Britain, 1910. EM Forster published Howards End; Cora Crippen was murdered by her husband, sparking an international manhunt as he went on the run with his mistress; and the suffragettes felt the wrath of the home secretary, Winston Churchill, on “Black Friday”, as 300 women attempted to enter parliament to argue for their rights. After the ensuing riot, the government desperately attempted to cover up evidence of police brutality and serious physical assaults on the suffragettes, but the damage was done. For many of the women present, the government’s use of extreme force on what had been a peaceful protest was the final straw. Women suddenly entered the public and political worlds in a way they had never done before.

Many women chose to carry out a campaign of direct action that we might now struggle to understand

Led by the Pankhurst family, the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) – the suffragettes – conducted a nationwide bombing and arson campaign unlike anything this country had ever experienced, or has seen since. Women across the UK carried out midnight attacks on MPs’ houses, churches, railway stations and post offices armed with guns, bombs, and a belief that the only way to win the vote for women was to follow in the violent footsteps of men. Kitty Marion reduced the Sussex home of Conservative MP Arthur Du Cros to a burnt-out shell during one of her attacks and proclaimed: “If the government must have damage as a token that women want the vote, damage they shall have.” Often driven by their experiences of sexual assault at the hands of bosses, the police and the government, many of those women chose to carry out a campaign of direct action that we might now struggle to understand. We have sanitised our history of the suffragettes, remembering only their defiant bravery and rousing call to arms.

But not all women believed that militant violence was the only way to convince the government to give them access to the political world. Many thousands fought for their rights with peaceful protests. They were not suffragettes, but suffragists: the inheritors, from Josephine Butler to Millicent Fawcett, of a long legacy of female activism in Britain, who marched, petitioned and raised money to fight for women’s rights. Our lack of knowledge of this work shows that feminism was as fractured and complex then as it is today. Finally, in 1918, women aged over 30 and owning or occupying property worth more than £5 were awarded the vote. Some of the women who made sure Britain survived the first world war by keeping its social and economic infrastructure going while so many men were dying at the front; who lost lovers, sons, brothers, husbands and fathers; who manned the hospitals near the front lines; who worked as journalists and photographers documenting the tragedies of war, were granted the right to be heard and to challenge the structure of power in the UK.

Fern Riddell is a cultural historian specialising in entertainment, sex and the suffragettes in Victorian and Edwardian Britain. Her book Death in Ten Minutes: Kitty Marion: Activist. Arsonist. Suffragette will be published on 19 April by Hodder & Stoughton (£20)