Bateman exhibition at the Cartoon Museum

Last Friday I participated in an evening event at the Cartoon Museum in Bloomsbury in connection with their current exhibition on the work of H M Bateman. Bateman is probably best known for his series of tableaux of social shame, 'The Man Who...' embarrassingly committed some solecism or faux pas but his long career included numerous other contributions to the cartoonist's art. (His vivid evocations of shame and humiliation resonate with Nash and Kilday's suggestion that shame continued as a compelling cultural force well beyond the period conventionally assigned to the rise of a guilt culture.)

I was asked to speak on women in the Edwardian period - Bateman has a number of rather conventionally hostile cartoons of suffragettes, but he often depicted women as terrifying and/or grotesque, and one feels that pillars of the anti-suffrage forces would not have gained any very flattering treatment either. Conversely, there are some more sympathetic portrayals of women, for example the Woman with Flat Iron and several of music hall performers. I didn't see any works illustrating 'khaki fever' in the early months of the Great War but one is rather surprised that he didn't make something of this.

It occurred to me, in my consideration of the wider changes in women's lives and their increasing move into public spaces for both work and leisure purposes, whether some of the hostility towards the suffrage movement, and the often very nasty ways in which they were portrayed, was because they were in some sense an epitome of, or a scapegoat for, disturbing changes more generally in the relations of the sexes at the period.

Lucy Delap, The Feminist Avant-Garde: Transatlantic Encounters of the Early Twentieth Century (2007)

This is a very useful study of a neglected strand within and around feminism before World War I. It's particularly strong at looking at the controversial and short-lived yet influential journal The Freewoman and going beyond the perhaps overmuch rehearsed account of the debates on sexuality for which it provided a forum, important as those were - they were far from the whole story. It also points up the surprising (with the perspective of a century between) fuzziness of the suffrage/anti-suffrage distinction: a number of scholars have pointed out that anti-suffragists managed to combine a belief that women should not have the vote with a commitment to various causes within the public sphere and indeed aimed at the advancement of women (such as Mrs Humphrey Ward's work for women's higher education), but Delap also shows that a number of self-declared feminists, whether active in the suffrage movement, sympathetic, or disillusioned with the way the struggle was being taken, had attitudes towards other women which were far from sisterly and supportive.

It is valuable to have a nuanced account of how the movements in the UK and the USA influenced one another or produced local mutations of transatlantic developments, and also the influence of certain significant European figures. A whole book could perhaps be written about the place of Swedish feminist reformer Ellen Key's work in different national contexts.

Delap also looks at the extraordinarily heterogenous, not to mention counter-intuitive, sources upon which women were drawing to articulate their discontents with society, the position of women, etc and to advance solutions. The focus tends to be on the more individualistic, rather than collectivist, trend within feminism at the period, though  in many cases the commitment to the development of the individual sat next to involvement in various forms of collective activism and programmes aimed at producing an impact on society as a whole.

This study reveals long-standing fracture lines between different feminisms, and also depicts certain phenomena which are perhaps reflected in other periods: for example, reading Delap's account of the turn to interiority, contemplation of the psyche, and the importance of the individual liberating herself from mind-forged manacles I was strongly reminded of directions taken following the renaissance of feminism as 'Women's Lib' in the late 1960s. During the 1970s there was a similar commitment to personal change, which took individuals down many different paths, including the teachings of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh.

UNESCO UK Memory of the World Register 2011

On 23 May 2011 twenty items and collections became the second round of inscriptions to the UK Memory of the World Register
It is extremely gratifying to see important collections relating to women's history in this batch - not only Documentary Heritage of the Women's Suffrage Movement in Britain, 1865-1928 (joint project of the Women's Library and the Parliamentary Archives), but the diaries of Anne Lister (at West Yorkshire Archive Service) - and also the Edinburgh and Lothian HIV/AIDS Collections, 1983-2010 in Lothian Health Services Archives).

Slightly behindhand with this

I intended to post on Saturday for the centenary of the Great Census Boycott of 1911 undertaken by suffragettes as an act of protest. There was a piece in the Guardian on Friday, and on the Saturday there was a guided walk of Kensington under the auspices of the Women's Library.

My own impression has been that it was largely an action of the Women's Freedom League in line with their policy of non-violent (but nonetheless significantly disruptive) protests, but it does seem to have extended well beyond that particular organisation.

There is a nice story by Laurence Housman, the male suffragist, playwright and sex reformer, about leaving his own residence for census night so that an interdeterminate number of women suffragists could stay there. They had departed by the time he returned, but left him a cooked breakfast.

A quote a day for Women's History Month: 25th March

[I]t would be strange... if they had not, in the course of ages, acquired a measure of that mental dexterity and rapid skill which, in any other business, would be dubbed mechanical, but in a woman's business of obtaining and managing a lord and master is commonly described as intuitive.

