Women are often written out of history but the centenary of the Representation of the People Act 1918, when women over the age of 30 were given the vote for the first time, has provided a chance to start changing this. This year has already seen women’s voices and stories emerging loud and clear from all corners of the UK, often through activities happening in museums.
Many of the larger projects have been developed by 14-18 Now, an organisation set up to programme art experiences related to the first world war. These include mass participation artworks, organised by the arts charity Artichoke, which will take the form of celebratory processions in Belfast, Cardiff, Edinburgh and London on 10 June.
Another 14-18 Now project is the statue of the suffragist Millicent Fawcett, by the artist Gillian Wearing, which was unveiled in Parliament Square in April. In a similar vein to the Fawcett project, a statue of the suffragette leader Emmeline Pankhurst, by the artist Hazel Reeves, will be unveiled in December in St Peter’s Square in Manchester, the city where the Pankhursts lived. Also in Manchester, the People’s History Museum has a series of banners on display as part of its Represent! Voices 100 Years On exhibition.
The Museum of London is showing a range of objects from its collections, including pendants, banners and medals, and a poignant set of police surveillance photographs of suffragettes. These include less well-known names such as Grace Marcon, who slashed five paintings at London’s National Gallery as part of the cause.
Meanwhile, Rebel Women at the National Portrait Gallery, London, tells the story of women’s suffrage through its portraits and a new book, 100 Pioneering Women.
London’s Foundling Museum is also using portraits to celebrate the role of women. Its Ladies of Quality and Distinction exhibition, which opens on 21 September, will feature portraits of its 18th-century female founders. The display aims to showcase, for the first time, how invaluable these women were in setting up the hospital at Coram’s Fields in 1739. Previously, only their male counterpart founders have been given the limelight.
The show will include Prudence West, who set up a branch of the hospital in Barnet in 1762. There will also be material relating to the scullery maids, laundresses and wet nurses involved in the day-to-day running of the hospital.
The Foundling is also running a collection-based exhibition, First Amongst Equals (until 13 January 2019), which displays items from the museum’s collection chosen by women who are shaping British society today.
“It’s a mix of personal and professional responses,” says Kathleen Palmer, the curator of exhibitions and displays at the Foundling. “They range from the small, almost insignificant but hugely emotive identifying tokens left with babies by their mothers, to letters and musical memorabilia.”
Louise Richardson, the vice-chancellor of the University of Oxford, has chosen a letter written by five unusually literate girl apprentices who had been abandoned in a workhouse in 1778 and appealed to the Foundling Hospital for refuge. Nicky Morgan MP, the chair of the treasury select committee, has chosen a coin token for display, which was left with the baby of a woman who was executed for clipping a coin.
Political voices
The government has its own programme of exhibitions and events to engage the public with the struggle for the vote. These include Voice & Vote, an exhibition that presents the long-drawn-out fight for votes and women’s representation in parliament.
“Parliament felt it was important to celebrate this milestone not only with public engagement, but also with a historic exhibition in the building where the struggle was largely played out, and with crucial material drawn from the parliamentary art collection and archives,” says Melanie Unwin, the joint project manager and co-curator of the Voice & Vote exhibition, which runs at Westminster Hall from 27 June to 6 October.
The exhibition recreates the cramped and stuffy spaces into which women had to squeeze themselves to hear and see the debates in the House of Commons, as well as the cupboard where Emily Wilding Davison hid to claim that her address was the Houses of Parliament and therefore gain the rights that men had for the 1911 census. Sadly, a cleaner found her and she was ousted from her spot. She was later imprisoned, along with other suffragettes, for arson.
Wilding Davison was one of the many suffragettes who endured force-feeding and even tried to end her life in prison, writing that “one big tragedy may save many others”. She died as a result of injuries that she suffered at the 1913 Epsom Derby, when she made her way onto the race track with a suffragette flag.
“Women had always engaged with the politics of the day but through different means,” says Unwin. “Twenty women could squeeze into the ventilator above the Commons chamber and despite the toxic fumes, this quickly became a social space. We have diary entries as far back as 1818 describing the space and the quality of the speeches.”
Objects on display in Westminster Hall range from a document of the 1918 act itself to items owned by Alice Hawkins, a working-class suffragette from Leicester who was harshly treated in prison for her militant activities.
Voting reform was actually instigated by the time the first world war had begun, because 40% of the male population were excluded from voting by the residency clause. The women’s vote, therefore, was really a footnote to that, Unwin adds.
“But before the act was in place, women made huge sacrifices,” says Unwin. “They were beaten up by policemen for their activism and force-fed if they went on hunger strike, which had terrible long-term effects on their health.”
