This was an interesting book. I enjoyed reading it, and it had a lot of information in it that I've never heard about.

I was curious to read this book because of the title. I have learnt in the past few years that the Suffragettes had quite a few issues (they were all white middle class women, didn’t want the vote for all just rich and educated women, etc etc). What I have not seen before is somebody implying they were fascists.

It reminded me of something an old teacher of mine once said: ‘If you want to win a debate against somebody, find a way to imply that they agree with the Nazis.’ That’s basically what I felt this way was doing. The introduction I did find quite informative. I hadn’t been aware of the lack of democracy within the WSPU, so this was enlightening to me. Though I also don’t see why Emmeline Pankhurt shouldn’t be allowed to run her organization as she wanted. There was nothing stopping people who didn’t agree with her to join different organisations or starting their own.

However, many of Simon Webb’s arguments/opinions really grated on me. He repeatedly returns to the statement that the Suffragettes were terrorists because their actions were illegal. Yes they were illegal, but laws are created by those in charge and reflect their opinions. Progress and change very often requires breaking the law. As Audre Lorde wrote: “For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change”.

He also argues that the Suffragette’s actions were unnecessary as no one was really against women’s suffrage. The problem was that people could not agree on the type of suffrage that should be implemented: Universal (everyone gets a vote) or Equal (women gets to vote on same terms as men). Universal would mean working class people could vote which would benefit labour, Equal would benefit conservatives. Apparently what women should have done is just sat down and waited for the men to argue this one out in parliament, based entirely on their own interest *eye roll*. We’d probably still be waiting.

The rest of the book is basically Simon Webb mentioning different things fascists did, and finding ways to imply that the Suffragettes also did those things. Whilst he doesn’t say outright that they WERE fascists, that is the clear implication. On top of this the book is tedious and incredibly repetitive. If you want to learn more about the suffragettes, it shouldn’t be hard to find a better book to help you do so!

Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for providing this e-arc for an honest review.

This certainly was an eye opener. I wanted to read this book because the word Suffragette and Fascists didn't fit together in my mind.
I always believed in these women being heroines fighting for equality. Reading this book I felt only anger that the cause was only used for their personal benefit and interpretation. They really never got sentenced for what I consider mayor crimes. The short imprisonment did not fit their crimes. The forced feeding might have been a bit brutal but I can’t help feeling any kind of sympathy towards them. They were not interested into getting the vote for everybody only the more privileged class of woman. This book is a must for anybody that would like to have a bit better understanding. Certainly there were woman serious about what the suffragette should have stood for but it wasn't Emmeline Pankhurst and her WSPU. What they might have accomplished without it been their intention that working class male ended up getting the vote rather sooner than later.
A tremendous amount of research was done and was presented clearly with an understanding of the times and social unrest of that period.
The only reason I gave it a four instead of five star is that I felt some of the same information was repeated a couple of times. I know it was done mostly for clarity but it was kind of annoying to me. This is my personal preference only.

The title fascinated me from the start because, as a male, the only Suffragettes that I knew anything about were Emily Davison and, of course, the Pankhursts and then only the "widely circulated" information about them.

This book was a total revelation and Simon Webb has done an excellent job of making the history of the Suffragettes a very readable one, with little to no conjecture. I could not have imagined such a colourful past for these ladies who seemed to have turned their unshakable belief from a less than Universal Suffrage to Fascism purely at the behest of their Leader.

The Suffragettes were I think best known for their slogan - Votes For Women - a simple catch phrase which did not reflect their actual agenda which was votes for SOME women and which was intended to exclude the women of the "lower classes" from getting that vote. Their whole movement went downhill from there and, regrettably, society and history appear to have chosen to whitewash them into legendary paragons of virtue.

This book deserves and needs to be read so that the legend that is the Suffragettes can be correctly seen as the myth that it truly is.

Simon Webb is a very brave man. I can imagine the backlash from writing on this subject could be horrendous for anyone, let alone a man.
The book itself is fascinating. Details are given and supported by contemporary documents, making it impossible to deny that the history we are taught of suffragettes is warped at best, destructive at worst. I found this book a little repetitive in parts, and at times a bit frantic. Things are not laid out as clearly as they could be. Nevertheless, it makes for very interesting reading.

