The Ascent of Woman: A History of the Suffragette Movement

The Ascent of Woman: A History of the Suffragette Movement (Paperback)
by Melanie Phillips (Author)

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0349116601?v=glance&n=266239

The story of the fight to gain the vote for women is about much more than a
peripheral if picturesque skirmish around the introduction of universal
suffrage. It is an explosive story of social and sexual revolutionary upheaval,
and one which has not yet ended. The movement for women's suffrage in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries prefigured to a startling extent the
controversies which rage today around the role of women. Far from the stereotype
of a uniform body of women chaining themselves to railings, the early feminist
movement was riven by virulent arguments over women's role in society, the
balance to be struck between self-fulfilment and their duties to family and
children, and their relationship with men. Melanie Phillips' brilliant book
tells the story of the fight for women's suffrage in a way which sets the high
drama of those events in the context of the moral and intellectual ferment that
characterised it.