12 Dec 08

A suffragette march in Hyde Park, London, in 1910. The people pictured are, from left to right, Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence, Christabel Pankhurst, Sylvia Pankhurst, and Emily Wilding Davison.

This month marks the 90th anniversary of the women’s vote and to mark the anniversary, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography has created a virtual free exhibition which includes the biographies of 25 prominent women.

Biographies range from suffragette leader Emmeline Pankhurst, to Muriel Matters, the campaigner who once showered leaflets from an airship emblazoned with ‘Votes for Women’.

Other lives include Constance Markievicz, an Irish republican and the first woman to be elected to British parliament in the 1918 election; the society hostess Nancy Astor, who became the first woman to win and to take up a seat in the Commons; Margaret Haig Thomas, Britain's leading feminist in the interwar period and founder of the feminist journal Time and Tide; as well as the first Labour and Liberal female MPs to enter the House of Commons and to achieve government office.

The feature, which marks the anniversary on Sunday (14 December 2008), is now available for free via the dictionary’s homepage. The Dictionary is a research project of the University of Oxford, published and funded by Oxford University Press.

This anniversary feature also includes first-time appointees who, benefiting from anti-discrimination laws in 1919, took up careers previously restricted to men. Pioneering professionals include Ivy Williams, the first woman to be called to the English bar (1922), and Helena Normanton—the first women to take cases in the Old Bailey and the first married woman to be issued a passport in her maiden name (1924).

The lives featured in this virtual exhibition, along with the dictionary’s 56,646 other subjects, are freely available online in almost all public libraries across Britain, with direct home access for library members.

The Oxford DNB currently includes entries on all women MPs who died in or before 2000.The Oxford DNB, published by Oxford University Press, is updated online three times a year, in January, May, and October. The next online update of the Oxford DNB will be published in January 2009.