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The Finding Aid

The complete survey and listing of sources relating to women held in the National Archives at Kew, England, is presented here. This extends to over 2,000 pages which prohibited conventional publication in print. There are lists relating to:

Abortion
Alien workers
Clothing
Conditions of service and trade unions
Divorce
Domestic work and training
Education and training
Employment
Equal Opportunities and Pay
Forces
Government officers, Civil Servants and MPs
Health
Home Front
Honours and Awards
Labour Advisory Committees
Manual work
Marriage
Maternity and child welfare
Munitions and Ordnance
Noteworthy Women
Nursing and Midwifery
Petitions, claims and cases
Prisoners
Professional
Property and Finance
Prostitution
Single parents
Teaching and Teacher Training
Victims
Widows
Wives
Women's organisations
Women's Suffrage, rights and status

The added advantage of publishing this material online is that the lists can be thoroughly interrogated with the aid of the powerful search engine provided. This resource will be of great value for anyone planning to visit The National Archives as the listings can be searched and studied in advance.

Original Documents on the Suffrage Question in Britain, the Empire and
Colonial Territories

We include access to over 5,000 pages of original source documents. These are drawn from Home Office Files (HO 45 and HO 144), Cabinet Papers (CAB 41), Metropolitan Police Office (MEPO 2 and MEPO 3), Records of the Wallace Collection (AR 1), Colonial Office (CO 323, CO 1031, CO 1032) and Dominions Office (DO 35).

Many sources concentrate on the womens suffrage movement in the UK between 1906 and 1922. The documents contain papers on government and police handling of the suffrage question, photographs and descriptions of leading suffragettes, police reports on suffrage meetings and disturbances, including attacks on the Wallace Collection and death of
Emily Davidson after throwing herself under the kings horse at the Derby in 1913. There are petitions, newspaper clippings, extracts from Parliamentary debates, Cabinet opinion and Committee reports on franchise bills, including the work of the Equal Franchise Committee of 1927-1928. There are also various sources relating to the arrest of suffragettes, their transit in police vans and treatment in prison. Accounts from suffragettes and their supporters, and reports from prison authorities provide details of hunger strikes and forced feeding.

There is also a large number of documents from the Colonial Office and the Dominions Office relating to the increasing debate after 1900 on the development of universal suffrage throughout the British empire, continuing through to the post-1945 period when colonial territories started to press for independence. We include a sequence from the CO 1032 files on suffrage arrangements in Colonial territories, 1954-1962. This material addresses issues of race, the legislature and voting procedures.

Our consultant editor, Professor Martin Pugh, author of The March of the Women:
A Revisionist Analysis of the Campaign for Women's Suffrage, 1866-1914 (OUP 2000) provides a contextual essay with hypertext links to many of the original documents.

Access is by IP recognition and/or password and there are no extra charges for multiple users over a single university site. As such, scholars will be able to use the material in the classroom, access it in the library or set essays that will require undergraduates to examine the images anywhere on campus. This will feed the increased demand for material allowing students to work with primary sources.

$9,900/£5,500 - available now

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