Mitzi Auchterlonie – författare

As the suffragette movement was becoming increasingly militant what was the Conservative reaction to successive parliamentary bills on women's suffrage and what was the level of support for votes for women within the Tory party? After the 1867 Reform Bill, Conservatives were hesitant about supporting further measures to widen the franchise. Although a few party members supported John Stuart Mill's proposal for women's suffrage, and some notable individual Conservative women were part of the early organised campaigns for female enfranchisement, the period before the 1880s saw little interest in this issue among the party faithful. It was only when the grassroots Primrose League was created in 1883 that the suffrage question was taken up by a number of its women members.One of the most significant gaps in our knowledge of the British women's suffrage movement is how the Conservative Party dealt with this controversial issue. In this important reassessment of Conservative women's suffrage, Mitzi Auchterlonie looks at the political activities of Conservative women between 1867 and 1914.As the campaigning by the women's suffrage societies intensified and became more militant, Conservative suffragists responded by founding the Conservative and Unionist Women's Franchise Association (CUWFA) in 1908. This became the third largest women's suffrage party of the pre-World War One period.Auchterlonie looks at the activities of this organisation and its publication "The Conservative and Unionist Women's Franchise Review" in depth, enabling readers to understand the social, political, economic and imperial issues which most concerned Conservative suffragists. She charts their campaigning activities at local and national level using primary sources including memoirs of prominent Conservative supporters of women's suffrage. She discusses the relationship between the CUWFA and politicians of all parties as well as their links with other suffrage organisations. Auchterlonie concludes that Conservative women, dismissed by some as marginal to suffrage history, played a significant part in the suffrage campaigns, while the party itself contained an unexpectedly diverse range of views towards the idea of votes for women.

Highly Commended for the W.G. Hoskins Prize in the Devon History Society Book of the Year awards.This book is one of the first to study the regional role of women in public and professional life, breaking new ground in early twentieth-century local and gender history.Covering politics (Eleanor Acland and Clara Daymond), medicine and education (Dr Mabel Ramsay and Jessie Headridge), and a variety of voluntary organizations (Florence Cecil, Georgiana Buller, Jane Clinton and Sylvia Calmady-Hamlyn), it shows how women worked individually and in collaboration to create new opportunities for women and girls in a large, mainly rural, county far from London and the industrial heartlands of England. These biographical studies are based on original research and reveal the huge public contribution made by these eight women, who up to now have been largely hidden from history.Devon Women in Public and Professional Life, 1900–1950 is a contribution to the history of women in Britain between the wars, a period that has received less attention than the Edwardian era and the two World Wars. It also fills a major gap in the history of Devon women, on which almost nothing has been published, and on Devon in the inter-war period, similarly neglected by historians. It will be of interest to academics and students in the fields of gender history and the history of modern Britain, as well as everyone interested in the history of twentieth-century Devon.