Next Meeting: Sunday 18th March

To celebrate the Lunar New Year (we're now in the Chinese year of the Dog), and the Terracotta Warriors being on tour in Liverpool, next time, we're meeting at a local Chinese Restaurant for a meal - if you'd like to join us, please contact us by email/facebook/twitter for details and to confirm.

We'll be reading our own choice of books set in/about China, to discuss over food.

During our February meeting, we discussed the books we'd read relating to The Representation of the People Act (1918), which gave some women (over 30, landowners/with a degree) the right to vote for the first time in General Elections, and also gave ALL men over the age of 21 the right to vote, instead of just landowners.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, our books centred particularly on the women's suffrage, especially Suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst, but also on a number of other eminent women, including; Suffragist Millicent Fawcett, and her sister, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson (who became the first woman in Britain to qualify as a Dr), and Constance Markievicz, the first woman to be elected as an MP in 1918, but as a member of Sinn Fein, didn't take her seat, leaving the first woman MP to take her seat, to be Nancy Astor.

Astonishingly, we managed to keep politics fairly well out of the whole discussion!