Introduction

With 2018 marking the centenary of the extension of the voting franchise to (some) women in Britain, it is an opportune moment to reflect on the complex relationship between the press and the feminist movement(s) in the context of British-Irish politics– and the ways this relationship has changed over time. This opportunity for reflection involves the shifting ways that newspapers have represented feminist activism, and the ways feminists have themselves used the press in various ways to agitate for change. This chapter has three objectives: to offer an overview of existing scholarship; to provide new insights from original research; and to indicate salient and productive areas for future research.

Significantly, the focus on both Britain and Ireland seeks to challenge what has been identified as a highly London-centric approach to the history of the women's suffrage movement (Pedersen 2017) as well as of feminism more broadly. Given space constraints, it is not possible to account exhaustively for the highly complex gender politics and feminist histories of Britain and Ireland across the expansive timeframe of 1900–2017, or across all geographical regions (see Forster and Hollows 2020). Instead, this chapter seeks to consider the complexities of both feminism and media within a more transnational frame– and as such, to be more attendant to regional and cultural specificity as well as historical periodicity.

James Curran famously suggested that media history is the ‘neglected grandparent of media studies’ (Curran 2002: 3). Curran has also suggested that feminist approaches now constitute the fastest growing area of media history. Certainly, in recent years, there has been increasing attention paid to gender histories of media, as indicated by the establishment of the journal Feminist Media Histories. However, we would still nonetheless suggest– following Curran– that women's media history can be considered the neglected grandmother of feminist media studies, given that much research in this field proceeds without an understanding of what has come before. As such, this chapter thinks historically about gender, media, activism and social change, encouraging further scholarly investigations into the multiple and complex relationships between feminism and media.