Women's Suffrage in Word, Image, Music, Stage and Screen

The Making of a Movement

Christopher Wiley, Lucy Ella Rose, Christopher Wiley, Lucy Ella Rose

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000404326
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Sozialwissenschaften
• Sous-sujet: Genderforschung

This collection of essays explores the myriad ways in which the women's suffrage movement in Britain in the nineteenth century and twentieth century engaged with and was expressed through literature, art and craft, music, drama and cinema.

Uniquely, this anthology places developments in the constituent arts side by side, and in dialogue, rather than focusing on a single field in isolation. In so doing, it illustrates how creative endeavours in different artforms converged in support of women's suffrage. Topics encompassed range from the artistic output of such household names as Sylvia Pankhurst and Ethel Smyth, to the recent feature film Suffragette. It also brings to light under-represented figures and neglected works related to the suffrage movement. A wide variety of material is explored, from poems, diaries and newspapers to posters, dress and artefacts to songs, opera, plays and film.

Published in the wake of the centenary of many women receiving the parliamentary vote in the UK, this book will appeal to scholars, undergraduate and graduate students, and members of the public interested in the broad areas of women's history and the women's suffrage movement, as well as across the arts disciplines.

1

Women’s suffrage and cultural representation

The making of a movement

Christopher Wiley and Lucy Ella Rose

The women’s suffrage movement, emerging in the second half of the nineteenth century and gaining momentum in the early twentieth century, engaged with art in myriad ways. Art, in its widest sense, enabled campaigners to express their personal ideologies as well as generate invaluable publicity for the women’s cause. Sending a postcard of a women’s suffrage poster or a photograph of one of the movement’s leaders, or serving afternoon tea to one’s guests using a china tea set adorned with the colours and emblems of women’s suffrage, effectively constituted a political act. In high street shops dedicated to women’s suffrage, as well as regional offices, objets d’art and artistic keepsakes (some of them, such as pin badges, reasonably priced so as to attract women of low income) were available as merchandise, providing a useful means of fundraising for the campaign for votes for women. The movement involved many professional and untrained artists, writers, musicians and performers. These included some of its leading members, such as Sylvia Pankhurst, who studied at the Royal College of Art in London and was also a writer, and the composer and musician Ethel Smyth—both of whom are discussed in several chapters in this volume. Across decades, centuries, regions and nations, suffrage creativity wove a rich and fascinating tapestry through the fields of literature, visual arts, music and drama.

In literature, suffrage societies maintained dedicated newspapers—most notably Votes for Women, later replaced by The Suffragette, the organ of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU). These were a valuable means for campaigners to organise and promote their cause, spreading their views, telling their stories in print on a wide scale, and even selling papers themselves on the streets. Writing letters and petitions was also an essential activity undertaken as part of the women’s suffrage movement, particularly when pursuing constitutional means. Elsewhere, those involved with the campaign wrote widely about their experiences in published and unpublished prose, poetry and auto/biographical accounts, both at the time and subsequently, to be read in a variety of contexts. Archival documents, such as contemporary manuscript letters and diaries—some of which are analysed in this volume for the first time—provide valuable insights into the lived experiences of women’s suffrage campaigners. The many newspaper reports of activities undertaken over the years—particularly the more militant acts, including attacks on artworks, as discussed in this collection by Gursimran Oberoi—represented another significant source of publicity.

It was in the domain of the visual arts that the women’s suffrage movement was especially vibrant. As Anne Anderson indicates in this volume, different suffrage organisations branded themselves using carefully selected colours. Campaigners’ clothing was accessorised with badges, buttons, ribbons, jewellery, medals, sashes, flags, rosettes and handkerchiefs, designed using both these colour schemes and other pictorial motifs that became associated with the movement. Photographs of suffrage leaders (which thereby gave them celebrity status), and of meticulously staged scenes of suffrage demonstration, were in wide circulation. Similarly, posters promoting the women’s suffrage campaign became a frequent sight in local high streets. As Elizabeth Crawford’s chapter reminds us, images freely migrated from one medium to another; for instance, photographs, cartoons and posters were reprinted as postcards to be pinned to the walls of suffrage sympathisers’ houses or sent by them directly to the home of another. Perhaps the greatest visual impact was reserved for the beautifully embroidered banners designed to be carried during suffrage processions and to decorate rally platforms.

