Women's Suffrage Exhibition, London, 2010 - Dissertation Example

and Number of the Teacher’s A REPORT ON WOMEN’S SUFFRAGE EXHIBITION, LONDON, Introduction The Women’s Library in London, founded in 1926 by leading suffragist Millicent Fawcett, has the “oldest and largest collection of women’s history in the UK” (VADS, 2011). The internationally well-known specialist library has extensive collections of books and various artefacts in its archives and museum, on the lives of women in Britain. The material related to women’s suffrage includes posters, photographs, postcards, badges and other mementos reflecting women’s efforts to gain equality with men for the right to be voted towards full representation in the parliament. For the first time in its history, the Women’s Library showed original art works inspired by items in its collection, in the exhibition Out of the Archives extending from May to September, 2010, curated by Anna Colin. The exhibition explored the relationship between art and political campaigning, highlighting events, objects and movements from women’s history in Britain. Included in the diverse selection of archives on women’s campaigns and struggles, is depicted the association between art production and destruction as a part of the women’s suffrage movement (Out of the Archives, 2011). For the exhibition Out of the Archives, artists Olivia Plender and Hester Reeve took into consideration “the troubled, turbulent and sometimes contradictory relationship between suffragettes and art” (Jones, 2010). Thesis Statement: The purpose of this paper is present a report on women’s suffrage exhibition held in the Women’s Library, London, from May to September, 2010. Commissioning for the Exhibition by Olivia Plender and Hester Reeve The artists Olivia Plender and Hester Reeve used a range of items from the Women’s Library archives including “magazines, reports, photographs and posters” (The Commissions, 2010). Additionally, using photography and video, the artists display other significant moments of the suffragettes’ revolt as well as their connection with violence. Plender and Reeve focused mainly on work related to the suffragette movements of the 1800s and the 1900s (Jones, 2010). Plender and Reeve were inspired by the concept of the suffragette as a militant artist. They created three works that examined the strategies used by the suffragettes in denouncing women’s subjugation. In the exhibition they present an illustrated chapbook, describing the suffragettes’ skilled means of attracting media attention. The artists question the conventional differentiation between art and politics, exploring the “militant attacks waged on famous art works by suffragettes and artists such as Mary Richardson” (Admin, The Women’s Library, 2010) and other trained artists including “Sylvia Pankhurst, Barbara Leigh Smith, and perhaps most importantly of all, Emily Dickinson” (Jones, 2010). Plender and Reeve also took into consideration the futurist F.T. Marinetti’s comparison between militant suffragettes’ techniques and 20th century avant-garde strategies against the bourgeois art institution (The Commissions, 2010). When Reeve and Plender began researching for the Out of the Archives exhibition, they decided to utilize the opportunity to build on the idea that occurred to them when they first met the previous year. This was related to the celebration of Emily Davison Day on June 4th every year. They examined the suffragette’s actions and addressed the relationship that she had with art and politics, and how the two were combined together. In June 2010 the first official celebration of Emily Davison Day took place, when Plender and Reeve paid a visit to the same event, the Derby that had marked the end of Davison’s life nearly a century ago in 1913. They have established the Emily Davison Lodge to commemorate the suffragette, and registered her anniversary as an annual public holiday, to celebrate her fatal deed to win the vote for women (Jones, 2010). Both Reeve and Plender wanted to change the lack of public knowledge and interest in the suffragette actions and their part played in British history. It was important to them to get the suffragettes’ achievement more widely known and appreciated, particularly in view of its relevance in contemporary times. Besides the Emily Davison Lodge, they have created a web domain in the form of art work, rather than as the basis for a campaign. At the heart of this operation was their desire to “produce art highlighting