My friend Jo Vellacott, who has died aged 96, was a pioneer in the study of women’s history, drawing particular attention to the intersection between the non-militant suffrage movement and resistance to the first world war.

Born in Plymouth, Devon, Jo was the youngest of the three children of Harold Vellacott, a surgeon, and Josephine (nee Semphill), a nurse. She boarded at Downe House school in Berkshire and, after graduating from Oxford University in 1943, worked as a mechanic in the Women’s Royal Naval Service during the second world war.

After the war she went to teach English in South Africa, where she met Peter Newberry, a medical student. They married in 1949 and moved in 1953 to the UK, before emigrating in 1955, with their three children, to Canada. There Jo combined family life with working as a schoolteacher and as a lecturer in history and women’s studies at various universities as the family moved around the country, living in Ottawa, the Yukon, Edmonton, London (Ontario) and Toronto. She gained a history PhD from McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, in 1978.

Although Jo lived in Canada for the rest of her life, her work on the early pacifist activism of Bertrand Russell occasionally brought her back to the UK on grant-funded projects, and led to a rediscovery of the role of the Edwardian feminist and pacifist Catherine Marshall. Her work on Russell and Marshall inspired Jo to adopt radical alternative perspectives on conventional narratives about how the vote for women was won and on women’s responses to war, including challenging the idea that suffragists had overwhelmingly backed the war effort.

Her first book, Bertrand Russell and the Pacifists in the First World War (1981), and her biography of Marshall (1993) were both reissued in new editions to mark the centenary of the first world war. One result of Jo’s scholarship was that Marshall’s name and portrait are engraved, with those of other suffragists, on the plinth of Millicent Fawcett’s statue, which was unveiled in Parliament Square, London, in 2018.

As a relative of Marshall, and myself a history teacher, I was fortunate to meet Jo several times on her later visits to Britain. I am grateful for her work in highlighting a largely forgotten heroine of first-wave feminism and war resistance who had died (in 1961) long before I knew of her.

Jo, who became a Quaker in her 40s, was able to complete and publish a fascinating account of her own early life, Living and Learning in Peace and War, in 2017.

Her marriage to Peter ended in divorce in 1979. She is survived by their children, Mary, Soo and Douglas, five grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.