Susan Pedersen writes:

Julia Bush has written this book to restore the anti-suffragists to the mainstream of women’s history. Suffragists and anti-suffragists, she argues, shared considerable ‘common ground’, agreeing on the need for women to involve themselves in social work and local government, as well as on the limitations of a Parliament dominated largely by men. Anti-suffrage women, she points out, ‘warned that parliamentary politics meant politics on men’s terms’, and she claims (wrongly in my view) that the record of the interwar years shows their warnings to have been ‘very largely’ justified. Partisan and parliamentary politics proved to be ‘no substitute for the ongoing work of a long-established and largely non-political women’s movement’ – a claim no suffragist would dispute, but one she would certainly amplify by pointing out that those two strategies were not incompatible.

(LRB 20 March 2008)

Oxford | hardback 340 pp. |ISBN: 9780199248773