the problems surrounding the representation of women in the art world today and to examine the links between art and politics” (Jones, 2010). Immense changes occurred in women’s lives by the suffragettes. Hence, it was essential to remember an event that helped women gain the right to vote. Emily Davison’s Contributions to Women’s Suffrage “Emily Davison was a suffragette activist who was trampled to death by King George V’s horse at the Epsom Derby on 4th June, 1913” (Jones, 2010). Emily Davison (1872-1913) participitated in several forms of activism such as hunger strikes and militancy, public acts of arson, and stone throwing while participating in the women’s suffrage movement. On 4th June, 1913 she rushed on to the Derby race course, and attempted to hold the bridle of King George V’s horse, when she was seriously injured. In a few days Davison passed away (Crawford 160-161). Her fellow activists in the suffrage movement hailed her as having risked her life to draw attention to the immense hardships endured by women because of their exclusion from any political status. They believed that she had “attempted to pin a suffragette poster on the horse, so that when it crossed the finishing line, the suffragette flag would be flying” (Jones, 2010). She had purchased a return air ticket from London to Epsom, which was found in her purse, revealing that it was not her intention to attain martyrdom for the cause. “The original Emily Davison Lodge was established in 1913 by Mary Leigh and Edith New in order to perpetuate the memory of a gallant woman” (Jones, 2010). For this purpose, they brought together women of progressive thought and inspiration towards working for the progress of women in accordance with the requirements of the times. The original Emily Davison lodge was closed in the 1940s, but was reestablished by Hester Reeve and Olivia Plender, as a part of their display for the Out of the Archives exhibition. Reeve and Plender had a number of photographs taken, to document the Inaugural Meeting of the Emily Davison Lodge. The Emily Davison Lodge In this photographic display related to the Emily Davison Lodge, there is a series of photos taken in the Women’s Library archive stores, in which Plender and Reeve are performing various actions. They are seen in the midst of material that inspired their commission of items for the exhibition (Jones, 2010), for example in Figures 1 and 2. Fig. 1. Inaugural Meeting of the Emily Davison Lodge, 2010 (Jones, 2010) In the photograph depicted in Fig.1. above, Olivia Plender and Hester Reeve are seen with their reproduction of Davison’s purse and her return ticket to Epsom found in the purse. It is clear that Davison’s death was not martyrdom, but an unexpected tragedy which occurred during her campaign to win the vote for women (Jones, 2010). Plender and Reeve reexamined other significant moments of the suffragettes’ uprising and use of violence. They used a number of suffragette relics. In Figure 2. below, they are seen reading contemporary political theory and having a cup of tea in a tea set dating back to 1913, “produced for the Women’s Social and Political Union” (The Commissions, 2010), the WSPU and designed by Sylvia Pankhurst (Jones, 2010). Fig.2. Olivia Plender and Hester Reeve, The Emily Davison Lodge, 2010 (The Commissions, 2010) Video Titled The Argument of the Broken Window Pane The video starts with the 1912 Conspiracy Trial, which had been used by the suffragettes as an unprecedented public platform to convey their political message. For the video The Argument of the Broken Window Pane to serve as research for the first feature film on women’s suffrage ever made, actors enacting the roles of the judge and of the accused suffragettes, were required to read out extracts of the trial report facing the camera. Through interactions with the artists, they were further requested “to reflect on the movement’s relationship to militancy and to project themselves onto the various characters of the trial” (The Commissions, 2010). Plender and Reeve used the theme of women’s activism to obtain the vote, as the key concept of the exhibition. The suffrage movement involved extensive militancy and violence by women activists. Between 1909 and 1914, the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) were engaged in adversely impacting people’s personal safety, destruction of public and private property, as well as various acts of vandalism. Personal attacks on individuals whose opinions the activists differed