expedited by the use of militancy fuelled a revolution on a grander scale. One which moved beyond the exterior mask for the pursuit of the Vote, towards a dissipation of conventional Victorian ideals of femininity. The term ‘Suffragette’ was coined in 1903, as Emmeline Pankhurst led a movement that has often been interpreted as a ‘sex war’. Such can also be said for the divisive …show more content…
Indeed, the political and personal context of each historian may determine their representation of the Suffragette’s more so than their gender. Hence, to accurately answer this question, I will explore the dynamics between gender and context to discern both the similarities and differences that exist between male and female renditions. In the first chapter, I will be conducting a close analysis of Sylvia Pankhurst’s 1931 autobiography, ‘The Suffragette Movement’, and George Dangerfield’s 1935 novel, ‘The Strange Death of Liberal England’ as the foundational texts of Suffragette historiography, in creating an archetype that filtered through generations of historians. The minor impact of gender upon their history is revealed through the parallels that transpire between each text in spite of their differing genders. The second chapter will examine the reverberations of this archetype through a myriad of predominantly male historians between the 1950s-70s. The revival of the feminist consciousness prompted by second wave feminism arguably provokes the subsequent ‘masculinist’