Lena Connell was one of a new breed of young professional women who took up photography at the turn of the 20th century. She ran her own studio in North London, only employed women, and made her mark on history by creating compellingly modern portraits of women in the British suffrage movement. The women that Connell captured on film are as class-inclusive a group as you could find: whether they were factory workers, schoolteachers, or aristocrats, they joined the cause to make a difference for future generations of women, if not for themselves. Connell's portraits created a new kind of visibility for these activists as hard-working, unrelenting women, whose spirits rose above injustice. This book examines Connell's artistic career within the Edwardian suffrage movement. It discusses her body of portraits within the British suffrage movement's propagandistic efforts and its goals of sophisticated, professional representations of its members. It includes all of her known portraits of suffragettes through 1914.

This book examines the domains of public space and the private, domestic realm and the interstices between them by focusing on ways that women enter the public arena while using the domestic politics of the private one to propel them forward in their cause for social justice, equality, and citizenship. The subject is unique not only in its focus on the visual culture of first-wave feminists in Edwardian England with a comparator analysis, where appropriate, on feminist developments in France, but also in its attention to women's movements into the public arena in the late 20th/21st century more globally in the context of how they continue to honor this first-wave suffrage history. Women's bodies were and are at the center of every debate on women's rights worldwide. The present study connects the hard work of women activists in the streets of London, Paris and beyond in making their desires known.

Exploring the concept of portrait as memoir, Women, Portraiture and the Crisis of Identity in Victorian England: My Lady Scandalous Reconsidered examines the images and lives of four prominent Victorian women who steered their way through scandal to forge unique identities. The volume shows the effect of celebrity, and even notoriety, on the lives of Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Dilke, Millicent Garrett Fawcett, and Sarah Grand. For these women, their portraits were more than speaking likenesses-whether painted or photographic, they became crucial tools the women used to negotiate their controversial identities. Women, Portraiture and the Crisis of Identity in Victorian England shows that the fascinating power of celebrity - and specifically its effects on women - was as much of a phenomenon in Victorian times as it is today. Colleen Denney explores how these women used their portraits as tools of persuasion, performing a domestic masquerade to secure privacy and acceptance, or sites of resistance, tearing down male constructions of female propriety and fighting Victorian stereotypes of intellectual women. Questioning the classic Victorian notions of "separate spheres," this volume celebrates women's search for self within the constraints of the nineteenth century, as well as within the world of present-day academia.