Stage rights!

The Actresses' Franchise League, activism and politics 1908–58

Naomi Paxton

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781526114815
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

Stage rights! explores the work and legacy of the first feminist political theatre group of the twentieth century, the Actresses' Franchise League. Formed in 1908 to support the suffrage movement through theatre, the League and its membership opened up new roles for women on stage and off, challenged stereotypes of suffragists and actresses, created new work inspired by the movement and was an integral part of the performative propaganda of the campaign. Introducing new archival material to both suffrage and theatre histories, this book is the first to focus in detail on the Actresses' Franchise League, its membership and its work. The volume is formulated as a historiographically innovative critical biography of the organisation over the fifty years of its activities, and invites a total reassessment of the League within the accepted narratives of the development of political theatre in the UK.

1

EXHIBITION

In the Victorian and Edwardian period, public fairs and exhibitions were enormously popular, showcasing ideas and ideals, political movements, different cultures and the advances being made in technology and science. In every major city, there were grand spaces and exhibition halls, and in London large venues such as the Albert Hall, Earl’s Court and the Royal Horticultural Hall and smaller spaces such as the Egyptian Hall, St James Hall and Caxton Hall ‘hosted an eclectic mix of events’, all competing for the attention of the public and each offering a unique social and cultural experience.¹ By 1909, the city was also a regular location for a diverse range of small-scale exhibitions, particularly around industry, the arts and culture, and suffrage societies engaged with the marketing potential of these occasions through their own exhibitions, fetes, fairs and bazaars. Recognising the importance of utilising the persuasive power of visual culture as part of a political agenda, the suffrage movement made itself publicly visible using images and text generated by the movement itself as well as adapting those created in and by the national and international media. Such public occasions frequently offered, in effect, a combination of immersive experience and pageant, with the visitor as audience in constructed, carefully designed presentations of performative feminist propaganda. The presence of the AFL at suffrage exhibitions and bazaars became an integral component of the performative elements of exhibition culture within both militant and non-militant suffrage societies. These were public political spaces in which the League could flourish and where the organisation gained not only opportunities for networking in the profession and among influential suffrage campaigners but also the space for individuals to try out new suffragist material and diversify their professional portfolio. This chapter investigates the AFL’s role in and theatrical contributions to suffrage exhibitions beginning with the largest and longest the organisation took part in: the 1909 WSPU Women’s Exhibition.

Setting the scene: the 1909 WSPU Women’s Exhibition

What will this Woman’s Exhibition be? It will be more than an ordinary exhibition: it will be a rallying ground for all who are interested in women’s work, women’s aims, women’s hopes, and above all in the great, inspiring movement of women towards a fuller and more spacious life.²

The WSPU held its Women’s Exhibition at the Prince’s Skating Rink in Knightsbridge, London, from 13 May to 26 May 1909.³ Adept at organising marches, deputations, demonstrations and large events on the streets of cities across the UK, the WSPU wanted to make a strong impression on the public and the press and show the government how popular the suffrage cause had become. The Prince’s Skating Rink was a large and prestigious venue, well located and easily accessible by London Underground. Home to the Prince’s Ice Hockey Club, the rink had been owned since 1903 by Mary Russell, Duchess of Bedford, a suffragist and active member of the Women’s Tax Resistance League. The rink had been a site of recent female success, when in October 1908 British figure skater Florence Syers won a gold medal there in the individual ladies skating competition of the London Olympic Games.⁴ The aims of the 1909 WSPU Women’s Exhibition were to educate, entertain and build support for the movement. The WSPU was growing fast, and the popularity of its newspaper Votes for Women had increased substantially from 16,000 copies sold weekly at the beginning of 1909 to nearly 40,000 by 1910.⁵ Advertisements for the exhibition appeared in the national press, detailing the specific events and performances to be held each day, and there was regular press coverage of the exhibition in national papers and periodicals including the Daily Telegraph, Morning Post, Nursing Times, Daily Chronicle, Sphere, Christian Commonwealth, Manchester Guardian, Lady’s Pictorial and the Daily Mirror. The stalls and decorations at the exhibition were also extensively photographed by Mary Broom, the first female press photographer.⁶ Controlled public presentation that presented a positive message was vital for recruitment and fundraising, and the newly formed AFL was a key component of both attracting and entertaining exhibition visitors as well as providing a potential new source of publicity and audience for the WSPU. Many large exhibitions had formal performance spaces, but the Women’s Exhibition was unique in having a space dedicated to the professional performance of theatrical propaganda material.

