Women Against the Vote

British women who resisted their own enfranchisement were ridiculed by the suffragists and have since been neglected by historians. Yet these women, together with the millions whose indifference reinforced the opposition case, claimed to form a majority of the female public on the eve of the First World War. By 1914 the organised 'antis' rivalled the suffragists in numbers, though not in terms of publicity-seeking activism. The National League for Opposing WomanSuffrage was dominated by the self-consciously masculine leadership of Lord Cromer and Lord Curzon, but also heavily dependent upon an impressive cadre of women leaders and a mostly female membership. Women Against the Vote looks at three overlapping groups of women: maternal reformers, women writers and imperialist ladies. These women are then followed into action as campaigners in their own right, as well as supporters of anti-suffrage men. Collaboration between the sexes was not always straightforward, even within a movement dedicated to separate and complementary gender roles. As the anti-suffrage women pursued their own varied social and political agendas, they demonstratedtheir affinity with the mainstream social conservatism of the British women's movement. The rediscovered history of female anti-suffragism provides new perspectives on the campaigns both for and against the vote. It also makes an important contribution to the wider history of women's social and politicalactivism in late nineteenth century and early twentieth century Britain.

...an important contribution to the still woefully under-researched history of female conservatism. It provides fascinating insights into the continuities between pre-war anti-suffrage conservatism, and the flowering of non-party, female associational culture between the wars., Julia Bush has produced a rich, wide-ranging and provocative account of the involvement of women in British anti-suffragism...Bush offers an ambitious account of the nature of the conservative gender ideals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries...This book offers an important contribution to the rethinking of conservative values in the women's movement and in British life more generally., Women against the Vote is an illuminating, well-crafted study that restores to history the conservative dimensions of female political activism in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain. It also reveals fascinating threads between opponents and supporters of female suffrage in all their complexity., The personnel, organization and attitudes of the 'Antis' are fully and sensitively explored by Julia Bush...[with] sober and careful analysis, Julia Bush has written this book to restore the anti-suffragists to the mainstream of women's history. Suffragists and anti-suffragists, she argues, share considerable 'common ground'

Julia Bush is Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at University of Northampton.