My thanks to the author, publisher, and NetGalley/Edelweiss+ for an advance copy to review. This review is entirely my own, unbiased, opinion.

Suffragette Fascists is a historical non-fiction, each and every chapter is thoroughly details and the source and information are well stated. My favourite part in the book are the illustrations, there are pictures, there are posters from that time with short descriptions which is a treat for the readers. At times the book gets too factual which made it a very slow read as we go through it , it would have better if the illustrations were along the texts and not pictures in the ending. Pictures and text together would have a been the perfect combination. The terms and terminology are well explained and in detail which would be excellent for academic purposes and people wanting to read more about Emmeline pankhurst. The part which made the book particularly interesting was that deals with questions and debunks myths at the same time. Even if you know nothing about the topic you can definitely read this one as it introduces you about pankhurst, suffragettes, that dark time for female in History and so on. I've tried my best to keep this review spoiler free so go ahead read this one.
I would like to thank netgalley and the publisher for providing me with the E-arc.

In this monograph, Simon Webb argues that the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), led by Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst, was a proto-fascist and terrorist organization that is undeserving of the accolades bestowed upon it by contemporary feminists and some politicians today. He asserts that the WSPU’s members, better known as suffragettes, were elitists, who conducted ferocious bombing and arson campaigns in which they demonstrated little respect for alternate views or for the lives of their opponents or innocent bystanders. He notes that many of the group’s former members would go on to champion anti-union activities, ethnic cleansing, concentration camps as well as support religious fanaticism. Rather than advancing women’s struggle for suffrage, the suffragettes’ militant actions delayed the granting of the parliamentary vote to British women. While Webb’s claims may shock some readers, they are far from new. Moreover, they are indicative of longstanding biases within the historiographical record.

The role of the suffragettes’ militant campaigns in the suffrage movement has long been a contentious topic of historical debate. Since the formation of the WSPU in 1903 in Great Britain, suffragettes and suffragists have locked horns over the violent tactics of the group and its impact on the suffrage movement. Seeking to establish their place in history, both Emmeline Parkhurst and her daughter Christabel wrote accounts of the WSPU and its struggles. In their respective autobiographies My Own Story and Unshackled: Suffragettes, each woman described the WSPU as an outgrowth of the failure of the National Union of Women Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) to achieve women’s suffrage through traditional means, such as political lobbying and peaceful protests. As Christabel Pankhurst succinctly stated, “For suffragists to put their faith in any men’s party, whatever it may call itself, is recklessly to disregard the lessons of the past forty years…The truth is that women must work out their own salvation. Men will not do it for them.” To this end, members engaged in acts of civil disobedience, arson, and bombings in order to convince members of the other sex that until women acquired the right to vote, there would no peace. This claim was immediately met with resistance from so-called constitutional suffragists, i.e. women who supported suffrage, but opposed any extra-constitutional, militant approach. For example, in The Cause, Ray Strachey, a NUWSS member at the time, denounced suffragettes’ methods as ineffective, inflammatory, and undemocratic. Similarly, some former members of the WSPU, such as Cicely Hamilton, who became disillusioned with the organization, attacked the Pankhursts for their authoritarian leadership style, describing Emmeline Pankhurst as ‘a forerunner of Lenin, Hitler, and Mussolini – the leader who could do no wrong.”

The claim that the WSPU was an extreme-right organization also was the product of familial tensions and sibling rivalry. Sylvia Pankhurst, who unlike her mother and older sister, wanted the organization to remain affiliated with the Independent Labor Party, depicted Christabel in her monograph Suffragette Movement: An Intimate Account of Persons and Ideals as exercising undue influence over their mother and as betraying socialist feminism: “Mrs. Pankhurst, to whom her first-born had ever been the dearest of her children proudly and openly proclaimed her eldest daughter to be her leader.” And this eldest daughter – Christabel – had shed the socialism in which she was raised “as readily as a garment.” Rather than the militant actions of the suffragettes, Sylvia maintained, that it was her success in getting the anti-suffragist Liberal Prime Minister Herbert Asquith to meet with her East London delegation in June 1914 that was key to winning women the vote (Sylvia Pankhurst quoted in June Purvis, “Christabel Pankhurst: A Conservative Suffragette? In Rethinking Right-Wing Women: Gender and the Conservative Party, 1880s to Present, 2017). Thus, the two sides of the debate on the role of suffragettes in the struggle for women’s right to vote was established early on, including the claim that the suffragettes were conservative, autocratic, and even proto-fascist.

