Votes for Women

Susan Croft Susan is a writer, historian, curator and researcher. She worked in the USA with the Omaha Magic Theatre in the early 1980s, returning to Britain to work as a dramaturg with small-scale theatre companies and founding New Playwrights Trust, of which she was Director from 1986-89. She taught Creative Arts (Performance) at Nottingham Trent University and then was Senior Research Fellow in Performance Arts at Manchester Metropolitan University to 1996. From 1997-2005 she was Curator of Contemporary Performance at the Theatre Museum where she worked on the National Video Archive of Performance. She also curated four major exhibitions including Let Paul Robeson Sing! and Architects of Fantasy and pioneered a range of initiatives to record the history of black and Asian theatre in Britain. She has written extensively on women playwrights, including: …She Also Wrote Plays: an International Guide to Women Playwrights from the 10th to the 21st Century (Faber and Faber, 2001). She is working on a Critical Bibliography of Plays Published by Women Playwrights in English to 1914 for Manchester University Press and a major anthology Staging the New Woman, with Sherry Engle. She also runs the project Unfinished Histories: Recording the History of Alternative Theatre, with Jessica Higgs, a major initiative to record oral histories and preserve archives of the alternative theatre movement from the 1960s to the 1980s. See www.susan.croft.btinternet.co.uk for further details. She lives in London with her partner and two children.

Introduction 7

Votes for Women (1907) 21

A Change of Tenant (1908) 107

At the Gates (1909) 121

How the Vote was Won (1909) 141

The Apple (1911) 167

In the Workhouse (1911) 193

Jim’s Leg (1913) 209

Chronology 216

Bibliography 239

Universal Suffrage dates 245

Useful links 255