From Liberal to Labour with Women's Suffrage
The Story of Catherine Marshall
Description
By 1913 Marshall was uniquely placed as a lobbyist, with inside information and sympathetic listeners in every party. Through her the dynamically re-organized NUWSS brought the women's suffrage issue to the fore of public awareness. It pushed the Labour Party to adopt a strong stand on women's suffrage and raised working-class consciousness, re-awakening a long-dormant demand for full adult enfranchisement. Had the general election due in 1915 taken place, NUWSS financial and organizational support for the Labour Party might well have been substantial enough to influence the final results. These impressive achievements were forgotten by the time Catherine Marshall died in 1961. Even recent research on the period has failed to show the full significance of the issue of women's suffrage, much less Marshall's part in the movement. Jo Vellacott's revealing account of Marshall's political work also includes vivid descriptions of a liberal Victorian childhood, a strangely purposeless young adulthood, and the heady experiences of women who, through the awakening of political consciousness, forged a lifestyle to fit their new aspirations.
Reviews
"Vellacott's illuminating story tells of the life and work of a woman who made an important contribution to suffrage -- and later to peace-activism ... and contains outstanding research on an important topic." Deborah Gorham, Department of History, Carleton University. "The book's significant new contribution is its 'insider' perspective, based on the author's exemplary, definitive analysis of the huge archive of Catherine Marshall papers -- a source never so thoroughly worked before ... The author is clearly the world authority on this material ... and her work is, in addition to its contribution to British political history, a real addition to the growing corpus of British women's biography." Sybil Oldfield, School of Cultural and Community Studies, University of Sussex. "Vellacott's study of Catherine Marshall blends admirably the political history of the Edwardian period, surveyed until now almost exclusively from a perspective of males, with the new dimensions of women's history. All historians of Britain in the turbulent years before 1914 will welcome this compelling, fresh analysis." Richard A. Rempel, The Bertrand Russell Editorial Project, McMaster University.