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The Cause: A Short History of the Women's Movement in Great Britain by Ray Strachey and Barbara Strachey
First published 1978 by Virago Limited
In this famous work, Ray Strachey records in rich detail women's struggles for personal, legal, political and social liberties from the late eighteenth century until after the First World War.
It is a balanced and immensely readable record both of human character and collective determination - from the awakenings of individual women to their own uselessness, through the growth of Radicalism and philanthropy to the decade after the vote was won.
Considered one of the great historians of the women's movement, Ray Strachey draws remarkable portraits of the personalities involved - Harriet Taylor, John Stuart Mill, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, Millicent Fawcett, Josephine Butler - and many, many others.
Today, for a new generation wondering how the struggle began, Ray Strachey's panoramic book provides the only complete account of a great cause - the emancipation of women.
Her daughter, Barbara Strachey, writer and former BBC producer, provides a new preface to this edition.
Ray Strachey (1887-1940) was born into a distinguished American Quaker family. Deeply committed to the Suffrage Movement, a close friend and colleague of the Suffragist leader Millicent Fawcett, she took part in the fight for the vote during the critical years.
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