The exhibition also looks at the experience of women MPs and recreates the ladies members’ room. The year of 1918 saw the act that gave women the right to be elected as MPs. Constance Markievicz was the first, but as a member of Sinn Fein, did not take her seat. So, in 1919, Nancy Astor became the first woman MP to take her seat and although she knew many of the male MPs socially, she had a tough time in parliament.
“Fellow MPs made it clear that she was not welcome in the male chambers and they were rude to her, refusing to move out of her way – and the toilet was a quarter of a mile away,” says Unwin. “Even when more women were elected they still had to squeeze into the tiny ladies members’ room, at one point having to sit on the floor to write their correspondence.”
The centenary has also prompted new research and collecting. The 1918 act not only enfranchised eight and a half million women over the age of 30, but also five and a half million men who were over 21 years old.
Radical histories
Sheffield, a city with a recognised history of radicalism and activism, has positioned its celebration within this wider context. Changing Lives: Two Hundred Years of People and Protest in Sheffield, at Weston Park Museum, comprises part of Museums Sheffield’s Protest and Activism season, which is supported by the Esmée Fairbairn Collections Fund, managed by the Museums Association. It covers 38 groups including the Sheffield chartists and striking miners. Importantly, the show is feeding back by helping to fill gaps in the collection caused by a lack of contemporary collecting.
“We wanted to explore protest more broadly,” says Louisa Briggs, the curator of contemporary collecting at Museums Sheffield. “It is such an inherent part of the city’s make-up, from the radical press in the 18th century to tree protestors today, and we saw an opportunity to consider the impact of all this on the citizens of Sheffield.
“However, much of the material culture of this history has been lost, and its ephemeral nature made it a collecting challenge,” Briggs says. “In particular, we needed to find items relating to two important events: the 1980 steelworkers’ strike and the 1984-85 miners’ strike.”
“We now have items that feel human – for example, a collecting bucket and board from the miners’ strike, and the tweed suit and walking boots of GHB Ward, a steelworker and ramblers’ rights activist who took part in mass trespasses in the Peak District.”
A Woman’s Place (until 31 December) at Abbey House Museum in Leeds, although focusing on the contribution of local women, also broadens the timeline and scope beyond the suffragettes.
“We have a lot of material on permanent display relating to the local suffragette Leonora Cohen,” says Kitty Ross, the curator of social history at Leeds Museums & Galleries. In 1913, Cohen famously threw an iron bar at the glass case protecting the Crown Jewels in the Tower of London.
“While we are selecting from our existing material we are also bringing it up to date,” Ross says. “We are looking at issues affecting women today and activism such as the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements, as well as the battles still being contested, from pension inequalities and the gender pay gap to better representation of women in higher education and on company boards.”
The exhibition shows material from protests such as Leeds Reclaim the Streets in the 1990s as well as more contemporary items reflecting contributions to women’s rights, such as the boxing gloves belonging to the Olympic champion Nicola Adams.
“From researching the exhibition we have identified some collecting gaps that we hope to fill,” says Ross. “Many of the women involved in the suffrage movement remain relatively anonymous and we are hoping to get their lives properly documented.”
Sue John, the enterprise development manager at Glasgow Women’s Library, is also hoping its exhibition will shine a light on less-known figures. “Ask anyone to name a suffragette and the answer is invariably Pankhurst,” John says. “So we wanted to highlight the role of the Scottish suffragettes, such as Marion Wallace Dunlop, who was the first to go on hunger strike.”
Women Making an Exhibition of Themselves is a community co-curated project that looks at women in domestic and political spheres, and the synchronicity between archive items. “A knitting needle, for example, could conjure images of cosy domesticity,” says John, “but for some it may suggest backstreet abortions and domestic violence.
“We also want to display our astounding collection of suffragette postcards, such as the misogynistic image of a suffragette with her tongue in a vice,” John says. “This is one of the ways we can touch on campaigns such as #MeToo. Bear in mind that 100 years ago the post was delivered three or four times a day and these postcards that vilify or champion women – some are ambiguous – were the social media of the time.
“It is certainly a watershed year and it lifts my heart to see the number of young women and men interested in gender equality,” John says. “But the debate must continue. There’s no point in us showing all this amazing material only to clear it away at the end of the year. The fight goes on.”
Trust in suffrage
Like Brexit today, the issue of women’s suffrage divided families and communities. The National Trust is marking the centenary of the Representation of the People Act 1918 by exploring how opposing sides of the suffrage argument were played out at its properties.
