First of all, I am grateful to the staff of the brilliant People’s History Museum in Manchester, whose assistance has been invaluable, particularly when it came to allowing me to find and use photographs. I am also indebted to the TUC Library at London Metropolitan University and the Women’s Library and Archive at the LSE, in both of which I found new and interesting insights.
This is not an academic book, but it could not have been written without the sterling work of the small band of academic women who have kept alive the memory of early left-wing and feminist women over the years. Many of their works are listed in the Bibliography, and have been invaluable in helping me to understand the environment in which the women I was writing about were working.
Many people over the years have allowed me to lecture them at length about women they’ve barely heard of, and their interest, positivity and enthusiasm have helped to keep me going. Credit is also due to everyone who has read chapters, commented, asked tricky questions, criticised bad grammar or suggested new angles, as well as to a large number of Labour women for their good-humoured and sisterly tolerance of my occasional eccentricities. I am grateful to all of you.
I am also indebted to my editor, Jo Godfrey, and the team at I.B.Tauris who saw the book through the publication process, and who turned out to be right about the title.
My husband, Christopher, and my children and grandchildren have, as always, put up nobly with my obsessions, vagaries and intermittent neglect. I am (I hope) more appreciative than I might sometimes appear.
Last, but by no means least, I would like to thank all those people who have been mystified, amazed or simply confused by the idea that it might be possible that there were politically active women in the early part of the last century who were not either suffragettes or members of the Pankhurst circle or both. Your polite bemusement kept reminding me of the reason I decided to write about those women in the first place, so thank you! This book is for you.
Nan Sloane
June 2018