In this splendid book, Laura Nym Mayhall redefines suffrage militancy and explores it perceptively as a complex and sophisticated political idea involving a wide range of organizations, strategies, and practices. Drawing on suffragette publications, archival sources, government papers, directories, reference books, yearbooks, annual reports, contemporary periodicals, books, essays, memoirs, letters, and diverse secondary sources, Mayhall argues that the militant movement was an integral part of the radical political culture of late-Victorian and Edwardian Britain, firmly rooted in historic precedent and deriving legitimacy from its use of the constitutional idiom. Mayhall reveals how the militants drew on radicals’ vocabulary of protest and claimed for women their full rights as citizens on the basis of the rule of law and traditional British liberties and values. Her book successfully illuminates the rationales central to the entire militant suffrage movement, explores the connections between the nineteenth- and twentieth-century women's suffrage campaigns, exposes the multiple and diverse forms of militancy, and places the militant campaign for votes for women firmly within the British radical political and intellectual traditions. This is a singular achievement.

In the first chapter, Mayhall traces the evolution of the campaign for women's suffrage from its origins in the 1860s, when suffragists sought the vote on the same property-based terms as men, to the late 1890s, by which time the conceptualization of the relationship between citizens and the state had widened to include resistance and rebellion and had led some suffragists to question the state's authority to determine women's status and its ability to legislate fairly on behalf of women who could not vote.

Chapter 2 argues that the contentious debates on the South African War radicalized previous discourses on citizenship and brought two models of citizenship into conflict, the liberal, social service to the nation model, on the one hand, and a radical independent model, on the other. The latter produced a changed approach to the campaign for women's suffrage. “By early 1906, a new intensity in the campaign for women's parliamentary enfranchisement could be seen emerging from within the tangle of issues radical independents negotiated” (39), and its militant practitioners had become known as suffragettes. The diverse strategies, activities, and justifications of the suffragette organizations formed in the aftermath of the South African War are explored in chapter 3. Far from rejecting the constitutional idiom, in the tradition of nineteenth-century radicalism, they drew on it when pursuing strategies of resistance that insisted that the British constitution live up to its own ideals and that the right to resist a government that did not do so was grounded in constitutional principle. While challenging the authority of British institutions of government and seeking a profound change in the meaning of citizenship, they saw themselves as upholding British principles and values, rather than seeking fundamental constitutional and societal restructuring.

In chapter 4, Mayhall offers a fascinating expose of why and how suffragettes attempted to legitimize their protests and claims to citizenship by appealing to the law. In challenging the authority of laws that women had no part in making, and which failed to protect women's persons, property, and children, suffragettes initially hoped to force the courts into new interpretations of existing laws. Cleverly using courtrooms as stages from which they defended militancy and criticized the government on the basis of sophisticated legal and constitutional arguments, suffragettes made the case for women's right to citizenship to the people of Britain.

By 1910, failures in the courts convinced some suffragettes that peaceful attempts to acquire the franchise were futile and that they therefore should develop ever more aggressive strategies for confronting the judicial apparatus of the state. For the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU), resistance was no longer about convincing the government that women should have the vote, but rather making political life so difficult, through arson, bombing, and other forms of terrorism, that the government would have to enfranchise women. Having been blinded by most historians’ focus on the spectacularly destructive activities of the WSPU, many readers will likely be surprised to learn that the majority of suffragette organizations rejected the use of violence and criticized the WSPU for indulging in “cheap sentiment” (105).

One of the many strengths of this book is its focus on these neglected groups. Mayhall does a masterly job exploring the dialogue and innovations within the nonviolent militant suffragette movement, as members continued to embrace active resistance as an important component of citizenship, but at the same time struggled to define the extent and limits of resistance and the forms it should take. She concludes that WSPU violence was counterproductive, for it lost suffragettes the high moral ground and the extensive public sympathy they had gained through court trials and tribulations such as forced feeding, and it alienated the general public and women's suffrage supporters inside and outside Parliament. At the same time, she claims, the nonviolent militants’ continuing campaign and use of elements of earlier struggles, such as petitions to Parliament and tax resistance, contributed to militancy's continuum and overall vitality.

In chapter 7 Mayhall explores militants’ reevaluation of the relationship between resistance and citizenship during a time of grave national crisis, and the differing ways in which all militants embraced a service model of citizenship. The WSPU did an immediate about-face, turning their war against the British government into a chauvinistic war against the Germans. Other militants were active in the peace movement, in mitigating the effects of the war on noncombatants such as soldiers’ wives and children, or in fighting against the government's curtailment of women's civil rights, while some continued to press for women's suffrage.

It is a sad irony, Mayhall concludes, that women's enfranchisement in 1918 and 1928 occurred just as the meaning of citizenship in Great Britain was being reformulated, by party organizational changes and the manipulation of public opinion by mass media, in a manner that diminished the importance of individual voters. Further, when the history of suffrage militancy began to be written in the 1920s and 1930s, the leadership of Emmeline Pankhurst and the violent protests of the WSPU were allowed to overshadow other forms of resistance. Mayhall demonstrates how militancy's foundation in constitutional and moral principles was all but forgotten. While women's work for the nation during the war erroneously was given almost all the credit, all but forgotten too was the importance of the diverse and dynamic fifty-year-long militant and nonmilitant suffrage campaign in laying the groundwork for the legislation that finally gave women the parliamentary franchise.

All things considered, in bringing to light the dynamism and range of practices of constitutional suffrage militancy before and during the Great War and its differences of opinion on fundamental questions, in illuminating the relationship suffragettes asserted between resistance and citizenship, and in contextualizing the militant suffrage movement within the British radical political and intellectual tradition, Mayhall has done the history of women in Britain and the wider history of British political culture a great service. Mayhall's own eloquent if understated words make a fitting ending to this review, as they do to her book: “Drawing attention to … [suffragettes’] attempts to define citizenship through the act of resistance … highlights a significant chapter in British political history and suggests alternative trajectories for democracy's development” (143).