The Suffragettes: from Hard Sell to Hard Cell - SOLD OUT

Please note this event is now sold out.

7.30pm

A little over 100 years ago, the Representation of the People Act fundamentally changed the political landscape of the United Kingdom. For the first time women were able to vote. But not all suffragettes welcomed the Act: in order to vote, a woman had to be over 30 years of age (men had to be just 21, or 19 if serving military personnel), and had to meet certain property qualifications. In this talk, Emma Rees asks who the Act omitted and why. She maps the road to 1918 and asks what the consequences of the Act were for the suffragette movement and for its most vocal campaigners: the Pankhurst family. She also reveals some, at times, surprising continuities between the suffragettes’ struggle and the political world today, as well as identifying some local suffragette heroes.

Emma Rees is professor of literature and gender studies and Director of the Institute of Gender Studies at the University of Chester. Her second book, The Vagina: A Literary and Cultural History was published in 2013. She has published widely in the field of gender and representation and was the inaugural Political Writer in Residence at Gladstone’s Library. Emma is currently working on her third book, tentatively called That is a
Feminist Issue, looking at modern feminism’s fractures. She runs the biennial international, interdisciplinary Talking Bodies conference at the University of Chester.

Tickets are priced at £8. To book please call 01244 532350 or email [email protected].