“It was political but it was also personal,” says Rachael Lennon, the curator of the Women and Power programme.
“There was intergenerational solidarity, but also family rifts. Edith Stewart, of Mount Stewart in Northern Ireland, who founded the Women’s Legion, held garden parties while her family dismissed her as a ‘young hound running riot’.”
Lord Curzon of Kedleston was vehemently opposed to the extension of enfranchisement. “There was real misogyny behind it,” says Lennon. “Men like Curzon believed that women took longer to develop the intellectual capacity to vote, hence the limit of 30, while men could vote at 21.
The Mander family of Wightwick Manor supported women’s suffrage and we have redressed a drawing room (pictured left) where suffragist meetings were held. It’s easy to think that progress is inevitable but we aim to show the huge personal sacrifices made on both sides of the class divide and how the fight continued. Our properties and sites offer a huge range of stories.”
Suffragette artists
In the early years of the suffrage movement, Sylvia Pankhurst, a trained artist, was commissioned to design the interiors of Pankhurst Hall in Salford, a social club built for the Independent Labour Party and named after Pankhurst’s socialist father. The hall has since been demolished.
Pankhurst had decorated it in a William Morris style, with symbols of apples for love and roses for knowledge. But she never saw the finished work, because as a woman she was barred from the club. Pankhurst’s art lost out to her political campaigning, but an exhibition of her drawings of working women loaned by Helen Pankhurst, her granddaughter, revealed her talent earlier this year at Manchester Art Gallery.
“Her final three drawings were chalk studies for a large painting that was never painted,” says Hannah Williamson, the fine art curator at Manchester Art Gallery. “She chose a different path at what was clearly a formative moment for her. Like a lot of women artists at the time, she channelled her skills into commercial design for the cause, designing badges, logos, banners and the Holloway brooch that was handed to freed suffragette prisoners.”
A second exhibition displays the paintings of the Manchester artist Annie Swynnerton (until 6 January 2019), who set up the Manchester Society of Women Painters in 1879. Williamson, who curated the exhibition, says that although women artists are well represented in Manchester Art Gallery’s collections thanks to a forward-thinking early-20th-century curator, it is looking for more works by female artists.
Deborah Mulhearn is a freelance writer.
The Vote 100 UK website was developed by Royal Holloway, University of London, and supported by a range of organisations, including the Museums Association and the National Trust. It has further information and resources relating to the centenary of the Representation of the People Act.
Many of the larger projects have been developed by 14-18 Now, an organisation set up to programme art experiences related to the first world war. These include mass participation artworks, organised by the arts charity Artichoke, which will take the form of celebratory processions in Belfast, Cardiff, Edinburgh and London on 10 June.
Another 14-18 Now project is the statue of the suffragist Millicent Fawcett, by the artist Gillian Wearing, which was unveiled in Parliament Square in April. In a similar vein to the Fawcett project, a statue of the suffragette leader Emmeline Pankhurst, by the artist Hazel Reeves, will be unveiled in December in St Peter’s Square in Manchester, the city where the Pankhursts lived. Also in Manchester, the People’s History Museum has a series of banners on display as part of its Represent! Voices 100 Years On exhibition.
The Museum of London is showing a range of objects from its collections, including pendants, banners and medals, and a poignant set of police surveillance photographs of suffragettes. These include less well-known names such as Grace Marcon, who slashed five paintings at London’s National Gallery as part of the cause.
Meanwhile, Rebel Women at the National Portrait Gallery, London, tells the story of women’s suffrage through its portraits and a new book, 100 Pioneering Women.
London’s Foundling Museum is also using portraits to celebrate the role of women. Its Ladies of Quality and Distinction exhibition, which opens on 21 September, will feature portraits of its 18th-century female founders. The display aims to showcase, for the first time, how invaluable these women were in setting up the hospital at Coram’s Fields in 1739. Previously, only their male counterpart founders have been given the limelight.
The show will include Prudence West, who set up a branch of the hospital in Barnet in 1762. There will also be material relating to the scullery maids, laundresses and wet nurses involved in the day-to-day running of the hospital.
The Foundling is also running a collection-based exhibition, First Amongst Equals (until 13 January 2019), which displays items from the museum’s collection chosen by women who are shaping British society today.
“It’s a mix of personal and professional responses,” says Kathleen Palmer, the curator of exhibitions and displays at the Foundling. “They range from the small, almost insignificant but hugely emotive identifying tokens left with babies by their mothers, to letters and musical memorabilia.”
