Chapter 4 - Suffragism

Summary

This chapter opens with a brief survey of suffrage literature and the scholarship it has generated before honing in on a particular example: Constance Maud’s No Surrender. This novel conforms to many characteristics of suffrage fiction, playing on romance conventions and integrating fictionalised episodes from the real-world campaign. But even as No Surrender is a campaigning novel, it is also a novel of a campaign that registers and reflects the tensions that characterised the movement. Social class was a deeply contentious issue for the campaign and is one this chapter considers with a focus on Maud’s presentation of Lancashire mill-worker, Jenny Clegg. Maud’s novel raises questions about representation, authenticity, and appropriation, questions that have troubled feminist theory and practice. This chapter suggests that a fuller familiarity with the internal debates of the campaign – particularly those between adult and woman suffragists – results in a more precise sense of how the novel works as propaganda. A corollary of such a contextual approach is that more self-reflexive and self-questioning currents in No Surrender that run parallel to its primary propagandising ones are made visible.