YOU won’t have missed the fact that this year is the centenary of some women winning the vote. While it’s marvellous to see women’s history on the agenda, it’s disappointing, too, that it is still not fully integrated into the main historical canon rather than celebrated as a novelty on anniversaries. 

Despite the intensity of the current focus on suffrage, we still tend to be fed a rather Pankhurst-centric version of events, so wedded do we remain to the great (and white, and usually middle or upper-class) individuals historical narrative. 

Yet years before the formation of the Pankhursts’ Women's Social and Political Union, working-class women — Lancashire mill workers, in particular — were demanding the vote and were prominent in the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies.