In the course of the 19th century, the vote gradually became central to feminist demands. It was seen as important both symbolically (as a recognition of women’s rights to full citizenship) and practically (as a necessary way of furthering reforms and making practical changes in women’s lives). But winning the vote proved a complicated struggle, […]

It was not until the second half of the 19th century that anything like a true women’s ‘movement’ began to emerge in England. This movement converged particularly around Barbara Leigh Smith and the group of friends who had become known — after one of their early meeting places — as ‘the Ladies of Langham Place’. […]

The 19th century saw an increasingly widespread and articulate statement of women’s claims — perhaps in reaction to the emergence of an image of true ‘femininity’ that seemed to become more constricted as the century wore on: a class-based ideal of gentility and refinement. But though many women (and men) spoke out eloquently against and […]

Mary Astell was one of the earliest true feminists, perhaps the first English writer to explore and assert ideas about women which we can still recognize and respond to. Throughout her life she identified with and spoke directly to other women, acknowledging their shared problems. Though she was deeply religious, she had little in common […]

Secular self-assertion, perhaps inevitably, developed more slowly; it was one thing to act in ‘unfeminine’ ways if divinely inspired, not quite so easy to act unconventionally out of personal ambition. Speaking in public, or writing, was all very well when it was in the Lord’s cause, and could be claimed as the product of divine […]

‘I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is’, the writer Rebecca West remarked, sardonically, in 1913. ‘I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute.’ The word was a comparatively new one when she wrote; it had […]