An author from Forest Hill is set to publish a controversial chronicle of how women got the vote.

Jad Adams’ Women and the Vote bills itself as the first genuinely global history of women and the vote and the first major post-feminist history of the struggle.

Before 1893, no women anywhere in the world had a vote in a national election yet with 100 years nearly all countries had enfranshised women and it was a sign of backwardness to have not done so.

Adams, a research fellow at the University of London who has previously published biographies on Tony Benn and Gandi, charts this momentous change and takes the story through to the present day.

Controversially, he rejects the widely accepted idea that  success was primarily the result of pressure groups like the suffragettes.

Women and the Vote: A World History by Jad Adams is out September 18, published by Oxford University Press.