with, were carried out on the prime minister, other cabinet ministers, a Holloway Prison medical officer, and a newspaper editor. The breaking of windows included both destroying plate glass windows of government office buildings and privately owned shops, and “throwing bricks through windows of public halls while ministers spoke to capacity audiences” (Mayhall 107). The WSPU’s attacks were dangerous, with the possibility of causing harm to people. Christable Pankhurst, one of the daughters of the Pankhurst family, who led the suffrage movement, spoke of the militancy as “terrorism”, implying the intention to make the public fearful by the WSPU’s resorting to indiscriminate actions against persons and property. “By 1913, she had repudiated the notion that women’s claims to representation rested on moral force” (Mayhall 107). Her approach was that women being deprived of the right to political representation, were obliged to challenge the compulsive bondage imposed by the tyrant in the form of the government composed of men. Pankhurst stated that the women’s suffrage rebellion was a form of terrorism. The Women’s Social and Political Union’s (WSPU) members started in 1913 to attack property across the country. The violence included “cutting of telegraph and telephone wires, slashing paintings in public galleries, and setting fire to public buildings and private residences” (Mayhall 107). June 1913 experienced the peak of the attacks, with extensive damage to the tune of 54,000 pounds done to several structures in various place. The onset of the first World War brought an end to the arson campaign in July 1914. The levels of destruction were so high, that even the staunchest supporters of militancy had to recognize the difference between militant practices and historical examples of resistance which the members referred to, in defense of their attacks. Foyer Display Fe:MAIL, Women’s Activism through the Postal System The history of women’s suffrage includes intensive campaigning by women through several dimensions of the postal system. At the Women’s Library, London, the foyer display entitled Fe:MAIL: Suffragettes and the Post, curated by postal historian Norman Watson, investigates how suffragettes considered the Post Office as a means of mass communication as well as symbolic of the oppressive male Government; thus they viewed the postal service as both friend and foe. Propaganda through postcards, and pepper inserted in letters were some of the ways in which women attempted to achieve the right to vote. All suffragettes, whether militant or moderate, “attacked the postal system to increase the momentum of their campaign and to ensure frequent media coverage” (Fe:MAIL, 2010). The possibility for direct action was almost unlimited, because over 32,500 pillar boxes were installed by 1900. Members of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), including the Pankhurst family who founded the group, carried out intensively violent campaigns, attacking the postal service in numerous ways. They “smashed post office windows, poured acid in pillar boxes, set fire to post boxes and put pepper in letters addressed to anti-suffrage members of parliament” (Fe:MAIL, 2010). The suffragettes Daisy Solomon and Elspeth McClellan even despatched themselves in the form of human letters or post, to Prime Minister Asquith, with demands for the vote written across them. Thus, the militant suffragettes “used and subverted something as simple as the postal system in order to further their cause” (Feministmemory, 2010). They prepared propaganda postcards which was highly popular at that time, they destroyed mail in post boxes by dropping open ink bottles into them, and engaged in several similar actions to catalyse an urgent response from the governnment, favouring their demand. Fig.3 below depicts a letter damaged by suffragette action. Fig.3. A Letter Damaged by Suffragette Action (Fe:MAIL, 2010) The display in the foyer of the Women’s Library titled Fe:MAIL: Suffragettes and the Post included the world’s first postage stamp, and a fascinating selection of postcards, stamps, and audio narratives from actual participants of some of the most daring postal dramas. Other related items included the prison diary of a suffragette incarcerated for smashing post office windows, the world’s first suffrage postcard, and newspaper cuttings with reports of women’s campaigns and acts of violence, to gain the rights to suffrage (Fe:MAIL, 2010). In Fig.4. below, is seen an U.S. stamp