Abstract
Gupta’s volume offers unique critical insights into the media representations of the British suffrage movement before the outbreak of the First World War. Whereas previous historical research on the subject has focused predominantly on self-representation through the analysis of texts produced by some prominent British suffragists and suffragettes themselves, Gupta’s volume claims to be the first study that explores in detail media representations of the movement during a critical period in its history.
The source of data is articles published in The Times from 1908 to 1914 and collected from the newspaper’s digital archive. Selecting a national newspaper which was the voice of political elites of the time, and essentially anti-suffrage, proves an instructive choice as it enables the author to explore how disenfranchised groups protesting their lack of power were (mis)constructed by the powerful and dominant. The focus of the study is on the discursive strategies used to describe the suffrage movement over this 6-year period, during which the suffrage campaigns escalated to include events such as the tragic death of Emily Wilding Davison, who in a protest action crossed a racetrack at Derby and was knocked down by the King’s horse.
Chapter 1 sets the scene by offering a comprehensive overview of the historiography of the suffrage movement, highlighting the diversity, tensions and contradictions that existed within this complex movement, which the author likens to a rhizome in the sense of Deleuze and Guattari. The chapter then moves on to outline the analytical framework underpinning the study. It is already here that the author shows the major methodological contribution of their work to research in (historical) discourse analysis. By skilfully combining the notion of master and counter-narratives with the concept of newsworthiness and the taxonomy of social actors, the author offers a comprehensive framework that allows them to explore media discourses within the particular context of news production (e.g. how events develop into news) and simultaneously situate them within the wider socio-political context of the time (e.g. master gender narratives). This is followed by a competently executed linguistic analysis using the tools and methods of corpus linguistics and more established techniques of critical discourse analysis based on close readings of texts.
Chapter 2 offers a detailed description of the procedures involved in corpus compilation and the analytical corpus tools used to interrogate the data. Using historical press documents, which are mostly available in the form of images embedded in PDFs, requires a great deal of contextual knowledge and poses technical challenges for corpus-based discourse analysis, which explains why only a small body of corpus research has used this kind of data. The author can only be commended for the courage and hard work involved in obtaining, converting and adequately classifying these documents.
Chapter 3 offers the first analytical insights into the general representations of the suffrage movement based on a systematic analysis of frequencies and collocations of the key terms suffragist*, suffragette* and suffrage*. Contrary to historical evidence, The Times shows a preference for suffragist and suffragists in contexts in which suffragette would naturally be expected. Moreover, the author identified a salient pattern of direct action campaigns associated with suffragist, with actions being mostly described as destructive disturbances or unthreatening incidents. In the author’s view, the preference for suffragist in combination with direct actions seems to have been a deliberate strategy to portray the essentially polyvocal, rhizomatic entity of the suffrage movement as a unified homogeneous group whose main campaigning tool was direct and at times violent action. The diversity and other forms of protest advocated by the members, for example constitutional campaigns, was simultaneously erased. This created a vision of the suffrage movement as a mass of unreasonable women lacking seriousness and thus perpetuated the master narrative of the time that women were neither suitable nor worthy of having the vote.
As the author subsequently and convincingly demonstrates, this overarching discourse was reproduced not only at the level of the lexis and text, but also in the ways in which texts featuring issues surrounding the suffrage movement were combined with other texts on the pages of The Times to reinforce anti-suffrage interpretations. The author describes this phenomenon as ‘suggestive placement’ and shows how such suggestive arrangements can work to steer the reader into a particular reading. This is again evidenced in Chapter 5, in which positive representations of Emily Wilding Davison as a dedicated campaigner are placed alongside texts portraying her as dangerous and possibly mentally ill. Even in the places in which the voices of suffrage campaigners were allowed to be heard, such as in the letters to the editor, the resistance to this homogenising discourse was editorially counterbalanced by adding headlines with terms pointing to direct action.
Gupta’s work makes a significant contribution to the under-researched area of historical media discourse of the women’s suffrage struggle, demonstrating the often subtle discursive mechanisms that the political and media elites employed to discredit a protest movement. A quantitative corpus-based study can sometimes offer a rather dry read. This is not the case in Gupta’s work, in which quantitative corpus results are always intelligently contextualised against the historical evidence and skilfully interpreted using the comprehensive analytical framework adopted. It is precisely this constant process of zooming into the linguistic data and zooming out to the whole text, the layout and the wider analytical and socio-political context that makes this work stand out.
Above all, this volume is an exemplary study showcasing how a triangulation of corpus linguistic methods with discourse analytical theories and techniques can offer systematic insights into the public discourse of a protest movement, contributing to a better understanding of histoire des mentalités and social history in general. Written in an accessible way, this volume is an excellent model of analytical and methodological interdisciplinarity, and an inspiration for students, researchers and scholars interested in studying discourse in its social and historical dimensions.