The suffragette campaign was the inevitable conclusion of a fight that women, rich and poor, had been pursuing for hundreds of years against a system that gave men complete legal, political and physical control over the other half of the population. In this first programme Vickery describes how a wife was the property of her husband - who could if he chose, beat, rape or even sell her to another man. But the revolutionary politics of the late 18th century opened a crack in the door.
Vickery introduces us to the spurned mistress of a prime minister, who lost custody of her own children but won the first piece of modern feminist legislation - child custody rights for mothers. Plus a passionate campaigner who raised the age of consent and overthrew pernicious laws against prostitutes, a Cambridge undergraduate who proved that girls could even be better at maths than boys and undermined the centuries old prejudice that a Cambridge education was for men only, and a certain Mrs Pankhurst and her daughters, who decided that after so many years of women campaigning for the vote, it was now time to resort to deeds rather than words.
In the final episode of her story of British women’s fight for power, the historian Amanda Vickery explores how the Edwardian suffragette movement became a quasi-terrorist organisation. She asks what they achieved with their violent campaign and argues they are best understood as part of a war still going on today.
