Old Baggage by Lissa Evans – 8/20 Books of Summer

Mattie Simpkin fought valiantly for women’s right to vote as one of Mrs. Pankhurst’s militant supporters: speaking in public, arrested five times, force fed at Holloway Prison, but now, years later, with a small independent income, lives with her devoted friend, Florrie, near Hampstead Heath.

The Movement is over but Mattie keeps her past glories alive through magic-lantern shows to a mostly tolerant audience with Florrie (known for years as The Flea), handing her the appropriate slides. It is an undemanding life but Mattie is aware that many of her former Suffragette compatriots are in less happy circumstances. A former colleague tries to recruit Mattie to fascism, using language not unfamiliar to modern ears:

“It’s a forward-thinking group, bringing together some of the finest political minds in our country. There are those who’d like to drag the country down, whereas we want to focus our gaze on a brighter future for citizens who are prepared to work for it, and we’ve been talking to an English organization with similar aims.”

Mattie is appalled but chagrinned, realizing that on one point, her former friend is correct, Mattie is not doing enough to educate the next generation of women to prepare them for the responsibility of the vote. She decides to assemble a group of girls from all walks of life, ages 12 -1 8, who will meet weekly for her to improve their minds. Despite some early hiccups, the group – soon nicknamed the Amazons – is successful, until Mattie screws it up, and drives the loyal Flea away. It is always sad when a willful character can’t get out of her own way and destroys what means the most to her.

Emmeline Pankhurst (1858 – 1928), her three daughters, and a group of other women began the Suffragette movement as we know it in 1903, fighting for the right for women to vote. They started in Manchester, which is where the Pankhursts lived, then moved their headquarters to London in 1906. Their techniques included speaking in public, heckling elected officials, creating a popular newsletter, and chaining themselves to public buildings. Once their confrontational actions started getting them arrested, they undertook hunger strikes at Holloway Prison. To prevent their prisoners from martyrdom, not to mention bad publicity, the government introduced force-feeding, then a release and re-arrest law known as the Cat and Mouse Act, which Mattie experienced and describes to the girls.

In 1918, Parliament granted votes to all men over the age of 21 and women over the age of 30. This was to limit the number of women eligible to vote after the deaths of so many men during WWI. It was not until the Equal Franchise Act of 1928 that women over 21 were able to vote and women finally achieved the same voting rights as men. This took place in July, just about the time that Mattie wrecks the Amazons and quarrels with the Flea, and about a month after Mrs. Pankhurst died (how unfair that she didn’t live to see all British women get the vote). There was a great miniseries on PBS about the Pankhursts called Shoulder to Shoulder in which Sian Philips (best known from I, Claudius) played Emmeline and Angela Down (who played Jo in one of the best adaptations of Little Women) was her daughter Sylvia.

This book is a prequel to Crooked Heart, which she wrote first and I read several years ago but they are only very loosely connected. It is my eighth book for the 2025 Historical Fiction Reading Challenge and it is also my eighth in my 20 Books of Summer. I enjoyed this nearly as much as Evans’ most recent book, Small Bomb at Dimperley.

Title: Old Baggage
Author: Lissa Evans
Publication: Harper, trade paperback, originally published in 2018
Genre: Historical Fiction
Source: Library