It seemed like an appropriate day to visit the Women’s Library exhibition: women had just won the right to backdate workplace equality claims following a new ruling and Helen Pankhurst, Emmeline’s great-granddaughter, was leading a large march to lobby parliament for equal rights.
The Long March to Equality is divided into three key sections: suffragettes; the emergence of women in public life; and the development of feminism. The exhibition has a comprehensive range of artefacts, including banners, posters and pamphlets, that document the historic struggle for equality.
The excellent audioguide (free, like the exhibition) and the narration by well-known public figures such as actors Sophie Dahl and Bill Nighy, and QC Cherie Booth, adds welcome depth.
The comedienne Sandi Toksvig reads Mary Astell’s 1696 text, A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, and the extract includes Astell’s challenge to “dare to break the enchanted circle that custom has placed us in…” This is a strong point to open on as the exhibition as a whole is a celebration of women who dared.
While I very much enjoyed the Long March to Equality, overall I found that it sacrificed depth to breadth. As a result, the visitor experience at times feels dense and rather piece-meal.
Description overshadows evaluation and key questions could have allowed for more visitor engagement. In part, this impression was due to lots of text being too small and sometimes difficult to read.
History at its best
However, there is plenty of intelligent placing of text panels and artefacts. For example, seeing Emily Davison’s tiny frayed leather purse and return tickets from Victoria to Epsom to the fateful 1913 Derby, and reading the panel suggesting her martyrdom was not planned after all, but a propaganda stunt gone wrong, was very powerful and moving.
Elements such as this allow visitors to think again about long-held historical assumptions.
There are a lot of artefacts on display, but the audioguide offers respite, recalibrating the balance from objects to people.
It’s quite one thing to see the familiar protest posters about force-feeding, quite another to hear about it directly – Kate Adie’s reading of Lady Constance Lytton’s experience at Holloway prison packed such a punch that I could hardly bear to listen.
This is interpretation at its best – up close and personal, allowing history to be lived from the inside out.
Wit and creativity are present throughout. There is a game entitled Suffragettes In and Out of Holloway Prison and satire runs from the suffragettes’ protest to the feminist cartoonists.
In the Flapper Vote book cabinet, there’s a clever juxtaposition of Mary Stopes’s 1918 Married Love, which electrified England, with The Electrical Handbook for Women, which is open at a page showing a woman fiddling with a fuse-box at home, experiencing the joys of technology.
But this set up expectations that the exhibition would go on to explore the complex juggling act that modern motherhood has turned out to be for most working women, but unfortunately it does not do this.
It was a shame not to look at these themes in more depth. I also thought that Stopes’s compelling achievements and Nancy Astor’s parliamentary journey deserved more space.
In the feminism section, a 1974 board game entitled Miss World Game is accompanied by Jo Robinson’s audioguide narration.
As a member of the women’s liberation movement, she recounts her arrest for disrupting the Miss World 1970 show at the Royal Albert Hall. Forty years on, her reflections offer a key context for the exhibition as a whole.
End of an era
But this contextualization didn’t run throughout the exhibition to reflect the challenges facing women in the global village. For example, the Miss World the contest, now only taken seriously in the developing world, is a great example of how the long march to equality goes on and may have been a point of wider reflection.
By contrast, the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Gallery, named after the first woman doctor to train in this country, at the Unison Centre in central London strives to interpret from the particular to the general, anchoring her achievements to present-day issues.
The final panels in the Long March to Equality celebrate the punk rock groups and the 90s grrl power movement but ending here feels like a full stop rather than an ellipsis. A badge-making machine invites visitors to make a badge about an issue that is relevant
to them, but taking these away rather than pinning them to a noticeboard doesn’t allow for visitors to exchange ideas with each other and the curators. Perhaps a comments book and a blog would widen the dialogue.
There is some film footage but I wanted to hear what some ordinary people think about equality. Perhaps a clip of Bob Hope’s sexist compering just before he was flour-bombed by the women’s liberation movement in 1970 would have been fun.
And showing Plan UK’s Because I Am a Girl campaign and hearing from Helen Pankhurst about her work to campaign for equality would have updated the narrative.
The Women’s Library has been part of London Metropolitan University since 1977, but funding cuts have led to a controversial move to the London School of Economics, planned for mid-2013.
This will sever its resonant East End links to the early suffragette movement, but as I left I thought the move might also allow it to become a visible hub for the local community, something that the uninviting sofa area with an automatic coffee-machine in the entrance does not do now.