The single most famous exponent of music in relation to women’s suffrage is undoubtedly Ethel Smyth, composer of the suffragette anthem ‘The March of the Women’ (1910), which adapted an Abruzzi folk song with words added by suffragist actor and writer Cicely Hamilton. But Smyth’s achievements stand at the pinnacle of music’s relationship with the campaign for the vote extending back several decades. A large number of songs were written in connection with the movement, ranging from those with new words set to existing tunes (thereby appropriating popular, and sometimes political, melodies to serve new ideological agendas), to newly composed songs with original tunes, to purely instrumental music such as piano polkas and waltzes. These were published as sheet music, arranged into song books and even (in the early days of the recording industry) released on record. They were performed in music halls and theatres, in domestic settings with listeners gathered around the piano, in private meetings or in prisons to promote solidarity among campaigners, and at demonstrations so that campaigners (and their messages) could be heard even when they were not seen.

Suffrage demonstrations and marches were inherently dramatic and theatrical, as Brigitte Caroline Dale explores in this volume. These carefully choreographed spectacles involved campaigners effectively performing to an audience, fitted out with costumes (for example, the attire of Joan of Arc) and other clothing (displaying women’s suffrage colours, complete with accessories such as sashes, rosettes and badges) as well as props (such as elaborately crafted banners, held proudly aloft to promote their cause). Themes of women’s suffrage were also played out on the theatre stage itself: as Naomi Paxton’s chapter demonstrates, suffrage theatre, predominantly with female casts, covered a broad spectrum of entertainments, exhibitions and environments. The Actresses’ Franchise League (AFL), founded in 1908, brought together theatrical professionals who were also suffrage campaigners into a dedicated organisation, and worked in tandem with the Women Writers’ Suffrage League (WWSL) which was formed in the same year, co-founded by Cicely Hamilton. The Artists’ Suffrage League (ASL) and the Suffrage Atelier (SA) were formed in 1907 and 1909 respectively, and these organisations intersected and overlapped across disciplines in their shared agenda for female emancipation.

Rather than merely co-existing along parallel trajectories, this abundance of activities in diverse arts disciplines was such that different creative endeavours worked together, often existing in a symbiotic relationship and dialogising in support of—and as propaganda for—the campaign. Hence photographs of suffragette leaders being arrested went hand in hand with medals, pendants and certificates awarded to suffragettes who served prison sentences (most famously, the ‘Holloway brooch’ designed by Sylvia Pankhurst, and the ‘Hunger Strike Medal’), the sale of prison dolls in broad arrow prisoner outfits, prison symbols such as portcullis motifs appearing on merchandise, and the published prison narratives by suffragettes including Lady Constance Lytton and Emmeline, Christabel and Sylvia Pankhurst—the latter discussed in Eleanor March’s chapter in this volume. Suffrage songs, particularly when the tunes were well-known or when the target audience was not necessarily musically literate, were often published in words-only songsters, in which form they could be engaged with not just as music, but also as poetry. Literary and visual artworks were often printed together in papers and periodicals dedicated to, and pamphlets and handbills distributed by, the various national women’s suffrage societies, in which campaigners’ writings appeared alongside photographs, cartoons and other illustrations. The Victorian and Edwardian periods, with their technological developments in printing and photography, facilitated a proliferation and fusion of artistic forms that provided women with new discourses and strategies with which to call for sociopolitical reform. This collection of chapters is mindful of the ways in which different artforms converge in relation to women’s suffrage; hence Kristin M. Franseen’s chapter considers a suffragette’s music listening as documented through the writing of Vernon Lee, while Amy Galvin considers both written accounts and illustrations of the ventilation shaft through which women used to observe Parliament. The women’s suffrage campaign recognised the transformative political potential of the arts, using them as powerful mouthpieces to challenge their exclusion from traditionally male professions, to communicate their views and to influence ideas of gender. The nature of the women’s suffrage movement invites the multidisciplinary approach of this volume, which shows how the arts were important vehicles for first-wave feminist thought.