representing the women’s suffrage movement, borrowed from the British Postal Museum and Archive, and displayed at the exhibition. Fig.4. Stamp Commemorating Votes for Women (Fe:MAIL, 2010) According to Norman Watson, journalist, author and award-winning speaker, the exhibition which displays the suffragists’ struggles, reveals the power of images to influence public opinion. This is true even in today’s world, with sophisticated visual technology emphasizing the power of visual images to mould perspectives and approaches. This power was known to the early 20th century suffragettes also. Postcards of the time reveal that “art and photography were rich and important mediums for suffrage sympathisers” (LMU, 2010) to influence thought, and fuel action through visual impact. Figs.5, 6, and 7 below show a part of the display at the exhibition. Fig.5. Notices, Post Cards and Artefacts Displayed at the Exhibition Fe:MAIL: Suffragettes and the Post (Feministmemory, 2010) Art works related to the women’s suffrage movement are placed alongside related artefacts borrowed from the collections in the museum and archives of the Women’s Library (The Commissions, 2010). Some of the exhibited post cards and drawings are seen in Fig.6 below, while Fig.7 reveals the display of posters and illustrations, besides the diaries of incarcerated women’s suffrage activists. Fig.8. depicts a poster with a strong message communicated through a dynamic visual representation. Fig.6. Post Cards and Drawings: Powerful Visual Images to Support the Cause (Feministmemory, 2010) Fig.7. Display of Posters, Art, Photography and Imprisoned Suffragettes’ Diaries (Feministmemory, 2010) Fig.8. Poster: Strong Feminist Message Communicated by the Campaigners (London, 2010). Militancy and Destruction were Employed by the Suffragettes In the exhibition, Olivia Plender and Hester Reeve investigated the traditional demarcation between art and politics. In an illustrated chapbook, they examined the militancy displayed by artists such as Mary Richardson, Sylvia Pankhurst, Barbara Leigh Smith, and Emily Dickinson (Jones, 2010), who caused extensive destruction to famous art works. Women took to extreme acts of destruction, arson, bombing, and demolishing in public places, in retaliation for the arrest of a member of their suffrage movement, or other adverse actions taken against them. Suffragette militancy acted on the radical idea that citizens had the right to resist tyrannical authority. The implementation of militancy became a “contest over the uses and utility of physical force in negotiating with the state” (Mayhall 46). Thus, suffragette political campaigning was action-oriented and spectacular, strategically confronting discrimination against women being elected to the parliament. Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon, artist and a resident of Hastings was one of the pioneers of the suffrage movement. In 1866 she “drafted and promoted a petition for votes for women, thus sowing the seeds of a nationwide movement for votes for women” (Hastingspress, 2011). Both Bodichon and Bessie Rayner contributed greatly to igniting the movement for women to be voted to parliament. Over forty years women had tried peaceful means to get the law changed. Unsuccessful in their mission, sheer frustration made the national leaders of suffrage societies turn to militancy and violence to get their demands attended to. The early 20th century suffrage campaigns were in the form of rallies in Hastings and St. Leonards, where riots and a devastating arson attack later took place. The well-known suffragette Muriel Matters stood for Parliament in Hastings, which was also the place to which the infamous suffragette Mary “Slasher” Richardson retired, to live in anonymity until 1961 (Hastingspress, 2011). One of the most famous incidents of militant destruction was Mary Richardson’s attack on Velasquez’s painting of Venus in the National Gallery. Her action was intended to draw a parallel between the public’s indifference to the leader of their movement, Emmeline Pankhurst’s health in prison, and Richardson’s respect for the valuable painting which she claimed could be replaced, unlike a life (Bartley, 2003). There were important variations and similarities in approach among suffragettes, sometimes differing on the basis of the employment of violence in militant protests (Mayhall 46). The well-known poet Emily Dickinson participated in the suffrage campaign through some of her poems. Her most forceful