Suffragettes Forever! The Story of Women and Power

In this series, historian Amanda Vickery explores why, in the early 20th century, thousands of British women joined a violent militant organisation. In the struggle for women's political rights in Britain, the most iconic are the suffragettes - but for Vickery the story begins long before these Edwardian activists. The suffragette campaign was the inevitable conclusion of a fight that women, rich and poor, had been pursuing for hundreds of years against a system that gave men complete legal, political and physical control over the other half of the population. In this first programme Vickery describes how a wife was the property of her husband - who could if he chose, beat, rape or even sell her to another man. But the revolutionary politics of the late 18th century opened a crack in the door. From a wife sale at Hailsham cattle market, to the bloodstained streets of Paris on the trail of the grandmother of British feminism, to the heroic Manchester women attacked at Peterloo, to the great opportunity of the Great Reform Act, Vickery describes how at every step men furiously resisted giving women an inch.

In this second programme Amanda Vickery describes the paradox for British women of a female queen who thought women's rights campaigners deserved a good whipping. But during Victoria's reign extraordinary women gradually changed the lives and opportunities of their sex, despite successive governments furiously resisting giving women the vote. Vickery introduces us to the spurned mistress of a prime minister, who lost custody of her own children but won the first piece of modern feminist legislation - child custody rights for mothers. Plus a passionate campaigner who raised the age of consent and overthrew pernicious laws against prostitutes, a Cambridge undergraduate who proved that girls could even be better at maths than boys and undermined the centuries old prejudice that a Cambridge education was for men only, and a certain Mrs Pankhurst and her daughters, who decided that after so many years of women campaigning for the vote, it was now time to resort to deeds rather than words.

In the final episode of her story of British women's fight for power, the historian Amanda Vickery explores how the Edwardian suffragette movement became a quasi-terrorist organisation. She asks what they achieved with their violent campaign and argues they are best understood as part of a war still going on today. Vickery brings to life the enemies of female suffrage too, from the golfing prime minister Herbert Asquith, who had nightmares of being stripped naked by angry suffragettes, to the furious anti-suffrage societies and their mass meetings in the Royal Albert Hall. She describes the political skulduggery to stop women getting the vote and the increasing extremism of the suffragettes in response. So what did the suffragettes achieve? Vickery describes the political backroom deal that finally allowed some women the vote, the abusive treatment of the first female MP Lady Astor and the misogynistic backlash of the 1920s, revealed through attitudes to a great women's football team. The series concludes by looking ahead, 50 years after women won the vote, to Margaret Thatcher. Was her election a sign that the suffragette dream had been fulfilled, or is this a fight that is still going on today?