Louise Richardson, the vice-chancellor of the University of Oxford, has chosen a letter written by five unusually literate girl apprentices who had been abandoned in a workhouse in 1778 and appealed to the Foundling Hospital for refuge. Nicky Morgan MP, the chair of the treasury select committee, has chosen a coin token for display, which was left with the baby of a woman who was executed for clipping a coin.
Political voices
The government has its own programme of exhibitions and events to engage the public with the struggle for the vote. These include Voice & Vote, an exhibition that presents the long-drawn-out fight for votes and women’s representation in parliament.
“Parliament felt it was important to celebrate this milestone not only with public engagement, but also with a historic exhibition in the building where the struggle was largely played out, and with crucial material drawn from the parliamentary art collection and archives,” says Melanie Unwin, the joint project manager and co-curator of the Voice & Vote exhibition, which runs at Westminster Hall from 27 June to 6 October.
The exhibition recreates the cramped and stuffy spaces into which women had to squeeze themselves to hear and see the debates in the House of Commons, as well as the cupboard where Emily Wilding Davison hid to claim that her address was the Houses of Parliament and therefore gain the rights that men had for the 1911 census. Sadly, a cleaner found her and she was ousted from her spot. She was later imprisoned, along with other suffragettes, for arson.
Wilding Davison was one of the many suffragettes who endured force-feeding and even tried to end her life in prison, writing that “one big tragedy may save many others”. She died as a result of injuries that she suffered at the 1913 Epsom Derby, when she made her way onto the race track with a suffragette flag.
“Women had always engaged with the politics of the day but through different means,” says Unwin. “Twenty women could squeeze into the ventilator above the Commons chamber and despite the toxic fumes, this quickly became a social space. We have diary entries as far back as 1818 describing the space and the quality of the speeches.”
Objects on display in Westminster Hall range from a document of the 1918 act itself to items owned by Alice Hawkins, a working-class suffragette from Leicester who was harshly treated in prison for her militant activities.
Voting reform was actually instigated by the time the first world war had begun, because 40% of the male population were excluded from voting by the residency clause. The women’s vote, therefore, was really a footnote to that, Unwin adds.
“But before the act was in place, women made huge sacrifices,” says Unwin. “They were beaten up by policemen for their activism and force-fed if they went on hunger strike, which had terrible long-term effects on their health.”
The exhibition also looks at the experience of women MPs and recreates the ladies members’ room. The year of 1918 saw the act that gave women the right to be elected as MPs. Constance Markievicz was the first, but as a member of Sinn Fein, did not take her seat. So, in 1919, Nancy Astor became the first woman MP to take her seat and although she knew many of the male MPs socially, she had a tough time in parliament.
“Fellow MPs made it clear that she was not welcome in the male chambers and they were rude to her, refusing to move out of her way – and the toilet was a quarter of a mile away,” says Unwin. “Even when more women were elected they still had to squeeze into the tiny ladies members’ room, at one point having to sit on the floor to write their correspondence.”
The centenary has also prompted new research and collecting. The 1918 act not only enfranchised eight and a half million women over the age of 30, but also five and a half million men who were over 21 years old.
Radical histories
Sheffield, a city with a recognised history of radicalism and activism, has positioned its celebration within this wider context. Changing Lives: Two Hundred Years of People and Protest in Sheffield, at Weston Park Museum, comprises part of Museums Sheffield’s Protest and Activism season, which is supported by the Esmée Fairbairn Collections Fund, managed by the Museums Association. It covers 38 groups including the Sheffield chartists and striking miners. Importantly, the show is feeding back by helping to fill gaps in the collection caused by a lack of contemporary collecting.
“We wanted to explore protest more broadly,” says Louisa Briggs, the curator of contemporary collecting at Museums Sheffield. “It is such an inherent part of the city’s make-up, from the radical press in the 18th century to tree protestors today, and we saw an opportunity to consider the impact of all this on the citizens of Sheffield.
“However, much of the material culture of this history has been lost, and its ephemeral nature made it a collecting challenge,” Briggs says. “In particular, we needed to find items relating to two important events: the 1980 steelworkers’ strike and the 1984-85 miners’ strike.”
“We now have items that feel human – for example, a collecting bucket and board from the miners’ strike, and the tweed suit and walking boots of GHB Ward, a steelworker and ramblers’ rights activist who took part in mass trespasses in the Peak District.”
A Woman’s Place (until 31 December) at Abbey House Museum in Leeds, although focusing on the contribution of local women, also broadens the timeline and scope beyond the suffragettes.
