Published in 2018
352 pages
Dr. Fern Riddell is a historian specializing in sex, suffrage, and culture in the Victorian and Edwardian eras. She appears regularly on TV and radio, writes for the Guardian, Huffington Post, Telegraph, and Times Higher Education, and is a columnist for BBC History Magazine.
What is this book about?
Fierce, fresh and feminist, Fern Riddell tells the story of Suffragette Kitty Marion in a way that fizzes and shocks. Exciting, twisty and very very timely. –Lucy Worsley
In Death in Ten Minutes, historian Fern Riddell uncovers the story of radical suffragette Kitty Marion, told through never-before-seen personal diaries in Kitty’s own voice.
In the early twentieth century, women in the UK and the US were fighting for the vote using any means necessary. Kitty Marion was sent on a mission by the family of Emmeline Pankhurst, founders of the leading militant organization for women’s suffrage in the UK: to carry out a nationwide campaign of bombings and arson attacks in support of their goals. Kitty’s subsequent arrests and force-feedings while in prison put her on a path of dedicated radical activism, leading her across the ocean to the United States, where she joined Margaret Sanger in advocating for birth control.
But in the aftermath of World War I, the dangerous and revolutionary actions of Kitty and other militant suffragettes were quickly hushed up and disowned by the feminist movement, and the women who carried out these attacks were erased from our history. Now, for the first time, their untold story will be brought back to life.
Telling a new history of the women’s movement in light of new and often shocking revelations, this book asks the question: Why has the life of this incredible woman, and the violence of the suffragettes, been forgotten? And, one hundred years later, why are women suddenly finding themselves under threat again?
