Votes for Women: A Play in Three Acts

London, 1907. Jean Dunbarton is engaged to Geoffrey Stonor, a rising politician with his sights set on Cabinet office. At her aunt Lady John Wynnstay's country house, she meets the enigmatic Miss Levering, a woman of mysterious past who has devoted herself to the suffrage cause. When Miss Levering describes the desperate conditions of England's homeless women, Jean's comfortable worldview begins to crack. She finds herself drawn into the movement, unaware that her fiancé's opposition to women's rights conceals secrets that reach into his own past. What begins as a polite family gathering becomes a battleground of ideas, where personal ambition collides with emerging political consciousness, and where a young woman must choose between the life she's been promised and the truth she's only beginning to understand. Robins, herself a celebrated actress and suffragette, wrote this play to be performed. It premiered in 1907 to sold-out audiences and helped fuel the momentum that would lead to partial suffrage in 1918. The drama endures because it captures something universal: the moment when someone sees the world clearly for the first time, and realizes everything will change.