In ‘The March of the Women: A Revisionist Analysis of the Campaign for Women’s Suffrage’ Martin Pugh attempts to provide the reader with a comprehensive and somewhat new way of looking at the fight for women’s suffrage in Britain. Pugh does not wish his book to be a narrative of the women’s suffrage movement but instead structures the novel in the form of ten essays which each focus on specific questions and topics that he has identified as not being sufficiently covered by other writers in the field. He claims that ‘not since 1967 when Constance Rover’s Women’s Suffrage and Party Politics in Britain was published has there been an attempt to assess the entire campaign to secure the parliamentary vote for women’ and aims for his book to fill the gap in the historiography. Pugh’s main sources come from primary material which shows a keen attention to detail and a desire to provide an informative and interesting account. Pugh claims this primary material not available when other work was published, such as the unpublished autobiography of Scottish suffragette Helen Crawfurd and multiple archives in the Public Records Office and therefore enables him to provide a new perspective to the argument. He embarks to increase upon specific parts of the movement that have come to light in recent years such as the support of the Conservatives, the melding of militancy and non-militancy at local level and that the 1890s were actually extremely important in the process of gaining the vote, in order to provide a comprehensive and detailed account of the campaign for women’s suffrage and the political process and party politics that played into this. However, the main bulk of Pugh’s bibliography does come from primary sources which narrows his scope significantly and may be seen to neglect other solid materials that have been used in other works attempting to cover the topic and have contributed to debates in the past.
Part I of Pugh’s novel ‘The Issues’ attempts to assess the tactics of the movement in the nineteenth century and goes into detail regarding the strategies and arguments used by both the Suffragist and Anti-Suffragist movement. Pugh provides a detailed account and is extremely successful in covering the shifting success and failure of both movements over this time period. Unlike other historians who have written on this topic, Pugh claims that the 1890s were extremely important for the movement and even pinpoints it as the period in which the government opinion turned decidedly towards suffrage. Pugh argues that the view that support for the suffragists declined in the 1890s stemmed from misinformation. He claims that after 1900 ‘no fresh arguments were introduced into the debate’ and that ‘the principle of women’s enfranchisement had largely been won by the turn of the century’. This is true for Pugh because he focuses on the political and campaign movements of the Suffrage movement in actually gaining the vote for women, rather than focusing on the suffrage movement as a movement which attempted to redesign women’s place in society as other historians on the topic have done. Pugh’s account instead heavily focuses on campaign methods and the parliamentary process which is both a strength and a weakness.
Part II ‘Winning the Advantage’ aims to place the Suffrage movement within political movements at the time and even within the wider fight for women’s suffrage across the world. Pugh focuses on New Zealand and Australia because he believes them to be the countries with the most commonalities to British culture. He argues that these case studies effectively proved the suffragist argument that enfranchisement would benefit the nation but the suffragists themselves were ineffective at learning the Australasian lesson that it was much easier to implement suffrage when they worked with the government and not against it. Perhaps Pugh’s most controversial argument comes to light in this part of the book – that the surprising and controversial support of the Conservatives was a real turning point in the movement for suffrage and was perhaps the most important parliamentary measure. He purports that liberal hostility towards the movement was not down to ideology but rather to changing leadership and targets within the party that put women’s suffrage to the back of the party’s mind as a less important issue. Pugh’s strength in this chapter comes from private correspondence he uses from the Anti-Suffragist movement which showed that the suffragists were making converts in the Tory party and he very successfully capitalises on real life conversations and primary sources that other historians have overlooked or not had access to.
Part III ‘Edwardian Climax’ focuses on the issue of militancy within the suffrage movement. Unlike other historians Pugh argues that militancy, although widespread and important to the Women’s Social and Political Union, was, in general, less pivotal to the movement as a whole than some other historians have argued. He contends that militancy did little to change public or parliamentary opinion and was only really successful in turning heads towards the cause. Instead he argues that the key advantage to the movement was the alliance between Labour and the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies which is in line with his focus on the political side of the movement. Pugh implies that militancy added nothing and perhaps even slowed down an inevitable process but fails to take into account questions as to why so many women yearned to take part in militant action and how militancy really affected debates on the issue in parliament. Although Pugh claims to be ‘revisionist’ this idea is not completely new and historians such as Sarah Stanley Holton have purported similar arguments. Pugh also argues that suffragists meshed militancy and non-militancy successfully at local level and while an interesting idea he is not the first to argue this, Liz Stanley and Ann Morley successfully argued this same idea in 1988.
It is somewhat disappointing to see that Pugh’s account of the women’s suffrage movement completely ends in 1914 when full enfranchisement for women wasn’t achieved until 1928. However this is somewhat understandable when you take into account his focus on the parliamentary movement and the process of the vote rather than the social and cultural movement of women’s changing place in society. Pugh’s account is admirable in his focus on new primary materials which gives his work a new and interesting twist. It is pleasing to see that Pugh uses ten analytical chapters rather than producing another chronological account of the movement that would be lost in the historiography. However, Pugh’s account is not so much ‘revisionist’ because very little of his ideas are actually new, as previously stated. He also completely neglects to comment on the social and cultural changes that the women of the suffrage movement fought for and the changing place of women in society both before and after the vote. He further dismisses militancy rather too quickly as if it was just the action of a few crazy women which did not purport anything to the cause which seems a very weak argument considering the mountain of literature produced which says the complete opposite.
Overall, Pugh’s ‘The March of the Women: A Revisionist Analysis of the Campaign for Women’s Suffrage, 1866-1914’ provides a detailed and comprehensive account of the campaign methods and process of achieving the vote. He focuses on what he believes to be unanswered questions in the historiography of women’s suffrage and successfully puts his arguments across in a convincing and interesting manner. However, the word ‘revisionist’ is too readily given in the title. Although Pugh successfully looks at the movement from a different perspective very little of his ideas are actually new and have not been purported by other historians in the past. His book cannot be said to be a full review of women’s suffrage because his account ends in 1914 when the vote for women had still not been achieved. Pugh too quickly dismisses militancy and its important to gaining the vote. Pugh neglects to take into account the social and cultural changes of women in society as a result of the suffrage movement but if the aim was to be a completely political and parliamentary account of the fight for the vote then his attempt can be said to be very successful and definitely adds something new and important to the historiography.