Struggle and Suffrage in Portsmouth : Women's Lives and the Fight for Equality

The women of Portsmouth had of necessity to be tough. They kept their families together during long naval and military deployments overseas, raising their children on their own for much of this time. They worked in domestic service, in nearby stay factories or simply took in sewing to complete in their own homes, often with the help of their children. The local suffrage campaign was driven as much by the lack of opportunities for middle-class women as reaction to sweating in local stay factories and the injustices of the Contagious Diseases Acts. Womens own voices are seldom heard in surviving sources before the end of the 19th century, but as the century came to an end suffragists, pioneers of womens education, women who stood for public office for the first time, and those who entered the professions began to step forward. The First World War gave women the opportunity to prove that they could be effectively integrated into a male workforce. Similar sentiments were expressed by local women barely a generation later during the Second World War. This time the war came to Portsmouth and much of the old city was destroyed by enemy bombing. With their men away, women had to cope on their own with this wholesale destruction of their homes and communities - and the deaths of relations and friends. Womens own voices are heard most effectively for the first time in the postwar period through the medium of oral history. Recordings made over the last thirty years and printed, edited extracts of those recordings are used to detail womens lives and more recent times, and the continuing fight for equality This social and political history of women's suffrage in Portsmouth, England, covers a century of struggle from the mid-nineteenth century into the twentieth. The women of Portsmouth had to be tough. Many of them kept their families together during wartime, others worked in domestic service or in nearby stay factories. The local suffrage movement was driven as much by the lack of opportunity as by ruinously unjust laws. This volume shines a light on the women of Portsmouth who struggled for change. In the Victorian Era, women had few rights, and faced being thrown into an asylum thanks to the Contagious Diseases Acts. But in the First World War, they proved their ability to work effectively in the male workforce. And in World War II, women persevered as Portsmouth was destroyed by enemy bombing. Through this long, tumultuous period, a gathering chorus of pioneering women raised their voices. Those voices are now collected here, allowing the women of Portsmouth to tell their own stories of the fight for equality. An intriguing account of how women's lives in Portsmouth helped shape how the fight for equality was fought here.