The many people who fail to vote in both local and national elections might mend their ways if they settled down for a few hours with a copy of Rebel Girls - Their Fight for the Vote.

It's the result of extensive detective work by Jill Liddington, a senior research fellow at Leeds University, and is a follow-up to her previous book One Hand Tied Behind Us, co-written in 1978 with Jill Norris, which told the story of the radical working-class suffragettes of Lancashire.

Now she's come this side of the Pennines to seek out the stories of some of the West Riding women whose lives were transformed by their passionate commitment to the Votes for Women movement.

They were arriving at adulthood in a dawning Edwardian era which, like the late Victoria era which had preceded it, was driven by the desire for selfimprovement. Opportunities were opening up for them, though frustratingly slowly. And growing within many of them was a burning desire to speed things up and change society for the better.

"For many families, financial anxieties grew in the face of multiple problems, " writes Ms Liddington, setting the scene.

"Doctor's bills had to be paid: debts easily mounted in working-class families.

These stories are threaded with hopelessly idealistic fathers, or feckless fathers who drank into the meagre housekeeping money; or mothers, prematurely aged, who had to bring up the children on the earnings from their needle. Children witnessed all this in the homeIt meant that as the new century dawned they were determined it should promise better" Among these committed young women was Edith Key, born illegitimately in January 1872 in Eccleshill to mill worker Grace Proctor and well-to-do mill owner Joseph Fawcett.

When Edith was eight weeks old both parents signed a formal "Agreement as to Child" under which Joseph agreed to pay Grace £2 for the expenses incurred at the birth plus two shilling a week for the infant's maintenance until she reached the age of 13 or died. Grace, in return, promised that as long as Joseph kept his side of the deal she would never contact him.

Grace had a second illegitimate child five years later, to another man, and the youngsters' maiden aunts, Martha and Emily, who both worked as weavers, took them in while their mother went off to live at the Britannia Inn in the centre of Bradford with a widowed pub landlord and his children and work as a general domestic servant, or skivvy.

Edith moved to Huddersfield with one of the aunts, left school at 13, and worked in the mill as a knotter. Music was her route to enlightenment. She had a talent as a singer, joined the Huddersfield Choral Society and met Frederick Key, son of a Lincolnshire farmer, who had been blinded at the age of six.

He qualified as an organist and piano tuner at a school for the blind in London then went on to tour England and Europe as a concert artist and singer.

It was when he was guest soloist with the Huddersfield Choral Society that he met and fell in love with 19-year-old Edith.

They married. Frederick opened a music and piano repair shop in Huddersfield and developed an interest in socialism. Edith, bringing up their two sons and running the financial side of the business above the shop, was set on the way to joining the Women's Social and Political Union, becoming the branch secretary, efficiently taking the minutes and endowing them with a quiet passion, in one annual report noting that the brunt of the work was left to "a small band of determined spirits" and urging all women that "it is their duty to strengthen the hands of our members in order that justice may be secured for our sex."

While Edith beavered away behind the scenes, Honley-born weaver Dora Thewlis became a national celebrity thanks to being photographed at the age of 16 being rather roughly arrested by a pair of burly policemen during a mass demonstration in London in favour of women being allowed to vote in parliamentary elections.

This is an excellently-researched, highly-readable book packed with splendid, uplifting stories about remarkable people - ordinary girls and women from the mills and factories who found themselves fighting alongside their middleclass counterparts and the movement's "big guns" to change the world, and in the process transforming their own lives.

Rebel Girls - Their Fight for the Vote, by Jill Liddington, is published by Virago at £14.99.