The Women in the Room: Labour’s Forgotten History is published by I B Tauris.

It tells the story of the founding and the early years of the Labour Party, but with women added back in. Between 1900 and 1918 women were active in the suffrage movement, but they were also trade unionists, socialists, pacifists, public speakers, organisers and campaigners. Some campaigned for universal rather than limited female suffrage; others took an economic rather than a political view of how women could be liberated.

The story includes familiar names such as Millicent Fawcett, Emmeline Pankhurst and Keir Hardie, but also less well-known women including Margaret Bondfield, Mary Macarthur, Marion Phillips and Margaret MacDonald. It paints a vivid picture of the activism of a diversge range of women in the early twentieth century, and illuminates their involvement in the birth of the Labour and trade union movements.

You can buy the book from bookshops and online retailers, and you can find out more about talks and events about the book here.