How will these resources help you?

Women’s history in schools has been dominated by the campaign for the vote. However, the diversity of women’s activism is breathtaking, as these resources illustrate. Women have been involved in a wide range of political activities: from the grassroots through to the top-most level of government; from small pressure groups to mass movements; from single-issue campaigns to multi-layered programmes to change the world; from socialist women to those on the far-right; from local crusades through to international movements. It is a story of women from different classes, racial and ethnic groups and from various religious and non-religious affiliations. More recently, the Black Lives Matter movement has established the need to rewrite history, not only to retrieve the stories of BAME individuals but also to question the very nature of the British past. Britain in 1900 was a very different place from Britain a century later – many of the concerns of activists at the beginning of the century were quite different from those at its end. Moreover, two world wars and the vicissitudes of the 1930s depression changed the very nature of activism during these periods. Of course, women are not a homogenous group, and they were not all fighting for the same rights on the same ticket. Nevertheless, history shows continuity as well as change, and a number of themes and concerns are seen to develop through the century – equal opportunities, employment rights and parliamentary rights are examples of campaigns which broadened their scope and gathered momentum as the century progressed.