Dr Esther Breitenbach (University of Edinburgh) looks at the evolution of demands for women’s political rights over the course of the nineteenth century, and the continuing campaign for full enfranchisement which went on till 1928. She argues that, given women’s lengthy experience of local government and public office by the early twentieth century, the partial enfranchisement of women in 1918 was less evidence of a reward to women than of persistent resistance to universal suffrage.