Despite the presence of numerous suffrage societies, suffrage shops, newspaper-sellers and activists on the streets of London in the first two decades of the twentieth century, there are few traces that remain as physical memorials to acknowledge the legacy, variety and impact of the Votes for Women movement. This is of course a problem not exclusive to suffrage histories, but for women's history more broadly, with urban spaces dominated by monuments, statues and plaques that honour men and male histories. Urban feminist geographer Leslie Kern describes this as ‘patriarchy written in stone’ and twenty-first-century feminist activists like Caroline Criado-Perez are working to make the past and present lack of visibility explicitly visible across their research and writing, not only inviting but demanding a reassessment of who is celebrated through public monuments as well as in popular culture, educational curricula and public histories. Similar attempts to claim more space for women writers and theatre-makers of the past and present are taking place in the theatre industry, in which generations of predominantly male producers and critics have, as Jill Dolan has noted, been ‘unconcerned with not just women's work in the theatre, but with women's place in the world’.

Second-and third-wave feminist theatre-makers and organisations such as Sphinx Theatre Company, Tonic Theatre and Bechdel Theatre are among those attempting to tackle systemic sexist discrimination through exposing how this casual dismissal of women's writing has affected perceptions of its artistic worth and commercial appeal, frequently working with scholars, archivists and practitioners to show how the reticence of mainstream commercial theatre producers, directors and critics to engage with femalecentred stories and to commission and develop women playwrights has resulted in the under-representation of women's work within the canon of nineteenth-and twentiethcentury UK theatre. Feminist theatre historians and historians of feminist theatre are engaged not only in processes of rediscovery and reassessment, but also in critiquing and dismantling dominant histories of theatre that have ignored structures and biases that excluded women from training and working to their full potential in what Tracy C. Davis has called the ‘truly uneven’ playing field of the male-dominated industry.