The points that Mary Davis makes in her letter are well taken. But the question of "who cares" whether some of the women campaigning for the vote were lesbians cannot be left unanswered.
Lesbians have all too often been written out of history, even represented as "normal" heterosexual women. It is an important aspect of women's history to recover their contribution to the past but in a way that does not sensationalise their sexuality or represent them, through typically male heterosexist eyes, as somehow pathological, unnatural and the "other" because of their sexual preference.
June Purvis
School of Social, Historical and Literary Studies
University of Portsmouth