Several books on aspects of the engagement of the women’s suffrage movement with the arts exist, spearheaded by Lisa Tickner’s milestone The Spectacle of Women: Imagery of the Suffrage Campaign, 1970–1914 (1987). Barbara Green’s book Spectacular Confessions: Autobiography, Performative Activism and the Sites of Suffrage 1905–1938 (1997) focuses on a range of suffragist writings. Other notable publications include New Dawn Women: Women in the Arts and Crafts and Suffrage Movements at the Dawn of the 20th Century by V. Irene Cockroft (2005), who has kindly contributed the Foreword to the present volume, as well as her and Susan Croft’s Art, Theatre and Women’s Suffrage (2010), which are primarily concerned, as their titles suggest, with the Arts and Crafts movement and with theatre. Danny O. Crew’s Suffragist Sheet Music: An Illustrated Catalogue of Published Music Associated with the Women’s Rights and Suffrage Movement in America (2002) and Kenneth Florey’s Women’s Suffrage Memorabilia: An Illustrated Historical Study (2013) offer illustrative studies of suffrage music and visual art, respectively. Art and Suffrage: A Biographical Dictionary of Suffrage Artists by another of our distinguished contributors, Elizabeth Crawford (2018), provides a collective biography of artists involved in the women’s suffrage movement, while Rise Up, Women! The Remarkable Lives of the Suffragettes by Diane Atkinson (2018) marks the women’s suffrage centenary by charting the history of women’s fight for the vote. Most recently, Miranda Garrett and Zoë Thomas’s edited Suffrage and the Arts: Visual Culture, Politics and Enterprise (2019) has expanded on the work undertaken on women’s suffrage, visual arts and visual culture, with chapters exploring the complex relationships between the campaign for the vote and the Arts and Crafts movement, textiles, badges, interior design and portraiture.

This uniquely multidisciplinary volume builds on previous scholarship and endeavours to be the first to shift the spotlight from exploration of a single artistic field (such as the visual arts or theatre) in relative isolation, to that of a wider spectrum of arts disciplines considered collectively and connectively, spanning literature, the visual arts, music, and stage and screen—the four areas around which it is structured. Although it makes no claims to exhaust all the possible avenues for research in these areas, the remit of this collection is wider still: hence the essays on literature, for instance, encompass newspaper reports and autobiography alongside poetry. And, as Gursimran Oberoi’s discussion of the earliest act of suffragette iconoclasm alone demonstrates, the movement’s engagement with artwork was not always constructive in nature. In its interrogation of the relationship between creativity and politics, this volume offers a more comprehensive understanding of the central role of the arts in the emergence, development and success of the campaign.

The women’s suffrage movement can be traced in the UK at least as far back as the presentation to Parliament of the first mass women’s suffrage petition by John Stuart Mill in 1866 (and, in the USA, to the first women’s rights convention held in Seneca Falls, New York in 1848). While those actively involved with the campaign for the vote represented an ideologically diverse group, its later British history crystallises around three key national organisations, albeit with many local branches between them. First was the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), founded in 1897 to bring together suffrage groups across the country under the leadership of Millicent Fawcett, campaigning peacefully and within the bounds of the law. Second was the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), founded in 1903 by Emmeline Pankhurst (with her daughters Christabel and Sylvia also prominent in its leadership), whose split from the NUWSS was occasioned by disillusionment with the lack of progress in pursuing constitutional means to bring about change, and who famously adopted militant tactics instead, rallying under the motto ‘Deeds, not words’. Third was the Women’s Freedom League (WFL), founded in 1907 as an offshoot of the WSPU, prompted by concerns over its undemocratic governance. As this thumbnail sketch alone indicates, the women’s suffrage movement was in fact very disparate, with different branches and societies embodying different ideologies and degrees of militancy, and significant tension between them as to the ways in which they believed the campaign should be enacted. Complicating the matter further, in practice the different organisations were sometimes confused in the press and in the public imagination, as Sarah Pedersen’s chapter indicates, and some women transitioned from suffragist to suffragette as the fight for women’s suffrage escalated over the course of their creative careers. Nonetheless, this volume follows the practice of referring to those who campaigned peacefully and legally, such as members of the NUWSS, as ‘suffragists’, and reserving the term ‘suffragette’ for those who adopted more militant or violent tactics, as describes members of the WSPU, or otherwise pursued acts of civil disobedience, such as members of the WFL.¹ As Elizabeth Crawford explains further in this collection, artists who participated in the national campaign for the vote arranged themselves into groups such as the previously mentioned Artists’ Suffrage League and the Suffrage Atelier, which together provided much of the visual material for the campaign—although many artists also produced work related to women’s suffrage independently of these bodies.

