'She who would be politically free herself must strike the blow': suffragette autobiography and suffragette militancy

Much recent theory of autobiography has been strenuously opposed to the idea of a recoverable self or history and has excised referentiality from its concerns. In Autobiographies, Leigh Gilmore writes that 'one of the crucial insights of feminist theory is that politics is conceivable without a foundational subject (i.e. "women"), in fact, the condition of political agency lies in this conceptual refusal ... When "women" is only a record of wrongs, only the grounds of either immersed oppression or transcendent "womanhood", then being able not to identify with the category as the grid of self-knowing and selfrepresentation makes agency possible.'