If the histories of rights that have proliferated in recent years have taught us anything, it is that rights come with few guarantees. Consider, for instance, the experiences of ex-slaves in the French colony of Guadeloupe. Once liberated in 1794, these new “citizens” of the French republic found themselves still bound to their former masters and working the plantations. The restrictions on the Voting Rights Act of 1965 placed last spring in the United States offer another striking example of the instability of rights, even long after their initial conferral. The more we know about what comes after, in short, the harder it becomes to adopt a purely congratulatory stance on the subject of political emancipation.

It is in this skeptical spirit that Julie V. Gottlieb and Richard Toye have assembled their useful edited collection. Based on a conference held at the University of Sheffield in 2011 and comprising an introduction, twelve refreshingly unified (though poorly edited) chapters, and a bibliography, the book examines what happened to women and the nation after the passage of the 1918 Representation of the People Act, which extended the vote to most British women over the age of thirty and simultaneously enabled them to enter Parliament. The goal is to treat this act less as the culminating moment of the suffrage movement—an approach that remains all too common in the relevant literature—and more as an inaugural event that ushered in a new and frequently fractious phase of women in politics. It is an emphasis that would sit well with many of the suffragists who lived through these changes. As Viscountess Rhondda remarked in 1921, regarding her recently acquired right to vote and stand for Parliament, women “had passed the first great toll bar on the road which leads to equality,” but “it is a far cry yet to the end of the road” (56–57).

What kind of road, then, lay ahead for the newly enfranchised woman? The thirteen contributors to this collection persuasively demonstrate that female voters navigated a range of complex questions regarding party politics, the meaning of “women” as a voting bloc, and the future of feminism. Of these three, the problem of party seems to have been the most intractable. Demands for female suffrage during the prewar period were frequently animated by a belief that women's entrance into politics would lead to the disappearance, or at least minimization, of party. As Pat Thane explains, it was not uncommon in the prewar period to hear predictions about “the automatic disappearance of party government” and “the subordination of party considerations to principle” once women had the ballot (Thane, “The Impact of Mass Democracy on British Political Culture, 1918–1939,” 59–60). Yet party politics did not disappear during the interwar period. Women, then, had no choice but to organize around parties, however much compromise such organization entailed. Two contributors are particularly effective in illuminating these challenges at the individual and institutional levels. In her sympathetic study of Emmeline Pankhurst, June Purvis charts how this formerly outspoken suffragette transformed into a Conservative parliamentary candidate during the 1920s. This transformation, Purvis explains, suggests less about Pankhurst herself than about the “difficulties of fitting feminism into any of the main class-based, male dominated political parties of her day” (34). In a similar vein, Laura Beers convincingly shows why Women for Westminster, a nonparty political society founded in 1942 to promote women's entrance into Parliament, could not sustain itself. “In the decades after the vote was won,” Beers writes, “women, even committed feminists, showed a greater commitment to the existing party system than to a feminist political agenda” (239).

At the heart of the deliberations about party, of course, was the challenge of defining the female citizen, another key thread running through this collection. Were women to be treated as a voting bloc or were they to be understood as a diverse set of individuals, in no way bound by their special interests? Enfranchised women seem to have frequently insisted on the latter, but their message struggled to be heard. As Adrian Bingham notes in an excellent contribution on gender, media, and politics during the interwar period, long after 1918, “commentators continued to portray women as a coherent electoral force” (98). The implications of this lumping come to the fore in Julie Gottlieb's persuasive chapter on the feminization of the policy of appeasement in 1938–39. Here the tendency to see women as inherently irenic, regardless of their actual voting habits, put female voters in the unfortunate position of being linked en masse to the Munich Crisis—and to Britain's subsequent “diminishing position on the world stage” (177). Female members of Parliament faced similar struggles. In her detailed study of women's role in parliamentary committees between 1918 and 1945, Mari Takayanagi dispels any notions of female solidarity in the House of Commons. Female members of Parliament, she shows, frequently disagreed with each other, even when representing the same party. Nevertheless, the British public rarely acknowledged such differences and tended to fixate more on these trailblazers' fashion sense than on their political platforms.

Finally, many women struggled in the aftermath of suffrage to keep feminism relevant. Although the vote was never construed by suffragists as a capstone, the press proved successful in spinning the 1918 legislation as such. Adrian Bingham is particularly sensitive to this unintended consequence of the Representation of the People Act. “The press may have encouraged women to seize new freedoms and exercise their political rights,” he writes, “but it also encouraged the belief that the women's movement was no longer necessary” (88–89). This is not to suggest that women's rights entirely stalled during the interwar period—the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act, after all, was passed just a year later, in 1919—but feminist commitments came to be seen by many as outmoded, even by those who had most immediately benefited from the movement's successes. (One is reminded here of Margaret Thatcher's oft-quoted quip that she “owe[d] nothing to women's lib.”)

For the contributors to this collection, then, the “road to equality” has been marked by victories, yes, but also by struggles, frustrations, misrepresentations, and compromises. It may not be the narrative that Viscountess Rhondda had hoped for, but it is certainly a sobering account of rights in action.