Inevitably London, as the nation’s capital city, and Manchester, the birthplace of the WSPU, emerge as the principal sites of women’s suffrage activity discussed in this collection. Elizabeth Crawford’s chapter, with its emphasis on Surrey, illustrates the campaign’s dependency on the more rural locations of the Home Counties operating in parallel with the capital. Sarah Pedersen, meanwhile, considers Scotland in relation to England, examining the differently focused reporting on suffragette activity that took place in newspapers north of the border. At the time, Scotland was the political battleground for some of the country’s leading politicians, including the then Chancellor of the Exchequer (and subsequently Prime Minister) H.H. Asquith, whose constituency was East Fife, and Winston Churchill, who successfully stood for election as MP for Dundee in 1908. Further references within the volume to work undertaken by Emmeline Pankhurst in the USA, Ethel Smyth’s engagement with the women’s suffrage movement during her time spent in Austria, and Mary Winsor’s American play A Suffrage Rummage Sale (considered alongside similar manifestations in the UK) remind us of the interactions between the national campaign for the vote and wider international currents.

This volume has been developed in the wake of the resurgence of interest in women’s suffrage owing to the recent centenaries of many women being granted the national vote in the UK (1918) and the USA (1920) for the first time, as well as that of the first woman to take her seat in the House of Commons, MP Nancy Astor (1919); women did not receive the vote in the UK on the same terms as men until 1928. It therefore centres on the pivotal years of the early twentieth century, during which the aforementioned national organisations flourished, up to 1914, at which time much suffrage activity was indefinitely suspended in order that the country could come together to focus on the war effort. Anne Anderson and Amy Galvin provide some of the wider historical context for women’s engagement in politics in relation to art; and in a final chapter, June Purvis re-evaluates two landmark representations of the women’s suffrage movement in late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century television and film. As the following summaries reveal, many themes concerning women’s suffrage resurface throughout the chapters in this anthology, including the establishment of feminist networks and communities, the violence associated with the Black Friday demonstration, the plight of the incarcerated campaigner, the intrusive nature of forcible feeding, and the spectacle of suffrage.

The collection’s Part I on literature comprises a series of chapters investigating the various ways in which experiences of women’s suffrage were expressed through the written word: poetry, autobiography and prison narrative, as well as newspaper reports. Marion Wynne-Davies discusses the little-known poems of Sylvia Pankhurst, some of which exist only in manuscript form in the Pankhurst Papers collection, while others appear in Pankhurst’s volume Writ on Cold Slate (1921). Poetry was rarely published during the WSPU’s years of activity, one notable exception being Holloway Jingles (1912), whose poems depicted the suffragettes’ time in prison. Pankhurst’s own poetry includes graphic descriptions of forcible feeding, such as ‘The Wreck’ from Writ on Cold Slate, in which she likens the practice to rape, thereby drawing an implicit parallel with the sexual assaults endured by suffragettes during Black Friday. Pankhurst seems more concerned in her poems with the articulation of content than with matters of style, leading her to favour the more accessible, less complex prose writing with which she depicted the women in Holloway prison, resisting conventional stereotypes as well as addressing class issues (such as the experiences of the working class in London’s East End) according to her left-wing sympathies. Through these means, she gave a collective voice both to the working class and to the suffragettes; her unpublished poem ‘The Woman’s Summer, 1913’, for instance, is clearly addressed to a collective audience. The medium of poetry enabled Pankhurst to give greater expression to the plight of the suffragettes than through the prose description of her milestone historical account The Suffragette Movement (1931).

Kathy Atherton explores how Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence presented her involvement with the suffragette movement in her various autobiographical writings, as well as re-examining the circumstances of her and her husband Frederick’s expulsion from the WS...

Table des matières

• Cover
• Endorsement
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on contributors
• Foreword: the dawn is breaking…
• 1 Women’s suffrage and cultural representation: The making of a movement
• Part I Literature
• Part II The visual arts and visual identity
• Part III Music
• Part IV Stage and screen
• Index