challenge is found in her poem Mine - by the Right of the White Election! in which she infuses the phrases with powerful militant significances (Mitchell 233). Conclusion This paper has highlighted the exhibition on British women’s suffrage, which took place between May and October, 2010 at the Women’s Library in London. The exhibition Out of the Archives was commissioned by Olivia Plender and Hester Reeve. The display in the foyer of the library, was on the involvement of the women’s suffrage movement with the postal services. The foyer display titled Fe:MAIL: Suffragettes and the Post examined how suffragettes used the Post Office as a means of mass communication for effective and wide propaganda, as well as attempted to get their demand for the vote heard through militant attacks to cripple the postal services. In the exhibition, Plender and Reeve focused on the suffragette movement from the 1800s to the 1900s, examining the methods by which suffragettes retaliated against women’s subjugation. Through powerful visual representation of the injustice they faced, the suffragettes hoped to achieve their right to the vote. The artists’ establishment of the Emily Davison Lodge in commemoration of the activist who lost her life while attempting to win women the vote, is depicted in a series of photographs. Through an illustrated chapbook, photographs and videos Plender and Reeve presented significant moments of the suffragettes’ rebellion, and their recourse to militancy and violence. In commissioning for the exhibition, the artists chose the display art and artefacts with a view to promoting the history of British women’s struggles for suffrage, and the need for equality among all. Jones (2010) reiterates that they hoped the exhibition would change the treatment of women in the contemporary art world. Works Cited Admin, The Women’s Library. Behind the artworks, behind the scenes. Out of the Archives. (2010). Retrieved on 18th September, 2010 from: http://thumbsforhire.co.uk/outofthearchives/?p=82 Bartley, Paula. Emmeline Pankhurst: Paula Bartley reappraises the role of the Leader of the Suffragettes. History Review (2003): pp.41-49. Crawford, Elizabeth. The women’s suffrage movement: A reference guide, 1866-1928. London: University College of London (UCL) Press. (1999). Fe:MAIL. Fe:MAIL, suffragettes and the post. The British Postal Museum and Archive. (2010). Retrieved on 18th September, 2011 from: http://postalheritage.wordpress.com/2010/05/11/femail-suffragettes-and-the-post/ Feministmemory. Fe:MAIL suffragettes and the post. Feminist Memory. (2010). Retrieved on 18th September, 2011 from: http://feministmemory.wordpress.com/2010/10/24/femail-suffragettes/ Hastingspress. The women’s suffrage movement in Hastings, England. Hastingspress. Retrieved on 18th September, 2011 from: http://www.hastingspress.co.uk/history/20hastings.htm Jones, Beckie. Daring to be free: Britains honor suffragist, Emily Davison. Her Circle E-Zine. (2010). Retrieved on 18th September, 2011 from: http://www.hercircleezine.com/2010/12/07/daring-to-be-free-britains-honor-suffragist-emily-davison/ LMU (London Metropolitan University). Fe:MAIL: Suffragettes and the post. In our Foyer, The Women’s Library. (2010). Retrieved on 18th September, 2011 from: http://www.londonmet.ac.uk/thewomenslibrary/whats-on/exhibitions/past-exhibitions/femail-suffragettes-and-the-post.cfm London 2010. Fe:MAIL, suffragettes and the post. Festival of Stamps. (2010). Retrieved on 18th September, 2011 from: http://www.london2010.org.uk/component/content/article/39/152 Mayhall, Laura E.N. The militant suffrage movement: Citizenship and resistance in Britain, 1860-1930. New York: Oxford University Press. (2003). Mitchell, Domhall. Emily Dickinson: Monarch of perception. The United States of America, University of Massachusetts Press. (2000). Out of the Archives. Out of the archives: New art inspired by the women’s library. The Women’s Library. (2011). Retrieved on 18th September, 2011 from: http://www.londonmet.ac.uk/thewomenslibrary/whats-on/exhibitions/past-exhibitions/out-of-the-archives.cfm The Commissions. The Commissions: Olivia Plender and Hester Reeve. Out of The Archives, the Women’s Library. (2010). Retrieved on 18th September, 2011 from: http://thumbsforhire.co.uk/outofthearchives/?page_id=121 VADS (Visual Arts Data Service). The Women’s Library Suffrage Collection. VADS, The Online Resource for Visual Arts. (2011). Retrieved on 18th September, 2011 from: http://www.vads.ac.uk/collections/WLS Read More