THE CAUSE: A Short History of The Women's Movement in Great Britain.

First edition, first printing. Publisher's original brown cloth with gilt titles the the spine, in dustwrapper. Containing "Cassandra" a previously unpublished essay on the position of women in society by Florence Nightingale (Appendix). Illustrated throughout with black and white plates of paintings, drawings, and photographs.An excellent near fine copy, the binding square and firm, the cloth and gilt bright and fresh. The contents with very light spotting to the prelims are otherwise clean throughout and without inscriptions or stamps. Complete with the lightly rubbed and nicked dustwrapper that is toned to the spine and panel edges and with a clean closed score (without loss) to the bottom edge of the lower panel. An attractive example in original dustwrapper of Ray Strachey's "best-known and most successful book" (ODNB), uncommon thus.

An in-depth history of the women's movement, collected and written by a woman who was instrumental in much of the movement itself. Strachey came from a liberal, artistic family which had close ties with the Bloomsbury group. She campaigned and wrote extensively on women's suffrage, and later stood as an independent for Brentford and Chiswick for three general elections before becoming the parliamentary secretary for the UK's first female MP, Nancy Astor, and then the head of the Women's Employment Federation. Her papers are held at The Women's Library at the London School of Economics. "While acknowledging in a limited way the importance of the militants, [the book] established a version of the suffrage movement that endorsed the views and celebrated the role of Millicent Fawcett and the NUWSS" (ODNB).