Cicely Hamilton, 'Intuition', published in Time and Tide, 16 Sep 1927, reprinted in Dale Spender, Time and Tide Wait for No Man (1984)

Hamilton is probably these days best known for her 1909 polemic, Marriage As a Trade, but in her day, alongside her suffrage activism (including the lyrics to March of the Women even if Ethel Smyth actually copyrighted them) she wrote plays, novels, works on war, and travel books. One of her short suffrage plays ('How the Vote was Won', co-authored with Christopher St John) was produced last year at a fringe theatre in London and was still extremely entertaining. She was active in the birth control movement between the wars and also a supporter of abortion law reform, and is yet another example of someone who really doesn't fit in to categorisations of 'New' and 'Old' feminism at that period but was both involved with egalitarian campaigns and those addressing women's specific needs. (I am not sure that anyone, except possibly Eleanor Rathbone, who pretty much invented the concept of 'New' feminism around her concerns for Family Allowances, etc, really fits at all neatly in that simplistic division.)

A quote a day for Women's History Month: 23rd March

The sexual relation is a matter upon which average man--and we emphasise the average--is unfit to reason; the finer shades of thought seem invisible to him: in his view a woman is just a woman, the object of whose life should be to subject herself to his will: he can see no good in one who repudiates this position.

Margaret Dalham, Mere Man (1911)

It seems impossible to find out much more about Dalham besides her authorship of this work, at least without a lot of detailed research in the records of suffrage and social purity organisations in the early C20th. However, on the basis of this work she can be identified as one of the several feminist polemicists attacking the existing relations of gender and sexuality of the pre-Great War era, though a good deal less well-known than Cicely Hamilton or Christabel Pankhurst or even Louise Martindale; or, of course, Rebecca West, who summed up their case admirably in one short sentence: 'Men are terribly poor stuff'.

International Women's Day

Shout, shout*, up with your song:

Dame Ethel Smyth (neither of those bios strikes me as altogether satisfactory), The March of the Women - lyrics (which often get overlooked in the attribution to Smyth) by Cicely Hamilton (though Dame E apparently copyrighted them to herself along with the music).

I first heard this when it was the theme song for the 1974 drama series, Shoulder to Shoulder (1974 was a good year for television drama with feminist content - it was also the year of the good version of South Riding).  What would be a nice thing for 100 years of International Women's Day would be for this to be available once more on DVD, which it isn't (rights issues? deterioration of the originals? - surely there would be interest in it). I'm sure I'd find things now to criticise in its depiction of the suffrage movement (i.e. very Pankhurst-focused) but there was so much in it that I still remember fondly that I'd at least like to see how it held up. It might at least open up debates about the iconography of the suffrage movement and the way it's remembered.

*And how much do I like that exhortation to women to shout? particularly when articles in the Observer Magazine on Sunday, in what was presumably intended as an IWD-themed issue, invoked the 'strident' motif as a negative symbol of feminism.

The root, the blossom or the bole: passing along the message

THE SUFFRAGETTES’ TREE: CENTENNIAL EVENTS IN CELEBRATION OF INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S DAY  (pdf), Bath, 7th—11th March, 2011

Between 1909 and 1912, over sixty suffragettes who were recovering from the harsh treatment they had received while imprisoned for their political activism came to stay with the Blathwayt family at Eagle House in Batheaston, Somerset. As committed supporters of the women’s movement, the Blathwayts wanted not only to help the women recover physically, but also to record, in the very landscape, the cause for which they struggled. As such, they created a very special garden in the grounds of their villa, encouraging the suffragettes who stayed with themto plant trees and bushes commemorating their efforts and their hopes for the future of women's political equality.

Photographs of this beautiful field of trees, or ‘Annie’s Arboretum’ as it was also called, after the suffragette Annie Kenney, can be viewed online via Bath in Time (www.bathintime.co.uk — see ‘Social History’).

This unique work of feminist landscape history survived until the late 1960s, when it was destroyed to make way for a housing estate. At present, only one of the original trees remains from the original arboretum: a large Austrian Pine planted by the suffragette Rose Lamartine Yates (1875–1954) on 30th October, 1909.

....

On International Women’s Day, 8th March, 2011, The Centre for History & Culture at Bath Spa University, in conjunction with Bath & Northeast Somerset Council, will celebrate the centenary of this unique piece of suffrage history in Bath, with the symbolic planting of commemorative suffragettes’ trees in Royal Victoria Park, Alice Park, and Bath Spa University. These plantings, which we hope will attract widespread media attention and involve leading female politicians and public figures, as well as the general public, will serve as a living testimony to all those — suffragettes and suffragists — who contended to win votes for women and secure women’s rights as full citizens.

FaceBook Page for The Suffragettes' Tree