Suffrage Outside Suffragism

Abstract

Suffragism' was a political field where non-party structures were set up to gain women's suffrage. The suffragist field outside 'suffragism' offered party and non-party structures that were not specifically suffragist although suffragists belonged to them. If 'the study of antisuffragism is particularly important as an aid towards understanding suffragism', 1 then 'suffrage outside suffragism' should be seen as a valid object of study that can offer meaningful perspectives for understanding 'suffragism'.'Suffragism' has been studied through its organisations, whereas 'suffrage outside suffragism' has never been researched as a synchronic whole where various structures had to compromise with their suffragist activists. The aim of this book is to address how suffragists 2 outside 'suffragism' (hereafter 'outside suffragists') related to their original structures, what they targeted and how they fared, in a context where 'suffragism' as a separate field offered support and inclusion on an ad hoc basis. Such activists were thus suffragists with another (party or non-party) affiliation. The interaction between the two positions (suffragist and nonsuffragist) must have been difficult to experience. The fact that most outside suffragist activists were women also emphasized the gendered reading of affiliations. For each individual, being a suffragist mostly co-existed with being a female activist, and both positions needed some acknowledgement. At the height of the suffrage campaign, in the Edwardian era, organised structures outside 'suffragism' found it difficult to integrate one or both of these issues, suffrage and female activism, and one or both types of activists, suffragists and females. The existence of 'suffragism' could hardly be ignored, especially as many outside suffragists also belonged to suffragist societies: double-affiliations were common even if they were not always formalised through membership. How double affiliations were born but also how they affected the non-suffragist structures [page1] to which activists belonged, is discussed in this book. The fluidity and transfer of activists' affiliationseven if activists experienced contradictionsmust have enriched both 'suffragism' and 'suffrage outside 'suffragism'' (hereafter 'suffrage outside'): activists could compare political practices and structures, methods, back-up support and better assess how realistic their activists' expectancies were. Conversely, the structures outside 'suffragism' had to adapt to the pressure coming from their suffragist activists and gauge how realistic their expectancies (defined by the party or the group line) were in order to keep their suffragist members, that is, broadly speaking, their women members. This book's focus on suffrage outside 'suffragism' should help us to understand both fields, 'suffragism' and 'suffrage outside', their interaction and how they related to the Edwardian social and political fabric. 'Suffragism' and 'suffrage' were an integral part of Edwardian politics. Studying 'suffrage outside suffra...