The appeal to visitors began outside the venue with flags and festoons in the purple, white and green of the WSPU, colours which Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence described in the exhibition programme as having ‘become to those who belong to this Movement a new language of which the words are so simple that their meaning can be understood by the most uninstructed and most idle of passers-by in the street’.⁷ The exhibition was publicised on the streets of London through the newly formed WSPU Drum and Fife Band, resplendent in purple, white and green uniforms (see Figure 1.1). While the deputations, gatherings and protests organised by the WSPU, WFL, NUWSS and other suffrage groups were not always principally conceived intended as spectacles in their own right, the performativity of such public displays and the media coverage that resulted from them could be as effective in raising public awareness as the protests themselves. The Drum and Fife Band was the first all-female band of its kind, made up of leading professional female brass and woodwind players who ‘wanted their support of the suffrage cause to be public and wanted it directly identified with their commitment as artists’.⁸ Although variety acts in the music halls ‘made comic use of women brass players in mock-military uniforms’, by 1909 the sight of uniformed women musicians on the streets was a visual as well as aural echo of the Salvation Army bands, which had included female musicians since their inception in the 1890s.⁹ The allusion to such strict moral and religious proselytising also reflects the fervent religiosity of Sylvia Pankhurst’s mural designs inside the exhibition hall, and was also to be seen on the exhibition programme, the front page of which showed an angel with an elongated horn which she was playing ‘in a profile view that emphasizes her unflattering, puffed out cheeks’, defiantly making noise for the cause.¹⁰

1.1The WSPU Drum and Fife Band advertising the 1909 WSPU Women’s Exhibition

The band played newly composed music – Ethel Smyth’s March of the Women, for which Cicely Hamilton had written the lyrics – as well as existing music associated with democracy and freedom and adapted for the suffrage cause, such as The Women’s Marseillaise.¹¹ Joan Dugdale, who would become the AFL’s organising secretary in 1911, marched behind the band carrying a banner advertising the exhibition, as did Kitty Marion, a member of both the AFL and the WSPU.¹² The number of people that would see and hear the Drum and Fife Band outside the exhibition would be more than the WSPU could ever hope would enter it, but by adopting an aurally dominant and assertive form emblematic of traditionally masculine demonstrations of unity and force, the WSPU showed it did not intend to be silenced.

Sylvia Pankhurst’s murals covered the walls of the rink with a repeating triptych of figurative pictures signifying self-sacrifice and triumph through adversity and hope. Drawing on theological images that had been initially designed to educate the illiterate – reminiscent of Pethick-Lawrence’s description of the communicative visual power of the WSPU colours – these potent symbols depicted moral right and the dominance of a higher authority than man and men. Two of the three were recognisably biblical in origin: the Pelican in her Piety, a medieval religious allegorical reference to maternal devotion, martyrdom and sacrifice; and a dove and olive tree, signifying hope, peace and fruitfulness. The third symbol was that of a broad arrow, a motif repeated in different areas of the exhibition. Printed on prison uniforms in Britain since 1870, the broad arrow was frequently carried by WSPU members on marches to raise awareness of the punitive treatment suffragettes were subject to as a direct consequence of their political agitation, and it appeared on the medals awarded to those who had been imprisoned for the cause. In Pankhurst’s mural designs, each broad arrow was encased in a wreath of victory laurels. These potent images of sacrifice, triumph and hope and the use of the WSPU colours created a backdrop to the hustle and bustle on the exhibition floor, a branded environment in which to educate and entertain visitors and facilitate interactions between suffragists and the public (see Figure 1.2). The official title of the 1909 Exhibition was the Women’s Exhibition and Sale of Work, and, with the dual purpose of promoting the cause and raising financial support, there were stalls from WSPU branches across England, Scotland and Wales. Visitors were tempted and encouraged to part with their money at every turn, and there were branded mementos of the event and the movement to be bought, won and treasured.

1.2Inside the 1909 WSPU Women’s Exhibition

Every fine piece of embroidery, every baby garment … represents the woman’s answer to the silent centuries in which she has been overworked and underpaid. Here you may find the readjustment of that picture of womanhood so dear to the past … Here, in the Woman’s Exhibition, is the new picture of the woman.¹³

Examples of women’s domestic creative expertise used specifically for public political advertisement and sale transformed home-made crafts and their makers into transactions of femininity and feminism for visitors and sellers alike.¹⁴ Suffrage campaigners, and particularly militant societies, were keen to ‘offset the negative image created by the opposition of suffrage activists as “the other,” genderless creatures who had little or no relation to women’s daily lives’.¹⁵ Stall no. 45, which sold and displayed farm and garden produce, held competitions with cash prizes for the ‘best Pair of Fowls, drawn and trussed for table’ and ‘best assortment of Vegetables’, encouraging women to visit the exhibition repeatedly and take the idea of the movement into the heart of their domestic lives. Needlework in some form featured on thirty-four out of the fifty-five stalls at the exhibition, and in the same year as the Board of Education issued a publication maintaining that the subject of needlework was essential for a girl ‘to reach woman’s estate’, the WSPU’s exhibition was embracing rather than dismissing or diminishing the results of this education.¹⁶ Rather than reinforcing ‘concepts of femininity and domesticity that had long been the basis of women’s political dependency and social subordination’, the WSPU wanted to challenge negative stereotypes of suffrage campaigners.¹⁷ Much of the anti-suffrage campaign focused on the idea that if women bec...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of abbreviations
• Series editors’ foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: re-evaluating the AFL
• 1 Exhibition
• 2 Sisterhood
• 3 Visibility
• 4 Militancy
• 5 Hope
• 6 Legacy
• Bibliography
• Index