Suffragette Manifestos by Various is a must-read for anyone who is passionate about feminism, equality, and social justice, as it brings together the powerful voices of British women who fought for their rights and representation, offering an inspiring and informative journey through the history of the suffrage movement.

A rich collection of primary sources, this book provided many perspectives of women's suffrage, providing historical context for an issue many take for granted.

A beautiful collection of documentation that displays the suffragette movement from all levels of society. This collection contains the many ways women were able to speak up for themselves through pamphlets, letters, articles, speeches and more.

I'm intrigued by the Penguin Classics "Great Ideas" series and have requested to read/review a handful of them. Each slim title covers essays, speeches, and other writings that surround a particular idea, movement, or individual that changed the way the world thinks or operates. The series seem to focus very much on Euro-centric ideas, the ideas of white people, and the ideas of men. That said, I'm excited to explore the series and evaluate whether these books are digestible introductions to the topics covered. I'm not sure about the other books yet, but this one was 130 pages, so it's a very quick read.

This title features speeches and writings from various UK suffragettes. I found some of the speeches to be surprisingly dry as a reader in 2020, especially given my love and interest in the history of women's suffrage. This collection only covers ideas about white women's suffrage in the UK (I wasn't aware of that going in - I hadn't read the description, only read the title, so that's on me). Many of the essays remain powerful and some of the ideas mentioned STILL have yet to be realized. I did enjoy several of the essays very much and the collection was worth reading because of it.

Don't expect contextualization or contemporary commentary on any of the speeches or writings collected here. These are purely the texts of exact speeches or opinion pieces written at the time of women's suffrage, so you can't expect anything beyond that. This is a very narrow view of the history of suffrage. I don't believe there are any speeches featured by people of color, and the topic of suffrage isn't covered in any kind of intersectional way. I assume this is partially due to the curation on behalf of Penguin, and because many women's movements were, and remain, very white.

Many of the showcased works are sexist, some ableist, some classist. I cringed at times the lack of awareness or solidarity expressed. This is a collection that very much represents "white feminism" at the time the works were published, and illustrates how little some things have changed in that regard. It's a shame about the lack of solidarity across race, class, etc at the time (and it continues), but that does not mean there weren't people from other marginalized groups working toward suffrage. I did appreciate that the curators chose speeches from working class women and women working in different occupations. I was very interested in the couple of speeches that touched on women's suffrage as it relates to, or was ignored by, the union labor movement.

I would have appreciated more commentary, or reflections of these works from a contemporary standpoint. But, that's not what these titles are trying to do, and I understand that. They're meant to be brief and show purely the text as spoken or written. Still, those responsible for curating these works decide what to include and exclude, who to include or exclude from the collection.

Suffragette Manifestos represents more of the same as we've seen in history books since, well... forever. I get it's called Penguin Classics for a reason, you kind of know what to expect. Regardless, I would love to see Penguin broaden its coverage within the Great Idea series to topics, countries, and individuals that haven't already been exhaustively published about by American and European scholars and historians. There are a couple of those in the series that do, but not many. Penguin has the resources and clout to be doing so much more with it. This book felt a bit lazy to me.

Thanks to #NetGalley and Penguin for sharing a copy of this book with me in exchange for an honest review.