Professor Emerita in Women’s and Gender History, University of Portsmouth

After graduating from the Universities of Leeds and Manchester, June was awarded a studentship to study for her PhD at the Open University on the education of working-class women in nineteenth-century England.  She then held lectureships at the OU and Oxford Brookes before moving to Portsmouth where she has spent most of her career.  She founded the journal Gender and Education and then Women’s History Review of which she is the managing editor.  Her interest in women’s/gender history has never waned.  She is an active member of the Women’s History Network and of the International Federation for Research in Women’s History.

Her current research interest is women and politics, particularly the women’s suffrage movement in Britain.  Key questions that intrigue her is what made some Edwardian women become politically active, especially ‘militant’, and their political journeying throughout their lifetimes.  Among her many publications on women’s suffrage, she has published well received biographies of the suffragette leaders Emmeline Pankhurst and her eldest daughter Christabel.  June has made frequent radio and TV appearances and was one of the historical advisers for the feature film Suffragette (2015) in which she had a small cameo part.  She often writes for BBC History Magazine and is interested in the media representation of feminists in first and second wave feminism

Key Publications

• The British Women’s Suffrage Movement: National & International Perspectives, co-edited with June Hannam (Routledge) (2021)
• ‘Did Militancy Help or Hinder the Granting of Women’s Suffrage in Britain?’ Viewpoints by June Purvis, Elizabeth Crawford and Sandra Stanley Holton, Women’s History Review Vol. 28, No 7 (2019)
• ‘“A Glass Half Full”? Women’s History in the UK’, in Karen Offen and Chen Yan Eds.,Women’s History at the Cutting Edge (Routledge) (2019)
• Christabel Pankhurst: A Biography (Routledge) (2018)
• Women’s Activism: Global Perspectives from the 1890s to the Present, co-edited with Francisca de Haan, Margaret Allen and Krassimira Daskalova (2013)
• Emmeline Pankhurst: A Biography (Routledge) (2002)
• Votes for Women, co-edited with Sandra Stanley Holton (Routledge) (2000)
• The Women’s Suffrage Movement: New Feminist Perspectives, co-edited with Maroula Joannou (Manchester University Press) (1998)
• A History of Women’s Education in England (Open University Press) (1991)