The women who won poll position

Previous accounts of women's suffrage history in Britain have focused on the activities of key figures in the early 20th century, such as Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst, founders of the militant Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU). In this fine, impeccably researched book, Sandra Stanley Holton shifts the historical gaze to include the achievements of the 19th century, as well as lesser-known persons involved in the British movement - Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy, Jessie Craigen, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Hannah Mitchell, Mary Gawthorpe, Laurence Housman and Alice Clark. Although they did not form a distinct group, they were linked to each other through friendship, kinship and comradeship.

One of the most striking portraits is that of Elmy (1833-1918), a neglected figure whom Dora Montefiore claimed had "quite the most able mind and memory of any 19th-century woman". The daughter of a Wesleyan minister, her story epitomises all the hopes, fears, persistence, courage and bitter disappointments of so many of these early pioneers. She was, claims Holton, the "moving spirit" in the formation of the Married Women's Property Committee, founded in l855, and regarded as the beginning of the organised women's movement. She also established the Women's Franchise League and then the Women's Emancipation Union. These two organisations in particular encapsulated one of her key concerns, namely the inclusion of married women in the franchise.

The ending of coverture, whereby the legal personhood of a married woman, including any property (the main qualification for the franchise) was subsumed under that of her husband, was one of Elmy's most pressing concerns. A member of radical suffragist circles in the Manchester-Liverpool region, she shocked many by being five months' pregnant before she was persuaded to marry her partner, with whom she had lived in a "free union".

Refusing to compromise over what she saw as false considerations of respectability and political expediency, Elmy was frequently at the centre of the tensions and divisions within the women's movement.

Holton deftly reveals the continuity between 19th-century radical suffragism and the 20th-century militancy of the WSPU, with its demand not for adult suffrage, but for votes for women on the same terms as it was, or would be, granted to men. She also gives prominence to the transatlantic links these women established and the international significance of their work.

Although this book is uneven in places, especially in its interweaving of individual lives with coverage of key events in the suffrage movement, these are minor quibbles. What we have here is a story about the struggle for the vote that reveals not a steady line of progress through the pressure group politics of key heroic figures, but an account of conflicts and ruptures, continuities and discontinuities. By drawing upon untapped sources about ordinary, local activists, Holton is able to present a more complex picture to that previously drawn.

Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy would have approved. Her long years of dedication to the women's cause were crowned in February l918 when women over 30, subject to property qualifications, were given the vote. She died on March 12 of that year, before she could exercise her right in the next general election.

June Purvis is professor of sociology, University of Portsmouth.