Watching Women

""It is a rare thing to find a work of scholarship that reorganizes what we think we know about the British suffrage movement, but Stephanie J. Brown's brilliantly researched Watching Women does just that. By centring surveillance in the suffrage story and tracking the dynamic along with the often surprising interplay between suffragettes and the surveillance state, Brown positions feminist activists as smart readers of a quickly evolving surveillance culture, engaged in inventive negotiations with an environment of inspection that included state actors, neighbours, and family. This is groundbreaking work for modernist studies and suffrage studies alike.""--Barbara Green, Professor of English, University of Notre Dame ""Stephanie J. Brown's Watching Women identifies the many links between the women's suffrage movement and the rise of the surveillance state. In doing so, it meets a need that will be immediately legible: historians of suffrage have insufficiently attended to surveillance, and historians of policing have rarely attended to the presence and role of women, especially suffragettes. Watching Women is a lively read and a major work of scholarship.""--Anne E. Fernald, Professor of English and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Fordham University ""This groundbreaking book shows how the threat of women's activism catalysed state surveillance in twentieth-century Britain. Foregrounding the writing and actions of militant suffragists, Watching Women is an analytically sharp text that unveils the potency of radical feminist work.""--Torin Monahan, author of Crisis Vision: Race and the Cultural Production of Surveillance