Watching Women: Militant Suffragists Write the British Surveillance State, 1905-1924

by Stephanie Brown

Overview

Historians of the early twentieth century often focus on the surveillance of anarchist, communist, and anti-colonial movements, overlooking the resource-intensive policing of the women’s suffrage movement as a significant expansion of the state’s surveillance activities. Bridging that gap in the historical record, Watching Women draws on recently declassified Home Office documents to present a fuller picture of the British domestic surveillance practices.

The book maps the history of state surveillance of the British women’s suffrage movement and its leaders, explaining how militant activists used various forms of writing – novels, short stories, journalism, and memoirs – to represent and resist state surveillance. These genres in the book enable specific, strategic responses to the state’s repression of suffrage militancy. The book explores the aftermath of suffrage surveillance by tracing the diverging activist careers of two prominent suffragettes, Sylvia Pankhurst and Mary Allen, during and after World War I, as they continued their engagement with the state’s surveillance apparatuses. In doing so, Watching Women illuminates histories of the suffrage campaign through women’s experiences of navigating surveillance.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781487555641
Publisher:	University of Toronto Press
Publication date:	08/15/2024
Pages:	464
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Stephanie J. Brown is an assistant professor of English at the University of Arizona.

Table of Contents

Abbreviations
Acknowledgments

Introduction: Historical Surveillance as Lived Experience

Part One: Writing Surveillance into Suffrage Militancy

1. Suffragists versus the State: Opposing Surveillance Practice, 1905–14
2. Representing Surveillance in Militant Fiction: Suffrage Novels 1907–11
3. Anti-State Strategies of the Militant Press, 1912–14

Part Two: Surveillance Entanglements during and after World War I

4. An "Insult to Soldiers’ Wives and Mothers": Anti-Surveillance Rhetoric in the Woman’s Dreadnought, 1914–15
5. Women’s Police Work as Activism by Other Means, 1914–24

Conclusion

Notes
Bibliography
Index