I’ve always been interested in the way history reflects the age in which it is written. I recently came across a striking example of this in M R Brailsford’s book Quaker Women 1650-1690 , which was published in 1915. When I started reading the book I didn’t know who M R Brailsford was, but it wasn’t long before I realised that her book was profoundly influenced by the stirring events of the women’s suffrage campaign in the years before the First World War. For example, Brailsford expresses “a reluctant sympathy” for preachers confronted by women like Elizabeth Hooton who spoke out in church. Brailsford wrote that a preacher’s meetings, like those of “Cabinet Ministers of later date, were subject to interruption without warning, and his most eloquent discourses broken at any moment by the sudden shouting of home truths from a member of his congregation”. Heckling government ministers was one of the tactics used by the militant Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) from the st...