Deeds Not Words

In the years to the First World War, teaching was one of the very few career opportunities for women - a springboard semblance of independence and fulfilment. Deeds Not Words is a collective biography Agnes Dawson. Emily Phipps, Ethel Froud and Theodora Bonwick - four women who were teachers and suffragettes in the twenties and thirties. They were all socialists and union activists, whose lives were shaped and informed in various ways by their commitment to the cause of feminism. Drawing on feminist and anti-feminist archive material, private correspondence and public records, Hilda Kean has reconstructed an extraordinarily vivid portraid of committted women campaigning for radical change - in society at large and within their own profession. These were women who proclaimed their feminism through political action. By reclaiming their histories for a wider audience, Kean reminds us of the work still to be done in completing the picture of women's history.