Lead Actors: Amanda Vickery / Nancy Astor / William Astor
Country: UK
In this series for BBC Two, historian Amanda Vickery uncovers Britain’s longest war, the 300 year long campaign by women for political and sex equality in Britain, revealing the largely forgotten heroines (and a few heroes) who fought for the cause.
The suffragette’s battle to win the vote is the popular symbol of this struggle, but Vickery places that struggle in a much wider context, from the Levellers, the first recorded women’s rights demonstration at the time of Cromwell to the first custody battle in court over children in a divorce, producing the first piece of British legislation in support of women’s rights, to the lessons she draws from a woman becoming Prime Minister just 50 years after the franchise was extended to all women over the age of 18 and the ongoing fight for equal status today.
