Some of you may remember Pythagoras and his theorem from maths lessons at school – and if like me you weren’t keen on maths, then I’m sure he didn’t endear himself to you. Pythagoras, who lived in the fifth century BC, had other ideas too. He believed that a great land mass lay in the southern hemisphere – the Great Southern Continent, the Great South Land, or Terra Australis Incognita. It had to exist, he argued, in order to balance the land masses of the north.    For the next 2,000 years, men dreamed of the Great Southern Continent. They drew maps of it and they speculated about the people who lived there. One theory was that the inhabitants would have feet opposite to our own – antipodes. Others thought they had one huge foot and when they were sitting down they were able to raise the foot over their heads to keep the sun off their faces.    Tantalised by tales of the Great Southern Continent, explorers from many nations went looking for it – Dutch, Frenc...

In all the commemorations around the one hundredth anniversary of votes for (some) women, it’s easy to forget that there were many women who didn’t want the vote. In 1908 a National Women’s Anti-Suffrage League was formed. It later combined with the Men’s League to form the National League for Opposing Women’s Suffrage. One of the leaders of the anti suffrage movement was best-selling novelist Mrs Humphry Ward (1851-1920). Amongst my collection of suffrage books are signed copies of two of Mrs Humphry Ward’s works. The first is England’s Effort: Six Letters to an American Friend (1916) written to encourage America to join the war. The other is the 1910 novel Lady Merton, Colonist , inside which is a copy of the order of service for Mrs Humphry Ward’s funeral. Mrs Humphry Ward made her anti-suffrage views known not only through her public speaking but through her novels. In 1915 she published an anti-suffrage novel, Delia Blanchflower , which tells the story of the eponymou...

Mabel Tothill was a Quaker, a tireless worker for social reform , and a non-militant suffragist. She was born in Liverpool and her family moved to Bristol when her father retired from business. Mabel went to Clifton High School and later lived in Clifton with her sister, but they moved back into the family home in Cambridge Park, close to the Downs, after her mother’s death.     In the 1890s she was a member of the Bristol branch of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), as well as the Independent Labour Party. Her labour politics was to lead to a breakaway from the Bristol branch of the NUWSS when in 1912 the NUWSS formed an alliance with the Labour Party. The NUWSS had lost patience with the Liberal government which stubbornly refused to give women the vote, and had decided to work with the Labour Party which they thought was now the party most likely to help women to the franchise. However, many of the NUWSS's members weren’t happy about this a...