The Candidates of the Liberal Unionist Party, 1886–1912*

Historians have hitherto based discussion of the electoral performance of the Liberal Unionist Party on incomplete data regarding the candidates of the party, as published sources, including F.W.S. Craig's British Parliamentary Election Results, 1885–1918, the standard reference work, include a number of cases where the party label of a Unionist candidate (either Liberal Unionist or Conservative) is uncertain or incorrect. Utilising a wide range of primary and secondary sources, this article resolves a number of these cases, and thus creates the most accurate list of Liberal Unionist candidates available. The creation of this list allows for accurate analysis of the party's history, and the article makes some preliminary observations based on the data presented. Among these observations are that the Liberal Unionists comprised a consistent percentage of the overall Unionist Party in the house of commons, that the number of seats contested by Liberal Unionists remained steady through the January 1910 election, and that existing interpretations of the electoral pact between the Liberal Unionists and Conservatives may be flawed.     

The Rhetorics of Slavery and Citizenship: Suffragist Discourse and Canonical Texts in Britain, 1880–1914

This article examines the pivotal role played by two canonical texts in shaping the political subjectivities of suffragists in late nineteenth‐ and early twentieth‐century Britain. Read and discussed by three generations of British feminists, John Stuart Mill's Subjection of Women and Giuseppe Mazzini's Duties of Man shaped suffragist thinking on relationships between family, state, and citizenship and provided impetus for the creation of new kinds of argumentation and organisations for women's political activism.     

Women Students and the London Medical Schools, 1914–39: The Anatomy of a Masculine Culture

During the First World War in Britain, women were exhorted to rally to the nation's need and to train as doctors. A number of the London medical schools opened their doors to female students for the first time. After the war, several of these schools reverted to their former status as exclusively male institutions. This article looks at these events in some detail, focusing on the controversies over co-education in medicine and attempting to unravel some of the issues and politics involved. It is suggested that the gender politics which characterise these debates illuminate our understanding of the social history of work cultures and masculinity in the period.     

The Liberal Party and Patriotism in Early Twentieth Century Britain

Many historians have highlighted the role played by ‘languagesof patriotism’ in the political appeal of the BritishConservative Party in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.The present article engages with this debate by pointing tothe fact that the Liberals, in the Edwardian period at least,could also articulate patriotic languages That this was thecase is demonstrated by an examination of Liberal attitudesto the Education Act of 1902, the tariff reform controversy,and the issue of the ‘land question’. The widelyheld view that the Conservatives enjoyed a complete monopolyon patriotism is called into doubt. Furthermore, this articlecontends that the Liberal Party's use of patriotic rhetoricprovides a new means of making sense of their policies in thisperiod. These policies, it is suggested, cannot simply be understoodas expressive of a ‘new Liberal’ system of thoughtincreasingly influenced by collectivist ideas ^*I would like to thank Jon Parry for his very many helpful commentsand suggestions on earlier drafts of this article. The researchpresented here was assisted by the financial support of Christ'sCollege, Cambridge, and the Arts and Humanities Research Board.