This meticulously researched biography of Lydia Becker sheds new light on someone who worked tirelessly for women’s suffrage as well as a host of other campaigns for women’s rights but who has been largely overlooked and indeed forgotten in the years since her death. It is time that she was rehabilitated and this book does just that. Lydia Becker was one of those remarkable women who have all too often been written out of history but now she can take her rightful place amongst other campaigners. Finally her position as one of the great leaders of the suffrage movement is acknowledged. Her biography is also a history of the suffrage movement more broadly and it is obvious what a trailblazer she was. She was sometimes a controversial figure even amongst her peers and often managed to alienate them, which hasn’t helped her reputation. Her own work has been largely overshadowed by the later suffragettes and their more radical tactics. But Lydia Becker deserves to be remembered and celebrated and this biography helps us do just that. However, I did find the narration quite dry and academic. The detail is overwhelming at times and the emphasis on the facts doesn’t allow the reader to really get any sense of Becker’s inner life. I never felt that I got to know her as a person – only what she did. Nevertheless, this is an important book and a valuable addition to women’s studies.

I have previously written for a newspaper on Lydia Becker so was very interested to read this. She really was a remarkable woman and this book amply does her justice.
I’d highly recommend it to anyone interested in women’s history or women’s suffrage.

There is—fortunately!—a steady stream of books these days restoring the rightful place of women in history. These include neglected figures in the women’s suffrage movement in the US and the UK. The story of Lydia Becker is among the latter, and I am very pleased to have made Becker’s acquaintance, however belatedly.

Before there was Emmaline Pankhurst or Millicent Fawcett, there was Lydia Becker. Or more accurately, because there was Lydia Becker, there were Emmaline Pankhurst and Millicent Fawcett. And the enfranchisement of British women.

Becker was a gifted orator, writer, administrator, publicist, propagandist, strategist, and politician. She was the leading British suffragist of her day—a celebrity of international stature. Her prominence and power are evident, in part, in the degree to which she was publicly attacked and ridiculed in newspaper cartoons and other forms of invective. You have to be a household name for that type of thing to find an audience. (There was also a race horse named “Miss Becker.”)

She was the first woman elected to a school board in Britain, and served in that capacity in Manchester for two decades. She actively advocated for more equitable expenditures for girls’ education; a more equitable curriculum, rather than the domestic training (or “training for servitude”) that was the norm; pay equity for women teachers; and educational opportunity for the poor. She was also a self-taught and accomplished scientist—a frequent correspondent of Charles Darwin who early advanced the view that there is no difference of intellectual capacity between genders.

In recounting Becker’s story, Williams also provides a fast-moving history of the British women’s suffrage movement from the mid-1860s to Becker’s death in 1890. This includes the tensions, schisms, and compromises that inevitably attend any such struggle. (Marital status was to the UK movement what race was to the US movement, with married women the ones left behind for political expediency.)

Becker, while “formidable,” was gradually overwritten by her more “flamboyant” successors in the suffrage movement. Williams has done us all a service by reconstructing Becker’s fascinating story.