Review of Stephanie Brown’s Watching Women: Militant Suffragists Write the British Surveillance State, 1905–1924

Brown retells British suffragettes' literary worlds through the paradigm of surveillance activism.The lives, artworks, journalistic engagements, and textual production of suffragette women are linked to rhetorical and institutional strategies as they resisted, reformed, and even joined British surveillance organizations locally and nationally.Watching Women-the first book-length study of suffrage militancy vis--vis surveillance-leaves no claim unsubstantiated.Brown's rich archive does not eclipse her thesis' clarity: suffrage women's engagements with England's nascent, intensifying surveillance state are understudied, glazing over women's agency in shaping the modern surveillance apparatus.