Welsh women can boast of a long history of political activity. Shaped by a political culture that fostered nonconformity in both religious and political thought, Welsh women were part of the suffrage campaign since its beginnings in the 1860s, and they staged some of the movement's most dramatic spectacles outside of London. Yet, while suffragists in Ireland and Scotland have been fairly thoroughly documented, until now Welsh suffrage campaigners had received little more than passing attention. Wallace's is the first book to appear on the Welsh women's movement in nearly two decades, and it is the only comprehensive study of the suffrage campaign. When he began his research, Wallace assumed that the major suffrage organizations had made little impression on this rugged country, but he quickly discovered otherwise. Since the start of his project, a small but steady stream of scholarship has added to our knowledge of the particularities of the Welsh women's political and social experience. Articles by Angela V. John, Ursula Masson, and J. Graham Jones, for example, have highlighted the ways in which Welsh women's political activities were shaped by the dynamic interplay of language, religion, culture, and national identity. Now this book adds to that stream with a comprehensive account of the Welsh women and men who furthered the suffrage movement and actively opposed it, from the start of the campaign in 1866 through the winning of equal suffrage in 1928.

Organized around the well-worn themes of much suffrage scholarship, Wallace's book devotes chapters to each of the major suffrage organizations active in Wales, including the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU), Women's Freedom League (WFL), and the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies (NUWSS). Additional chapters tackle Welsh antisuffragists and the wartime and postwar years. Perhaps the most impressive feature of this book is Wallace's extensive research in archival collections, suffrage journals, and nearly every major Welsh newspaper, yielding an encyclopedic account that will serve as a valuable reference tool for years to come.

The most interesting part of the book chronicles the Victorian campaign, a period that is still underresearched in suffrage scholarship more generally. While the Welsh presence on the earliest suffrage petitions was minimal, between 1869 and 1874 nearly seventy suffrage petitions originated in Wales. The region's first activists were English women who brought their political passions along when they married Welsh men or settled in the area. Rose Mary Crawshay and Viscountess Amberley, for example, found a receptive audience among local religious leaders, councillors, and professional men as they staged local lecture tours and public meetings. Most of the early activists were middle class, evangelical, and English speaking, but by the turn of the century, the movement was tapping more local talent. The Welsh Union of Women's Liberal Associations (WUWLA), inaugurated in 1892, attracted almost 9,000 members within three years and became the main local vehicle for suffrage agitation. Its leaders adopted a variety of strategies to gain local support, including collaboration with Cymru Fydd (Young Wales) in a vigorous campaign of cultural nationalism.

As the movement gained momentum in the Edwardian period, the major national suffrage organizations directly targeted the region, especially the south and east, with lecture campaigns at seaside resorts and spa towns during the holiday season and open-air meetings at local factories, quarries, and dockyard gates. The WSPU even launched a separate Welsh society in 1911—the Cymric Suffrage Union (CSU)—under the direction of Edith Mansell Moullin, to carry the campaign into Welsh-speaking areas. Yet, any advantage militant suffragettes had gained among the Welsh with their energetic local strategies was sacrificed when they interrupted the National Eisteddfod in 1909 in London and again in September 1912 in Wrexham, the same month they heckled local hero Lloyd George at the opening of the Llanystumdwy Institute.

Drawing adherents from the backlash against these events, the antisuffrage movement appears to have also made deep inroads into Wales. Nineteen branches of the National League for Opposing Women's Suffrage (NLOWS) eventually formed in Wales, and the League's organizing secretary, Gwladys Gladstone Solomon, drew crowds during her speaking tour in 1912, aided by Welsh-speaking local activists. Yet, the antis’ story, like much of the material covered in this book, remains two-dimensional. After reading the chapter on the antisuffrage movement in Wales, one can say little more than the antis “appeared” to be strong in Wales, for Wallace fails to offer much analysis that would enable the reader to evaluate their relative strength or determine whether local cultural dynamics played a role. As with each of the other chapters, Wallace's narrative is organized around the major events and turning points in the national movement—territory that, for the antisuffragists at least, has been well covered by both Brian Harrison and Julia Bush—and key Welsh individuals and events are reduced to examples and illustrations. It is frustrating that Wallace makes little effort to compare the suffrage campaign in Wales to other parts of the country or to offer insight into how the particular currents of Welsh religious divisions, social cleavages, or economic troubles left a mark on the campaign, either for or against the vote.

After such innovative regional studies as Krista Cowman's, on suffrage organizing in Merseyside, or Callum Brown's, on the influence of religion on the Scottish women's movement, one hopes for more from a book that purports to have a regional focus. Here, neither geography, nor local culture, nor national identity become categories of analysis. The result is a book that might be valuable for a Welsh historian interested in learning about the basic contours of the nationwide women's suffrage movement with the bonus of references to familiar people and places, but it provides little beyond undigested data for a historian already familiar with suffrage history who is interested in the particular dynamics of the Welsh context. That historian might do almost as well to read the relevant sections of Elizabeth Crawford's The Women's Suffrage Movement in Britain and Ireland: A Regional Survey (Abingdon, 2006).