Historical analysis of the women's suffrage movement has reached a new maturity with Laura Mayhall's tightly argued study of the militant women's suffrage movement. On an already crowded bookshelf, her work offers fresh and stimulating insights into this often puzzling phenomenon. While feminist historians have effectively discredited George Dangerfield's early characterization of suffrage militants as irrational fanatics, arguments still remain about the motivations, meanings, and outcomes of militancy. In his recent The March of the Women (2000), for example, Martin Pugh argues that militancy was a failure—its leaders were autocratic, its practitioners impatient and pushy, and its ranks largely insensitive to class differences. In contrast, Mayhall eschews the “madwoman” school of suffrage history, which casts suffragette violence as the product of ill-formed thoughts and pent-up frustration, and interprets militancy far more positively than Pugh—as a deliberate and rational strategy, grounded in historical and legal precedent, and particularly effective when executed by women. Mayhall's argument rests on an expanded definition of militancy—one that centers on the concept of resistance rather than on violence.

One clear strength of this book is Mayhall's effort to situate the suffrage movement within the contexts of nineteenth- and twentieth-century political culture. Her work adds to a historiographical trend now well underway that emphasizes the intellectual, social, and strategic connections between suffrage activists and a wide range of other late nineteenth-century organizations aimed at broad-based social and political transformation. Suffragists and suffragettes took agitation to new levels, devising ever-new and more creative ways to resist what they deemed to be injustice. Mayhall's arguments also provide added dimensions to Lisa Tickner's popular study of suffrage spectacle. Here, militancy is cast as a calculated performance aimed at dramatizing women's exclusion from their historic constitutional rights. The suffrage movement became a stage on which to rehearse, debate, and proclaim new visions of citizenship.

Perhaps the most novel feature is Mayhall's attempt to reconfigure the typical periodization of suffrage militancy. Rather than starting with the Women's Social and Political Union's (WSPU) foundation (in 1903) or the first blatantly militant act (in 1905), Mayhall begins with the South African War. This distant conflict provided a (now familiar) dilemma to suffragists: how to act as citizens of a nation fighting an imperial and racialized war with questionable motives and methods. Suffragists split over how to respond. Some, like Millicent Fawcett, promoted dutiful service as a demonstration of citizenship, but others began to mimic the government's own forceful stance with increasingly radical and militant idioms. It was Britain's own imperial culture that fostered and supported suffragists’ increasing radicalization.

Within the next decade, militancy grew in strength and strategic scope. In chapter 3 (“Staging Exclusion”), suffragettes emerge as astute students of constitutional history. They skillfully drew upon seventeenth-century legal precedents and early nineteenth-century radical practice as the basis for their argument that resistance was a right when the government did not adhere to constitutional ideals. And resist they did. Mayhall provides a detailed analysis of key militant events in 1908 and 1909, including Christabel Pankhurst's bold cross-examination of David Lloyd George and Herbert Gladstone at the Bow Street trial and the dramatic “Siege of Westminster,” when the Women's Freedom League picketed the House of Commons for months in an effort to present a petition to Prime Minister Asquith.

Suffragettes not only broke the law; they also used it as a tool in their own defense. In chapter 4 (“Resistance on Trial”), Mayhall deepens her analysis of suffragettes’ legal strategies. Judicial activism was to blame for women's exclusion, they argued, not the law itself. In pressing such cases as Nairn v. Scottish Universities (1908), suffrage activists attempted to reveal the yawning gap between actual constitutional statutes and the prejudicial opinions of judges who were intent on upholding masculine privilege. Nevertheless, while suffragettes were unwilling “to acknowledge the authority of the courts in trying them for offenses related to their political agitation,” they were eager to use the courtroom “as a site for narrating militancy's defense” (72). Suffragettes on trial seized the opportunity to publicize their stories of struggle and imbue them with righteous motives.

In chapter 5 (“Embodying Citizenship”), Mayhall sidesteps dramatic recitations of hunger strikes and force-feedings and examines instead the idioms—of femininity and freedom—that provided meaning to these women's efforts to physically resist the state. Mayhall focuses on the pantheon of suffrage saints who offered complex and often conflicting models of inspired leadership. As amateur historians, suffrage workers recognized the power that lay in past examples. Both suffragists and suffragettes evoked Joan of Arc as patron saint for her martial qualities, which were intertwined with religious and nationalist sentiments. Florence Nightingale, by contrast, offered a more womanly ideal of self-sacrifice and service. Other historical figures—Josephine Butler, Mary Frances Buss, Lydia Becker—offered further models that, Mayhall argues, “reveal the range of possibilities available to suffragettes for embodying women's citizenship … [as well as] resistance” (91).

Suffragists and suffragettes may have admired the same heroes, but they were divided on the issue of violence—a topic addressed in chapter 6. Even militant suffragettes were deeply split on the issue. Mayhall follows their internal debates in sometimes painstaking detail, probing the underlying assumptions about the ethics of using physical force to resist the state. A minority of suffragettes participated in the violent protests, often appealing to divine authority or justifying violence as a legitimate response to brutal police attacks. By 1913, Mayhall argues, Christabel Pankhurst no longer made an effort to emphasize a moral rationale and embraced the term “terrorism” to describe the WSPU's indiscriminate attacks on people and property. Mayhall admits such strategies were counterproductive, but she also emphasizes the benefits they engendered, namely, the intense discussions violence provoked among every suffrage organization about the nature and the basis of resistance, producing ever-new formulations of militant protest.

Mayhall has a special ability to see beyond the frenzy of demonstrations and deputations and to recognize the historical process of “fetishization” that has conflated militancy with violence. With this study, Mayhall clearly establishes that the movement was not primarily about theatrics, but about reconceptualizing citizenship and redefining the public sphere. The potential weakness of Mayhall's argument, however, lies in old dilemmas—namely, the relative weight one ought to ascribe to rational and irrational explanations of human behavior. Her account deemphasizes the affective, emotional, and even mystical aspects of this movement. Suffragettes had both heads and hearts, and sometimes their anger and exasperation, moral indignation, and millenialist visions overrode even the most carefully crafted rational strategies. Nevertheless, with this thoughtful study, Mayhall has moved suffrage militancy permanently off the shelf of odd curiosities.