Playwright, journalist and suffragist, Cicely Hamilton (born Cicely Hamill, 1872-1952) is perhaps best known for her A Pageant of Great Women (1910), co-conceived and directed by Edy Craig, while her short story, How the Vote was Won, was successfully dramatised by Craig’s partner, Christopher St. John a year earlier. Like Corbett and Holme, Hamilton served with a Scottish Women’s Hospitals unit during WW1, based north of Paris (ODNB). A prolific author, of both fiction and non-fiction, in this title (published originally in 1909), Hamilton addresses marriage as the main livelihood for women and how it shapes her, arguing that it isonly by working that women will gain independence. Not unsurprisingly, Hamilton notes in her Preface: “I am not of those who are entirely satisfied with woman as she is: on the contrary, I consider that we are greatly in need of improvement, mental, physical and moral”.

Rosamund Billington, BA, BPhil, Phdis a British suffrage historian and sociologist, active academically 1976-2004.