This is my review of Vanishing for the Vote: Suffrage, Citizenship and the Battle for the Census by Jill Liddington.

It is a fascinating and now little-remembered fact that, furious over not counting for the vote, many women threatened to opt out of being counted in the 1911 election, of particular importance to the Liberal government as a source of information for their welfare reforms. The researcher Jill Liddington provides only recently available examples of 1911 census forms from different parts of the country in which the mother of a household has mysteriously “vanished”. Her academic findings have been worked up into a book intended to remedy the tendency for the suffragettes to be given far too brief coverage in histories of early C20 Britain. This may appeal to those who can find evidence of specific communities or families of local interest to them. I, for instance, homed in on the Bristol-Bath area. However, I found that like most of the other chapters, in the course of shifting the focus from the general to the particular, the book becomes too disjointed and bitty, too much banal description rather than analysis. The book’s main achievement is to inspire me to go in search of a more coherent and profound study of the fight to get women the vote.

⭐⭐⭐ 3 Stars