The Surveillance Studies Network (SSN) is pleased to announce the winner of the 2025 Book Prize: Watching Women: Militant Suffragists Write the British Surveillance State, 1905–1924 by Stephanie J. Brown.

Watching Women is a remarkable interdisciplinary investigation of state surveillance of the British women’s suffrage movement. Drawing on a rich repository of archival materials—posters, photographs, short stories, novels, news stories, memoirs, police reports, and other media—this book shows how the British “surveillance state” was clearly shaped by its responses to women activists.

Policing of suffragists contributed to the normalization of covert policing, the expansion of surveillance into women’s spaces, and the increased visibility of all citizens to the state. Importantly, the agency, and sometimes complicity, of women activists figures strongly in this book’s narrative. Suffragist leaders deployed writing to galvanize public support for their cause, but they also strategically tempered their criticisms of the police to curry favor and minimize future violence against movement members.

Additionally, the book traces how some suffragist leaders went on to join the police force, raising important questions about the ways that militancy could harmonize with militarism in the service of class warfare. The SSN Book Prize Committee found Watching Women to be a masterful, provocative book making a major contribution to the field.