By Victoria Martínez

Just because women have been formally excluded from politics for much of recorded history does not mean they have not been political actors. Even when disenfranchised and denied equal rights, women have fought for causes important to women and all people. Political Women by historian Professor Maggie Andrews (2024, Pen & Sword History) demonstrates this by exploring fifteen campaigns led by British women during the twentieth century that shaped the current century.

Although some well-known women in history appear in the book – for instance, Nancy Astor, the first woman to take a seat in the House of Commons in 1919 – many of the women featured in the book are “average” women whose fight for something close to home ultimately benefitted all women and all of British society. Andrew’s chapter on the Glasgow rent strike of 1915 – organized by housewives living in crowded tenements – is a case in point. While caring for their homes and families, the women coordinated to protest outrageous rent increases and prevent landlords from evicting tenants for non-payment. Their efforts were so successful that 20,000 households soon participated in the action and men working at local shipyards and factories threatened to strike in support of the rent strike.

Other campaigns featured in the book also started in the home, reflecting both women’s limited sphere of influence and how their actions were not for or benefited women alone. As Andrews writes, “Health, welfare and public amenities, like housing, were political issues that women cared about in the inter-war years” (p. 19). Women’s concern with these issues worried some in politics, who feared that enfranchised women would make politics “more parochial” (p. 14). If anything, time seems to have shown the opposite. Today, adequate housing and public healthcare are internationally recognized as human rights (even if they are still not granted to all).

The sad truth is that although the campaigns highlighted in this book improved life for twenty-first-century Britons, some are battles still being fought, in Britain and elsewhere. Of course, one of these is the battle over women’s bodily autonomy and right to choice. Andrews’ chapter titled “Avoiding Unwanted Pregnancy for the Young (1964)” is in reality about the much longer (and at least partly unfulfilled) quest for women to have access to information about sex and reproduction, effective and affordable birth control, and safe and legal abortions. Another chapter that stands out is “Prostitutes Sit-in at Holy Cross Church (1982),” which addresses the larger issue of violence against women (and society’s implicit acceptance of it, such as in cases of the rape of prostitutes and marital rape). Andrews’ statement, “The aim of all women to go out safely when and where they chose, was hard to achieve” (p. 127), is no less true now than it was in the late 1970s and early 1980s when the Yorkshire Ripper murdered 13 women.

Although the women featured in the book are primarily white women born in Britain, Andrews highlights campaigns led by LGBTQ people and women of color. Early in the book, she draws attention to the attempts to suppress (and the success of) Radclyffe Hall’s 1928 novel The Well of Loneliness, a groundbreaking work of LGBTQ literature. Moving forward both in time and the book is another important chapter on Black and Asian women’s activism in the 1970s, including individual and coordinated campaigns against virginity tests on Asian women at Heathrow Airport, racism in education and healthcare, police brutality, and domestic violence. Andrews makes the important point that although some of these issues overlapped with white British women’s concerns, Black and Asian women in Britain had different experiences relating to these issues. For instance, while white British women were seeking access to birth control and abortions, Black and Asian women’s bodies were being controlled through birth control and abortion, sometimes without their consent.

Only one of the chapters in Political Women seemed to me like it did not belong – Chapter 15 “’Tell me what you want, what you really, really want’ – Girl Power (1996).” That is until I read it. Previously, I would have laughed (in fact, I did laugh) at the notion that the 1990s girl group The Spice Girls could be considered a ‘campaign’ on par with others of the twentieth century. But Andrews makes a compelling argument for why it is:

“This was a political campaign which did not seek to change laws, welfare provision, media, government or employers’ behavior; it sought to change the way young women felt about themselves.” (p. 158)

Political Women is only partly about campaigns that shaped twenty-first-century Britain and the women behind them. And it does more than remind us that women have always been political and that many of the problems these campaigns addressed remain unresolved. It also challenges notions of what it means to be a political woman by illustrating that women’s engagement in political activism in the twentieth century was as diverse as it was powerful.

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