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Papers by Laura E Mayhall

Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 2015

Twentieth Century British History, 2010

This roundtable is the first in a projected series that will take global soundings of the present... more This roundtable is the first in a projected series that will take global soundings of the present state of twentieth-century British history, consciously pushing away from the shores of the British Isles to involve scholars not based institutionally in the UK. We begin in North ...

The American Historical Review

The Journal of Modern History

A Cultural History of Democracy in the Age of Empire

Feminist Media Histories, 2016

While Nancy Astor's 1919 victory at the polls—making her the first female member of British P... more While Nancy Astor's 1919 victory at the polls—making her the first female member of British Parliament—figures prominently in narratives of women's political progress in Britain, the taunt thrown at her while she was campaigning at the Barbican earlier that year, “It's your face that is carrying you through!” figures nowhere in discussions of women's entry into formal political life there. Astor's rejoinder, “No, it's the heart behind it,” points to a tension in her candidacy and subsequent political career that is characteristic of modern celebrity: between the superficial and the genuine, the artificial and the authentic. This text describes how a “film star” and “a personality,” rarely seen by contemporaries as a politician in any masculine sense, successfully publicized the democratic elements of her persona in order to make privilege more palatable in the age of universal suffrage.

Journal of Women's History, 2017

Cultural and Social History, 2007

ABSTRACT In the 1920s and 1930s Americans avidly consumed news of Edward, Prince of Wales, throug... more ABSTRACT In the 1920s and 1930s Americans avidly consumed news of Edward, Prince of Wales, through a variety of media: mass circulation newspapers and magazines, radio, the gramophone and film. This article argues that the Prince of Wales' popularity in the United States between the wars sheds light on key changes in the meaning of citizenship following mass enfranchisement in the Anglo-American world. It argues also that media representations of the Prince of Wales contributed to the creation of an Anglophone culture of celebrity, which would become a primary means by which Britons and Americans came to know each other in the inter-war years.

Women's History Review, 1995

Recent work on the militant suffrage movement in Britain suggests that the Edwardian 'Votes for W... more Recent work on the militant suffrage movement in Britain suggests that the Edwardian 'Votes for Women' campaign promoted in its participants a common identity forged through the experiences of the suffragette hunger strike and forcible feeding. Critical scrutiny of the texts upon which these analyses are based, however, reveals a more complex relationship between suffragettes' experiences and their representations of the same. In the 1920s and 1930s, a small group of former suffragettes created a highly stylized story of their participation in the Edwardian suffrage campaign that equated militancy with service to the nation during the First World War. While this story drew upon earlier representations of women's martyrdom and passivity, it more consistently promoted the agency and comradeship of women in the movement. This aspect of the narration of the subject of suffrage has played a significant, yet unexamined, role in the self-fashioning of British and American feminist scholars since the 1970s. In her introduction to the 1987 Cresset Library reissue of Christabel Pankhurst's 1959 memoir, Unshackled: the story of how we won the vote, Rita Pankhurst, daughter-in-law of Christabel's younger sister, Sylvia, observed that in contrast to the fate of the "constitutional" wing of the Edwardian women's suffrage movement, the "militant" wing "is alive in the popular memory and some meaning attaches to the word 'Suffragette' ... It would appear that the suffragettes have hijacked the movement's image as they hijacked the action at the time".[2] A glance across the historiography of the British women's suffrage movement would bear out this analysis.[3] Not only do suffragettes dominate discussions of the prewar women's suffrage movement, but the very definition of militancy with which historians and critics operate equates it with the material practices of window-breaking, arson, and hunger striking, associated with members of the Women's Social and Political Union under the leadership of Christabel and Emmeline Pankhurst. This remains the case, despite the presence of a vibrant and CREATING THE 'SUFFRAGETTE SPIRIT' 319

The European Legacy, 2001

Journal of Women's History, 2000

Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies, 1998

Albion, 2002

Book I Finding her way: family background, rebellious child, troubled girlhood struggle for a med... more Book I Finding her way: family background, rebellious child, troubled girlhood struggle for a medical education 1872-73 - early friendships, apprenticeships for journalism and the platform realities of medical practice, London Dialectical Society, Sunday Lecture Society Admiral Maxse debate, coming of age, Scottish lecture tour election to the London School Board, Bradlaugh-Besant scandal, marriage. Book II The realities of life: domestic struggle, early books, second school board race motherhood, suffrage campaign, third school board race the London press and the provincial press, Harriet Martineau biography, Contagious Diseases Act "The Illustrated London News", Women's Franchise Leatue the Wolstenholme-Elmy misunderstanding. Book III The fullness of life: Susan B. Anthony Women's Congress, the Chicago World's Fair, 1893, America women's suffrage leaders editor, "Outward Bound" and "Homeward Bound", the International Council of Women, London, 1899 "The Women's Signal", 1895-99 - 'the most important feminist paper of the period" National Woman's Suffrage meeting, Washington DC, 1902, International Woman Suffrage Committee. Appendix: Florence Fenwick Miller bibliography.

Journal of British Studies, 2000

May some definition be given of the word “militant”? (Chelsea delegate Cicely Hamilton)Scholarshi... more May some definition be given of the word “militant”? (Chelsea delegate Cicely Hamilton)Scholarship on the women's suffrage movement in Britain has reached a curious juncture. No longer content to chronicle the activities or document the contributions of single organizations, historians have begun to analyze the movement's strategies of self-advertisement and to disentangle its racial, imperial, and gendered ideologies. Perhaps the most striking development in recent scholarship on suffrage, however, has been the proliferating discourse on militancy among literary critics, a development with which few historians have engaged. Yet, while militancy has spawned a veritable subfield in literary studies, continually generating new articles and books, these accounts portray the phenomenon in similarly reductive terms. After 1903 the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU), under the leadership of Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst, revitalized a genteel and moribund women'...