Women's Suffrage Literature

Women's Suffrage Literature is a new Major Work from Routledge and Edition Synapse. It makes available in facsimile key texts which represent the wealth of creative writing that emerged around the issue of women’s suffrage in the early twentieth century. The collection includes five significant novels, a wide range of drama and representative short stories. Selected in order to illustrate the diversity of concerns and positions with the campaign for women's suffrage, the texts also reflect the different literary models adopted. They cover a range of key moments within and after the campaign for the vote, revealing changes in perspective and tactics between 1907 and 1924. The selected texts problematize categories such as pro- and anti-suffrage writing, reveal the complex relationship between definitions of a 'feminist' and a 'suffrage' text and raise questions about critical approaches to such politicized writings.

The collection is organized so as to provide some historical coverage of this key period; to allow comparative analysis of different genres; and to demonstrate the variety of concerns and discourses which defined this campaign. It has been edited by a team of academics with long experience of researching and teaching in the field of women's suffrage.