“We have a lot of material on permanent display relating to the local suffragette Leonora Cohen,” says Kitty Ross, the curator of social history at Leeds Museums & Galleries. In 1913, Cohen famously threw an iron bar at the glass case protecting the Crown Jewels in the Tower of London.
“While we are selecting from our existing material we are also bringing it up to date,” Ross says. “We are looking at issues affecting women today and activism such as the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements, as well as the battles still being contested, from pension inequalities and the gender pay gap to better representation of women in higher education and on company boards.”
The exhibition shows material from protests such as Leeds Reclaim the Streets in the 1990s as well as more contemporary items reflecting contributions to women’s rights, such as the boxing gloves belonging to the Olympic champion Nicola Adams.
“From researching the exhibition we have identified some collecting gaps that we hope to fill,” says Ross. “Many of the women involved in the suffrage movement remain relatively anonymous and we are hoping to get their lives properly documented.”
Sue John, the enterprise development manager at Glasgow Women’s Library, is also hoping its exhibition will shine a light on less-known figures. “Ask anyone to name a suffragette and the answer is invariably Pankhurst,” John says. “So we wanted to highlight the role of the Scottish suffragettes, such as Marion Wallace Dunlop, who was the first to go on hunger strike.”
Women Making an Exhibition of Themselves is a community co-curated project that looks at women in domestic and political spheres, and the synchronicity between archive items. “A knitting needle, for example, could conjure images of cosy domesticity,” says John, “but for some it may suggest backstreet abortions and domestic violence.
“We also want to display our astounding collection of suffragette postcards, such as the misogynistic image of a suffragette with her tongue in a vice,” John says. “This is one of the ways we can touch on campaigns such as #MeToo. Bear in mind that 100 years ago the post was delivered three or four times a day and these postcards that vilify or champion women – some are ambiguous – were the social media of the time.
“It is certainly a watershed year and it lifts my heart to see the number of young women and men interested in gender equality,” John says. “But the debate must continue. There’s no point in us showing all this amazing material only to clear it away at the end of the year. The fight goes on.”
Trust in suffrage
Like Brexit today, the issue of women’s suffrage divided families and communities. The National Trust is marking the centenary of the Representation of the People Act 1918 by exploring how opposing sides of the suffrage argument were played out at its properties.
“It was political but it was also personal,” says Rachael Lennon, the curator of the Women and Power programme.
“There was intergenerational solidarity, but also family rifts. Edith Stewart, of Mount Stewart in Northern Ireland, who founded the Women’s Legion, held garden parties while her family dismissed her as a ‘young hound running riot’.”
Lord Curzon of Kedleston was vehemently opposed to the extension of enfranchisement. “There was real misogyny behind it,” says Lennon. “Men like Curzon believed that women took longer to develop the intellectual capacity to vote, hence the limit of 30, while men could vote at 21.
The Mander family of Wightwick Manor supported women’s suffrage and we have redressed a drawing room (pictured left) where suffragist meetings were held. It’s easy to think that progress is inevitable but we aim to show the huge personal sacrifices made on both sides of the class divide and how the fight continued. Our properties and sites offer a huge range of stories.”
Suffragette artists
In the early years of the suffrage movement, Sylvia Pankhurst, a trained artist, was commissioned to design the interiors of Pankhurst Hall in Salford, a social club built for the Independent Labour Party and named after Pankhurst’s socialist father. The hall has since been demolished.
Pankhurst had decorated it in a William Morris style, with symbols of apples for love and roses for knowledge. But she never saw the finished work, because as a woman she was barred from the club. Pankhurst’s art lost out to her political campaigning, but an exhibition of her drawings of working women loaned by Helen Pankhurst, her granddaughter, revealed her talent earlier this year at Manchester Art Gallery.
“Her final three drawings were chalk studies for a large painting that was never painted,” says Hannah Williamson, the fine art curator at Manchester Art Gallery. “She chose a different path at what was clearly a formative moment for her. Like a lot of women artists at the time, she channelled her skills into commercial design for the cause, designing badges, logos, banners and the Holloway brooch that was handed to freed suffragette prisoners.”
A second exhibition displays the paintings of the Manchester artist Annie Swynnerton (until 6 January 2019), who set up the Manchester Society of Women Painters in 1879. Williamson, who curated the exhibition, says that although women artists are well represented in Manchester Art Gallery’s collections thanks to a forward-thinking early-20th-century curator, it is looking for more works by female artists.
Deborah Mulhearn is a freelance writer.
The Vote 100 UK website was developed by Royal Holloway, University of London, and supported by a range of organisations, including the Museums Association and the National Trust. It has further information and resources relating to the centenary of the Representation of the People Act.
