Suffrage and beyond: international feminist perspectives

Caroline Daley and Melanie Nolan

In 1892 New Zealand was the first self-governing country in the world in which women gained the right to vote. The suffrage was also achieved before 1900 in parts of Australia and the United States; but in some countries the struggle for this fundamental right of citizenship was long and protracted. In this important book leading women's historians discuss suffrage movements in an international context and over a century-long history; they address their leadership and their strategies, their language and their ideas, their consequences and their implications. Influences and connections are seen to be at least as important as difference and diversity. Mrs Mary Leavitt travelled the world spreading the Women's Christian Temperance Union and its suffrage message and linking women from the United States to Japan and the Antipodes; but at the same time the peculiar circusmtances of South American suffragists, for example, contrast markedly with those of nineteenth-century British promoters of the vote for women.

The material presented here, often closely researched in newly discovered sources, is rich with possibilities for comparison and analogy; and it gains too from an awareness of other such struggles, especially those of indigenous people. While the study of women's suffrage has for a number of reasons been hitherto neglected by feminists historians, the authors of Suffrage and Beyond, by facing the complex positions which suffrages occupied and by exploring in detail the contexts within which they worked, convincingly reveal its value and importance.