Not wanting to be left out of the debate, male historians had to get in on the action. The so-called Masculinist school of interpretation emerged with the publication of George Dangerfield’s The Strange Death of Liberal England in 1935. This school of thought blamed the suffragettes for the failure of multiple Liberal governments to pass universal suffrage. Dangerfield and other proponents of this school described suffragettes as “unhinged” and “irrational,” leading to a lack of public support for suffrage.
All three of these schools have adherents to this day. For example, in her 2012 biography of Emmeline Pankhurst, Paula Bartley advanced a Constitutionalist approach to the suffragette’s place in history, while C.J. Bearman in a 2005 article (“An Examination of Suffragette Violence” English Historical Review, April 2005, pp. 365-97) utilized a masculinist approach.

Arguably, Simon Webb’s narrative also fits within the Masculinist paradigm. Repeatedly, he highlights the violence of women’s actions while downplaying the use of violence by authorities against suffragettes. For example, Webb only briefly references the actions of the London police on 18 November 1910, when 300 women marched to the Houses of Parliament as part of their campaign to secure voting rights. Webb’s description of events on "Bloody Friday" is limited to “the police behaved very roughly.” He makes no mention of the fact that some women were sexually assaulted by metropolitan police, nor does he mention that two women later died from injuries sustained that day (See June Purvis, “Deeds, not words: The daily lives of militant suffragettes in Edwardian Britain,” Women’s Studies International Forum, March-April 1995, pp. 91-101). Similarly, he downplays the harm done by prison doctors to incarcerated WSPU members who staged hunger strikes. For example, one WSPU member was subject to force feedings, nasally, rectally, and vaginally. These “feedings” left her in extreme pain and caused genital injury. In short, she was tortured by prison officials under the guise of providing nutrition (See Diane Atkinson, Rise Up Women!: The Remarkable History of the Suffragettes, 2018).

Worse yet, although Webb’s monograph includes a bibliography, there are no footnotes, making it impossible for a reader to verify his sources for specific claims. Given the seriousness of the allegations he makes against the suffragettes, such notes are critical and are the hallmark of any professional history. He also fudges some facts. For example, he points out that Adela Pankhurst later in life became an ardent supporter of fascism (true), but he fails to mention that like Sylvia, she too split with the WSPU early one over its use of violence. Similarly, in discussing the arson of multiple tea shops owned by Katherine Strange, he fails to tell the whole story. Karen Strange did confront the WSPU leadership after her tea shop was burned to the ground, but what Webb does not mention is that the tea shop was not registered in the name of the two women who owned it, rather it was registered as belonging to Ewens and Sons. Harriet Kerr told Strange that if they had known the business was owned by two women, they would not have targeted it. This statement does not excuse Kerr’s seemingly insensitive remarks about the women left without employment (which Webb included): “You take too personal a view of the matter. Your women will, I have no doubt, be very glad by and by to think that they lent their help.” But it does complicate Kerr’s remarks.

Repeatedly, Webb fails to provide the full historical context, so that he can draw a false equivalency between Nazis and suffragettes. Moreover, he demonstrates disdain for those who offer a different assessment of the suffragettes than his known. For example, he describes June Purvis, Professor Emeritus of Women's and Gender History at Portsmouth University as “a well-known apologist for the suffragettes” and oversimplifies her position. He accuses Purvis of taking suffragettes at their word; yet, he takes a hostile press at its word

Certainly, the suffragettes were not saints, and few feminist scholars today characterize them as such. For example, most feminist scholars acknowledge that European women were often complicit in the oppression of colonized women and that leading advocates of woman’s right to choose, such as Margaret Sanger, supported Malthusian eugenics. In short, feminists were not always ahead of their times on all issues. Still, the suffragettes did play a significant role in advancing women’s right to vote, as it was the publicity that these women’s militant actions generated that constitutional feminists successfully exploited. To equate this movement with fascism is a gross oversimplification that fails to take into account the circumstances to which these women responded.