Suffragette Historical Romances: Re-Purposing Women’s Suffrage in a Postfeminist Context

Abstract

[eng] This chapter deals with a group of post-millennial historical romances featuring suffragette protagonists, which I situate in the context of the commemoration of women’s suffrage and the postfeminist marketing of the suffragette figure in popular narrative and visual media. This chapter discusses the incompatibilities between these novels’ project of recuperating the history of female suffrage and the requirements of the compulsory happy ending, which forces the heroines to abandon suffrage, presented in these novels as an insurmountable barrier, in favour of love and marriage. Ironically then, the suffragette protagonists, who appear to embody independence, rebellion and subversion, come to embrace a more conventional position, while the history of suffrage is presented as an attenuated and depoliticised background and commodified according to a postfeminist sensibility.