Many studies of British culture and society fall under the periodized rubric of “pre–World War I”; others, “the Interwar years.” A relatively small number attempt to deal with the war years head-on, and this oversight, Angela Smith argues, perpetuates the rather counterintuitive myths that social movements and the discourses informing and emanating from them were either put on hold for the duration of the war, or that the war had a negligible impact on them. Suffrage Discourse in Britain during the First World War succeeds in dispelling these impulses by showing that not only was a great amount and variety of women's suffrage discourse produced between 1914 and 1918 but that the context of the First World War served as a kind of pressure cooker for suffrage organizations, exacerbating preexisting ideological fault lines, creating new ones, hardening certain lines of thinking, and fragmenting others. In this way, the war provided a formative context for the complex character, articulation, and organization of the “New Feminisms” of the 1920s and beyond.

The first chapter serves to introduce the cast of both famous and lesser-known suffrage activist-writers who populate this study: Emmeline, Christabel, and Sylvia Pankhurst; Millicent Fawcett; Mary Sheepshanks; May Sinclair; Cicely Hamilton; and Dora Marsden, to name a few. What these figures did and wrote during the war and why forms, for the most part, the substance of the remaining seven chapters, which are comprised of literary and historical analysis of editorials, novels, poems, memoirs, and a smattering of diaries and letters. While this first section is meant to rehearse the variety of suffrage discourse in the decade before 1914, the author focuses on a key theme within this literature: that militaristic language, especially that produced by the Pankhurst-led Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU), was a facet of suffrage discourse long before the war. She argues that Emmeline and Christabel's 1914 shift from publishing The Suffragette, a radical newspaper designed to promulgate the suffragettes’ war on the British government, to Britannia, an extremely patriotic, prowar publication that doggedly supported Lloyd George's administration, was a passionate rechanneling of The Suffragette's rhetoric and cause. By supporting Britain and Empire in a time of need, WSPU members sought to demonstrate that women deserved the vote; the war certainly did not dispel their suffrage ambitions.

While WSPU went prowar, another chapter deals with Sylvia Pankhurst's ousting from the organization and her establishment of the resolutely antiwar, prosocialist publication The Women's Dreadnought. Women's suffrage continued to be a goal of Sylvia’s, but it operated within her concern for worker's rights and universal suffrage. Subsequent chapters forefront the complexity and range of suffrage discourse that was articulated: one deals with war work and suffrage as women demonstrated their crucial labor power as nurses, administrators, sweated labor, and industry workers; another examines how Hamilton and Sinclair, perhaps lesser-known novelists and feminist thinkers, wrote about the ideals of the suffrage campaigns vis-à-vis the devastation of war; and, building on an argument Smith made in her first book, The Second Battlefield: Women, Modernism and the First World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), how Marsden and others worked through formative ideas of modernism, individualism, and feminism during the war in the pages of The Egoist. A very short final chapter makes the point that suffrage discourse certainly did not end in 1918 with the Representation of the People Act, which gave the vote to British women property holders and wives of householders over the age of thirty, as the majority of suffrage activists felt, for various reasons, that the legislation did not enfranchise nearly enough people.

Throughout, this study suffers from a lack of engagement with the ever-mounting body of secondary literature that analyzes the British feminist movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries within the social and cultural context of imperial Britain. How does the discourse for (British, white, female) suffrage shift when the nonwhite, colonial, male Other serves Britain in the trenches? Surely a sustained engagement with this question and others like it would render a much richer view of how suffrage activists negotiated female citizenship in Britain and acknowledge, in important ways, how the female suffrage movement deeply affected British politics, both at home and abroad, in the twentieth century. Given this, the chapter that deals with Fawcett, the International Women's Suffrage Alliance (IWSA), and the periodical Jus Suffragii's internationalism and pacifism during the war is by far the most disappointing, as it fails to investigate how the “global sisterhood” advocated by the IWSA served to appropriate and obfuscate nonwhite, nonmiddling class, and non-Western voices under the banner of pacifism. Another source of frustration comes from Smith's flat discussion of “militant language” as she focuses on WSPU rhetoric as prototypical militancy too quickly and steadfastly in an analysis that seeks to display the range of discursive intersections between the war and suffrage. For readers intrigued by Smith's work and seeking other historical takes on this material, Laura E. Nym Mayhall's The Militant Suffrage Movement: Citizenship and Resistance in Britain, 1860–1930 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003) might be the place to start, as might Nicoletta Gullace's “The Blood of Our Sons”: Men, Women, and the Renegotiation of British Citizenship during the Great War (New York: Palgrave, 2002).

Smith, a senior lecturer in English at the University of Plymouth, has produced a work that answers many of the questions it sets out to ask. Undoubtedly, suffrage activists, with varying degrees of passion and success, articulated a wide range of positions on the war that were informed by their feminist politics, and certainly vice versa. For those who are interested in tracking what the famous suffrage activists thought and did during the war, this book will likely contain that information in very accessible prose. Perhaps most important, however, Smith showcases a number of primary materials that should inspire other scholars to examine war and feminist discourse between 1914 and 1918 in greater detail and, more broadly, how the context of war impacts social movements of all kinds.