WORDS AS DEEDS: GENDER AND FEMINIST DISCOURSE IN BRITISH SUFFRAGE PERIODICALS (1907-14)

The movement for women’s enfranchisement carefully exploited the press in order to convey its message and as a further help for its campaign, despite the fact that the Suffragettes’ motto was ‘deeds, not words’. The publication of their own periodicals, aimed at a new type of female readership, was significant, as it led to the creation of a true counter-discourse that also meant to overcome biased views on the matter of votes for women. Lately, scholarly research has focused on re-investigating the suffrage movement in a sort of revisionist emphasis which has also followed a new wave of national interest in the story of the Suffragettes; however, scholars have tended to concentrate more on the fields of feminist and media history. My attempt will be a linguistic analysis of Suffragette periodicals: the main aim is to study the language strategies used for their propagandistic goals, how they significantly challenged the representation of suffrage activists in mainstream press and their relevance for their campaign. This will result in a description of common linguistic practices used by the Suffragettes; moreover, through the use of critical discourse analysis, I will be able to interpret these linguistic choices, to place them in context and to go beyond the text itself by looking at issues of (hidden) ideologies, power relations and gender representation.