Virginia Stephen and The People's Suffrage Federation

Join us for a talk about Virginia Stephen, later Woolf's, link to suffrage campaigning!

This event is part of the series celebrating the 100th anniversary of The Women’s Library.

Clara Jones' talk will focus on Virginia Stephen, later Woolf's, association with the People’s Suffrage Federation (PSF) - an adult suffrage organisation campaigning for universal suffrage with no property qualifications. With reference to contemporary suffrage newspapers and the PSF papers at The Women's Library, this talk will explore the PSF’s dual feminist/socialist agenda and reveal the contentious position it occupied within the suffrage movement.

The talk will consider the ways in which Virginia Stephen’s early alliance with this group may have influenced the politics and aesthetics of her second novel Night and Day (1919). It will conclude with a focus on a later moment of feminist involvement for Virginia Woolf: her involvement throughout the 1930s with The Women's Service Library, forerunner to The Women's Library.

Speaker

Clara Jones is a Reader in Modern Literature at King’s College London. Her publications include Virginia Woolf: Ambivalent Activist (EUP, 2016), the edited collection Virginia Woolf and Capitalism (EUP, 2024) and British Interwar Women Writers: Class, Gender, Genre (EUP, 2026). Her next major research project, 'Committee Woman', is a literary and cultural history of British women’s administrative labour in cultural organisations and social movements from the first half of the twentieth century.

Chair

Deidre Troy is an LSE Fellow in Political Theory in the Department of Government. Deirdre’s research examines political theories of citizenship, immigration and banishment, with a specific focus on Britain and empire. She is interested in developing political theories through historical and archival analysis, and her research considers how imperial politics continue to shape practices related to the institution of citizenship.

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