Lady Insurrectionists

The women who led Britain’s first mass democratic movement – decades before the Suffragettes.

Lady Insurrectionists tells the story of the iconoclastic women who helped ignite Chartism, the largest democratic movement of the nineteenth century. In this ground-breaking history, Judy Cox brings to life the radical voices of women who refused to be sidelined – figures like the ‘Red-Hot Radical’ poet Eliza Cook, Quaker abolitionist Elizabeth Pease and the electrifying Chartist speaker Mary Ann Walker. Far from being passive auxiliaries, these women were insurrectionists in thought and action – speaking from platforms, organising strikes, boycotts and petitions, and demanding political rights as workers, women and democrats. At a time when the vote was restricted to a privileged few, they demanded more – and did so on their own terms.

This is a bold and necessary rewriting of British radical history. Cox dismantles the myth that feminism began with middle-class suffragists, revealing how working-class women forged a radical politics that defied the gender and social conventions of their age. Lady Insurrectionists restores these women to their rightful place at the heart of the fight for mass democracy and the People’s Charter – and shows how their legacy continues to shape struggles for justice today.

“This is a story of women fighting at barricades, of women theorizing capitalism, of women robbing trains and women smuggling weapons to fight the Tsar. They are the true foremothers of Feminism for the 99%” – Tithi Bhattacharya, co-author Feminism for the 99%