The suffragists were the womyn of the upper class, they
were wealthy womyn with time on their hands.
This is a total myth! Not all of them, at least in the UK. Upper-class is
certainly pushing it (a few perhaps, e.g. Charlotte Despard, Lady Contance
Lytton), middle-class certainly, but many were no more than lower-middle and
struggling to make a living, and significant numbers of working women were
active in the suffrage struggle--see Liddington and Norris's 'One Hand Tied
Behind Us' about the radical suffragists of the North of England. It is, as
they say, not a coincidence that the suffrage movement in GB had close links
with the Labour Party. I don't know if the ?mid-70s drama series about the
struggle for the vote, Shoulder to Shoulder, was ever shown in the US, but
there was at least one episode specifically about Annie Kenney, a Lancashire
mill-worker who became a leading suffragette.
Lesley
Lesley_Hall@classic.msn.com
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