In February 1912 the Bristol Liberal MP Charles E H Hobhouse addressed a meeting of the National League for Opposing Woman Suffrage in the city’s Colston Hall. During his speech he remarked, “In the present days of cheap and easy railway traffic they [the suffragettes] could always arrange numerous deputations or demonstrations and they could be as noisy as their funds permitted – (laughter)…” ( Western Daily Press , 17 February 1912). Hobhouse was anti-women’s suffrage and remained so even after the passage of the 1918 Representation of the People Act gave the vote to some British women. Although he had no understanding of or sympathy with the suffrage movement, his statement does show that he understood one thing: the importance of the rail network to the suffrage movement. In this three-part article, I’ll be exploring the connections between the railway system and the suffrage campaign, particularly the militant campaign. Both militant and non-militant women’s franchis...

I’ve just read On Gender and Writing , a selection of essays edited by Michelene Wandor published in 1983. It was a fascinating look back at the 1980s, the era of Spare Rib , of the Gay Liberation Front, of earnest fiddling with language to incorporate male and female – the awkward “he or she” and “s/he”. The book (discovered in an Amnesty International bookshop) even smells of the 80s with its aroma of yellowing pages and bleached cover. One essay in particular struck me: An Excerpt From My Unpublished Writing by Nora Bartlett. In this essay, Bartlett describes how when she started writing she had no idea that she would remain unpublished: “I didn’t set out to become an unpublished writer, it just happened”. Writing her first novel, she never even thought about being published – because it didn’t occur to her that she would not be. This was not because she had a huge ego or a sense of entitlement: you only have to read her essay to be certain of that. She genuinely believed ...