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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 April 2020
Through an examination of the women's suffrage movement, this article reassesses the place of petitioning within late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British political culture. While critical of their Victorian predecessors’ reliance on petitions, the Edwardian women's suffrage movement did not abandon petitioning, but reinvented it. Rather than presenting a polarized view of relations between suffragettes and suffragists, the article shows how both operated on a spectrum of direct action politics through petitioning. Militants and constitutionalists pioneered new, although different, modes of petitioning that underpinned broader repertoires of popular politics, adapting this venerable practice to a nascent mass democracy. The article then situates suffrage campaigners’ reinvention of petitioning within a broader political context. The apparent decline of petitioning, long noted by scholars, is reframed as the waning of the classic model of mass petitioning parliament associated with Victorian pressure groups. The early twentieth century was a crucial period for the reshaping of petitioning as a tool for political participation and expression through myriad subscriptional forms, rather than primarily through the medium of parliamentary petitions.
I would like to thank Richard Huzzey, Matt Johnson, Ludmilla Jordanova, David Minto, Kathryn Rix, Sarah Richardson, Kevin Waite, and the two anonymous reviewers for their comments on earlier drafts, and also the audience of the inaugural Durham–Münster conference, held in Durham, November 2018, for their feedback on this article. This research was supported by the Leverhulme Trust (RPG-2016-097).
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