Gemma McGrath is a freelance heritage consultant and tourism lecturer
The Long March to Equality is divided into three key sections: suffragettes; the emergence of women in public life; and the development of feminism. The exhibition has a comprehensive range of artefacts, including banners, posters and pamphlets, that document the historic struggle for equality.
The excellent audioguide (free, like the exhibition) and the narration by well-known public figures such as actors Sophie Dahl and Bill Nighy, and QC Cherie Booth, adds welcome depth.
The comedienne Sandi Toksvig reads Mary Astell’s 1696 text, A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, and the extract includes Astell’s challenge to “dare to break the enchanted circle that custom has placed us in…” This is a strong point to open on as the exhibition as a whole is a celebration of women who dared.
While I very much enjoyed the Long March to Equality, overall I found that it sacrificed depth to breadth. As a result, the visitor experience at times feels dense and rather piece-meal.
Description overshadows evaluation and key questions could have allowed for more visitor engagement. In part, this impression was due to lots of text being too small and sometimes difficult to read.
History at its best
However, there is plenty of intelligent placing of text panels and artefacts. For example, seeing Emily Davison’s tiny frayed leather purse and return tickets from Victoria to Epsom to the fateful 1913 Derby, and reading the panel suggesting her martyrdom was not planned after all, but a propaganda stunt gone wrong, was very powerful and moving.
Elements such as this allow visitors to think again about long-held historical assumptions.
There are a lot of artefacts on display, but the audioguide offers respite, recalibrating the balance from objects to people.
It’s quite one thing to see the familiar protest posters about force-feeding, quite another to hear about it directly – Kate Adie’s reading of Lady Constance Lytton’s experience at Holloway prison packed such a punch that I could hardly bear to listen.
This is interpretation at its best – up close and personal, allowing history to be lived from the inside out.
Wit and creativity are present throughout. There is a game entitled Suffragettes In and Out of Holloway Prison and satire runs from the suffragettes’ protest to the feminist cartoonists.
In the Flapper Vote book cabinet, there’s a clever juxtaposition of Mary Stopes’s 1918 Married Love, which electrified England, with The Electrical Handbook for Women, which is open at a page showing a woman fiddling with a fuse-box at home, experiencing the joys of technology.
But this set up expectations that the exhibition would go on to explore the complex juggling act that modern motherhood has turned out to be for most working women, but unfortunately it does not do this.
It was a shame not to look at these themes in more depth. I also thought that Stopes’s compelling achievements and Nancy Astor’s parliamentary journey deserved more space.
In the feminism section, a 1974 board game entitled Miss World Game is accompanied by Jo Robinson’s audioguide narration.
As a member of the women’s liberation movement, she recounts her arrest for disrupting the Miss World 1970 show at the Royal Albert Hall. Forty years on, her reflections offer a key context for the exhibition as a whole.
End of an era
But this contextualization didn’t run throughout the exhibition to reflect the challenges facing women in the global village. For example, the Miss World the contest, now only taken seriously in the developing world, is a great example of how the long march to equality goes on and may have been a point of wider reflection.
By contrast, the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Gallery, named after the first woman doctor to train in this country, at the Unison Centre in central London strives to interpret from the particular to the general, anchoring her achievements to present-day issues.
The final panels in the Long March to Equality celebrate the punk rock groups and the 90s grrl power movement but ending here feels like a full stop rather than an ellipsis. A badge-making machine invites visitors to make a badge about an issue that is relevant
to them, but taking these away rather than pinning them to a noticeboard doesn’t allow for visitors to exchange ideas with each other and the curators. Perhaps a comments book and a blog would widen the dialogue.
There is some film footage but I wanted to hear what some ordinary people think about equality. Perhaps a clip of Bob Hope’s sexist compering just before he was flour-bombed by the women’s liberation movement in 1970 would have been fun.
And showing Plan UK’s Because I Am a Girl campaign and hearing from Helen Pankhurst about her work to campaign for equality would have updated the narrative.
The Women’s Library has been part of London Metropolitan University since 1977, but funding cuts have led to a controversial move to the London School of Economics, planned for mid-2013.
This will sever its resonant East End links to the early suffragette movement, but as I left I thought the move might also allow it to become a visible hub for the local community, something that the uninviting sofa area with an automatic coffee-machine in the entrance does not do now.
Gemma McGrath is a freelance heritage consultant and tourism lecturer
Project data
- Cost £60,000
- Main funder Hefce
- Design Easy Tiger Creative
- Curator Kate Murphy
- Exhibition ends 22 February 2013
