The Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU), founded by Emmeline Pankhurst in Manchester in 1903, paid considerable attention to dress as part of its public image and political strategy. Suffragette dress oscillated between mainstream corseted femininity — deployed strategically to counter claims that suffragists were masculine or unfeminine — and practical reform dress that allowed for the physical demands of protest, marching, and imprisonment. The purple, white, and green colour scheme became an identifying suffragette uniform that worked within and against Victorian dress conventions.

The suffragette movement produced a rich literature of poetry, song, and journalism, much of it published in suffragette newspapers including Votes for Women and The Suffragette. Poets including Cicely Hamilton and Laurence Housman wrote for the movement, and the suffragette body — sometimes dressed in fashionable femininity, sometimes in prison uniform — became a powerful literary symbol. The forced feeding of imprisoned suffragettes gave bodily constraint an almost unbearable literal dimension that reappeared in their published memoirs and verse.