Measures and Meanings: Exploring the Ego-Net of Helen Kirkpatrick Watts, Militant Suffragette

Abstract

In this paper we discuss the personal network or ‘ego-net’ of Helen Kirkpatrick Watts, a militant suffragette and one of the founder members of the Nottingham Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU). Our aims are fourfold. Firstly, we want to make a contribution to the growing literature, briefly reviewed, on the significance of social networks in relation to social movements. Secondly, we want to make a contribution to the academic literature on the suffragettes. Thirdly, at a methodological level, we want to contribute to ongoing efforts, briefly reviewed, to bring qualitative concerns and issues back into social network analysis, generating a dialogue between quantitative and qualitative approaches. Finally, we conceive of this paper as a pilot for a much larger study of suffragette networks. Specifically, it allows us to experiment with ways of drawing network data from an archive and, relating to our third aim, to dry run an approach to network analysis which integrates quantitative and qualitative approaches.