I’m reading “Suffragettes: the fight for women’s votes” &rather than a history or worthy tome it is something far better. It is the suffragettes/suffragists in the words of their day from newspaper reports, critics and supporters, and most wonderfully of all in words of their own

I had no idea how inventive they were. The horsewoman who developed a technique to make police horses sit, or the woman who hired an airship and went leafleting over London in it with fifty six pounds of leaflets. There are so many stories that make me laugh with their joy

Others that make me well up, too.Stories of courage, or of imprisonment or of personal sacrifice.These women are real and magnificent. (Like the Lady getting arrested disguised as a sempstress so that she could show the shocking difference in treatment of working class prisoners)

As we are now in a new kind of women’s movement, one that seeks to preserve both our sex based rights and the recognition of women as a sex class, this book is even more precious to be reading. There is a lot here in the responses to these women that one can recognise

The fight may be different, the geography of the day may have changed but the forces at work are still the same. Women demanding to be seen as people in their own right and not only in reference to men is still treated as something audacious and wrong, like it was then.

The instinct to denounce,malign& lie about women is the same now as it was then.The disregard for women’s humanity remains a constant fraying thread wending its way through time&one can trace it back from the current day to the treatment of those women&then further back still

Eventually that thread will be broken but, perhaps, not today.

Most of all this book is giving me peace. It tells me that the betrayal of us as women, the voices raised against us, the unkindnesses and judgement should not be unexpected. All of it is only a demonstration of why we must fight.

It reminds me too, with its intricacies, that women are imperfect. That to be anything other than imperfect would make us inhuman and it is to be treated as though we are fully human that we are fighting for most of all

Women in this book disagree with one another, sometimes...

They leave the movement denouncing it as they go. They have personal grudges and grievances. They disagree wholeheartedly with each other’s initiatives and methods. Exactly as we see in our movement today. With hindsight, though, it appears that every woman was necessary.

Every method was part of the greater whole. You can no more extricate the women who broke window panes and set fire to post boxes from the movement for the vote than you can extricate those who wrote letters, avoided the census or considered militancy to be distasteful.

When looked at this way it becomes clear that all any of us can do is our own part.

This book also contains words from some of the antis. That’s fascinating, too. Especially as many of them were women.

At one point,wanting the vote for women was most definitely a niche position. The popularity of an idea really says nothing about its importance.When what seems like all the left of society is capitulating to unscientific,misogynist ideas we should take heart that that can change

While I sat reading this morning, in my garden, a young,brown blackbird came&sat a few feet from me,curious eyes watching me and my progress. One female creature regarding another. One of them with wings of feather and bone,&the other being uplifted on the wings of women’s words.

There is so much in the words of other women that comforts and inspires, and here they are reaching out from the past from their battleworn days, long before victory came, to offer a call to the woman’s fight.

We answer that call again.