In a crowded field of suffrage scholarship, this well-researched and thoughtfully conceived volume deserves to become a standard text. Lyndsey Jenkins set out to write a biography of Annie Kenney, one of the most caricatured figures in the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU), but soon realized that in order to understand Kenney she also needed to explore her dynamic working-class Lancashire family (250). The result is a collective biography in which Jenkins illuminates the important role of family networks in working-class feminist activism and reasserts the power of working-class women's agency without papering over their struggles.
One reason for this volume's success is Jenkins's extensive research into new source materials. Drawing on private archives, family papers, and unpublished suffrage histories, as well as extensive suffrage collections in the UK, Canada, and the United States, she goes well beyond the now well-known autobiographies, suffrage newspapers, and letter collections. Jenkins has also assembled one of the most comprehensive bibliographies of scholarship on feminism and suffrage of any recent publication and uses it to deeply contextualize the Kenneys’ experiences.
Adopting a thematic structure, Jenkins devotes the first third of the book to exploring how the Kenney household produced so many activists. In addition to Annie, sisters Jessie and Nell also joined the WSPU as local organizers, with Jessie becoming Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence's private secretary (10, 149–57). Another sister, Jane, worked as a governess for a family who introduced her to Dr Maria Montessori, who entrusted Jane to establish the movement in the United States (13, 176–94). Kenney's brother, Rowland, became an active member of the ILP, worked with Ramsay Mac Donald, Keir Hardie, and Philip Snowden, wrote for The Clarion and Dial, and eventually became editor of the Daily Herald in 1912.
While conventional gender expectations were present in the family, they were not constricting. Even as the children began mill work at age ten, the parents emphasized education, reading, and spirited debate alongside a commitment to moral development and social justice. The family admired Robert Blatchford and avidly read The Clarion, a paper devoted as much to labor issues as to the spiritual dimensions of socialist thinking. Jenkins is to be credited for exploring Kenney's own intense spirituality, which imbued her with confidence and a firm sense of self (61–2, 220–25). These familial values and relationships provided structure, support, and friendly competition, and demonstrate, Jenkins argues, that women could be politicized as much through their home life as through paid labor (40–1).
The next third of the book explores Annie and her sisters’ feminist beliefs and experiences in the WSPU. Best known for her representation as the “mill girl” (112–14) in a shawl and clogs, Annie has sometimes been portrayed—by both disaffected suffragettes and subsequent historians—as naive, easily manipulated by the Pankhursts, and loyal to a fault. Jenkins convincingly rejects this interpretation, depicting Annie as charismatic, resilient, pragmatic, and skillful at cutting through social hierarchies. Kenney's feminism was animated by the belief that sex outweighed class in determining women's options and that sisterhood, rather than trade unions or labour politics, offered the best way forward: “the shared experience of womanhood transcended all other forms of identification and self-definition” (80). In a chapter titled “Class,” Jenkins offers a cultural reading of the WSPU's deployment of Annie's “mill girl” image. Cast as an “ideal suffragette,” Annie proved highly effective at recruiting middle-class women, talking “turkey in a strong Lancashire accent to the bluest blood in England (126), but she was less able to attract working-class members, whose experiences were far more disparate than what Annie had known in the textile mills. Later, Jenkins analyzes how the reductive mill girl trope was deployed by the press and other chroniclers to distort the historical record (233–46).
In one of the most helpful chapters, Jenkins delves into the phenomenon of suffrage militancy, reframing it as a “collective identity” rather than a set of actions: “The focus must be on the meanings, not just the forms, of militancy” (136). As the Kenney sisters illustrate, not all suffragettes broke windows, lit fires, or went to prison. Annie's sister, Caroline, never made a public speech or committed an act of violence, but she marched in processions, made donations, and was a valued WSPU member (143). Jenkins argues that those who identified as militant were bound together by emotional ties and a sense of loyalty.
The final section of the book follows the lives and careers of four Kenney sisters after the suffrage movement. The need for financial stability drove many of their decisions. Jane and Caroline dedicated themselves to innovative educational reform, a pursuit that took them to the United States and then back to England (170–206). In her work with the Montessori movement, Jane became friends with Alexander Graham Bell and his wife, Mabel, who were strong supporters of the Montessori method (182–3). For these sisters, Jenkins argues, “[r]elationships forged on the basis of shared interests in suffrage gave the Kenneys access to new opportunities and resources” (205). But for Jessie, whose interest in science led her to train as a wireless telegrapher, those networks were of limited value. The Royal Navy and Merchant Navy would only hire her as a ship stewardess, a position that quickly disappointed (228–9).
After the passage of the Representation of the People Act in 1918, Annie retreated almost entirely from the public eye. Repeated imprisonments and hunger strikes had severely impacted her health, and undiagnosed diabetes hampered further political activities. As old networks fell away, she became surprisingly domestic, marrying and devoting herself to raising her son (although it's not clear whether that decision was entirely her own) (213–15). She did manage some writing, including Memories of a Militant (1924), the first book-length suffragette autobiography to appear after winning of the vote. Yet, despite that early stake in defining the narrative, other representations of militancy emerged that caused her no end of frustration.
Jenkins is careful not to lionize Annie, admitting that her ideas were often fuzzy, un-strategic, and acquiescent to prevailing ideas on racial difference and British superiority (98–9.) One dimension that might have been amplified in her analysis is the influence of imperial and racial thinking on the movement. But as it is, there's much to be learned from these enterprising siblings about the importance of familial and social networks for achieving political and economic progress, especially among those in the working class.
