Dr Maria Quirk investigates the events and people behind one of the biggest global activist movements, through a range of works in the NGV Collection connected to women’s suffrage, the acquisition of which has been made possible through the generous support of Krystyna Campbell-Pretty AM and the Campbell-Pretty Family.
In the early hours of Monday 10 June 1913, Clara Giveen, a 26-year-old woman of ‘independent means’, and Kitty Marion, a music-hall actress, were spotted on Kew Road in the genteel west London suburb of Richmond by a passing police constable. The constable questioned the pair on their reasons for being out so late. ‘I am an artist’, Kitty replied, ‘and often keep late hours’. Following Clara and Kitty to a semi-detached Edwardian townhouse on West Park Road, the constable called for backup. Both women were known to police as militant suffragettes. Earlier that morning, several fires had been deliberately lit in the surrounding district, including one at Hurst Park Racecourse, where the suffrage campaigner Emily Wilding Davison had been trampled to death by the king’s horse just hours before. Suspecting Clara and Kitty’s involvement in the crime, police entered the West Park Road house to find Clara lying in bed, fully dressed, and reading a copy of Suffragette magazine. Both women were arrested for loitering with intent to commit a crime. A day later, they were charged with arson.
Clara Giveen joined the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), Emmeline Pankhurst’s militant suffrage organisation, in November 1910. She was described by Kitty as a ‘beautiful blonde’ from a good family, who was inspired to join the WSPU after witnessing the events of Black Friday – a suffrage march on the Houses of Parliament during which women were subject to brutal police violence. Historian Fern Riddell speculates that Clara joined Kitty in a WSPU sub-group named The Hot Young Things. Founded in 1907, The Hot Young Things was made up of unmarried suffragettes willing to undertake ‘danger duty’ – extreme militant action. If true, this suggests that Clara was among the most radical and aggressive of all suffragettes active in the first decades of the twentieth century.
Clara had already been arrested three times by the night of the Hurst Park fire. In late 1910, she was one of 160 women arrested during a suffragette demonstration, but was discharged without trial. A year later, in November 1911, Clara served five days in prison for breaking the windows of a local government office. Just a few months after being released, Clara took part in another window-smashing campaign, this time on Regent Street, and received a four-month sentence at Winson Green prison in Birmingham. Winson Green was one of the first prisons to perform forcible feeding on suffragettes like Clara, who undertook hunger strikes while incarcerated. Clara was weak when she was released from the prison in mid 1912.
Just over twelve months later, Clara and Kitty were back in court on trial for setting fire to the Hurst Park Racecourse grandstand, causing damage valued at an estimated £13,000. Dubbed by the papers as the ‘female fire friends’, both women were found guilty and sentenced to three years penal servitude. When the judge pronounced the verdict, suffragettes in the court gallery shouted the campaign’s watchwords: ‘No surrender!’ They were ejected from the court singing the suffrage battle song, ‘March On’. ‘We have not had a fair trial’, Clara declared. ‘We have not been tried by our peers. Women never will receive justice until women as well as men are on juries’. The prisoners were taken to their cells shouting, ‘We shall fight and we shall win!’
Sometime between serving her first prison sentence in 1911 and her final stay at Holloway Prison in 1913, Clara was awarded one of the highest honours bestowed by the suffrage campaign: a Holloway brooch. Wrought in silver and green, white and purple enamel, the Holloway brooch was designed by suffragette and artist Sylvia Pankhurst in 1909 in the shape of a portcullis, representing the House of Commons. Described in the WSPU newspaper as their ‘Victoria Cross’, Holloway brooches were proudly worn by their recipients as visible markers of their bravery and commitment, and as a means to inspire others to similar personal sacrifice. A public, visual representation of suffragettes’ courage, the Holloway brooch was an important part of the suffrage campaign’s strategy to embed themselves into the nation’s public consciousness and visual culture.
The women’s suffrage movement in the United Kingdom was not just a momentous event in political history; it was also a turning point in the history of popular design, propaganda and dress. From the mid nineteenth century until1928, when universal female suffrage was granted, numerous suffrage societies were established to campaign for women’s right to vote using both peaceful and militaristic tactics. Designers and artists played an important role is popularising and disseminating the suffrage message. They designed and produced jewellery, accessories, ceramics, banners, printed ephemera and other artistic products, using distinct colour schemes, logos and graphics to raise awareness of the cause and build their political advantage. In doing so, suffrage designers created the first modern, ‘branded’ political campaign of the visual age.
Mary Lowndes, founder of the Artists’ Suffrage League, declared, ‘Who takes the eye takes all’. Visual images defined the suffrage movement, from the purple, green and white sashes worn by the WSPU, to the ‘Votes for Women’ posters designed by Hilda Dallas and distributed in their thousands around London and beyond. Suffrage organisations drew on the talents of a new generation of women artists and designers who had benefited from the opening up of art education to women in the late nineteenth century, and built on a long tradition of middle-class female fundraising and ‘craftivism’. Capitalising on new technologies in printing and distribution, suffrage organisations developed one of the most distinctive and dynamic visual identities of the twentieth century.
The British suffrage campaign was a rare instance where art and politics converged in a deliberate and strategic way. Art and design were not tangential to the campaign; they were central to it. The beginnings of the suffrage movement in the nineteenth century coincided with a wave of collective agitation from women artists, who campaigned for access to life study and entry into established art societies and schools. For artists like Barbara Bodichon, Emily Mary Osborn and Anna Mary Howitt, petitioning for women’s access to the Royal Academy art schools went hand in hand with the fight for the vote, women’s legal reform and property rights. Among this close-knit network of feminist artists, a culture of ‘matronage’ emerged; Bodichon, Howitt and others painted portraits of each other and other feminists that visually represented their courage, ambition and intellect. Portraiture that blended the personal with the political remained an important part of the suffrage movement’s visual culture and messaging into twentieth century.
In the latter part of the nineteenth century, high-profile professional artists such as Louise Jopling, Annie Swynnerton and Susan Isabel Dacre took an active role in the suffrage campaign, supporting the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (acronym NUWSS, a non-militant organisation led by Millicent Fawcett), the Manchester National Society for Women’s Suffrage and other proto-feminist causes such as the dress reform movement. Of the 2000 signatories of the 1889 Declaration in Favour of Women’s Suffrage, almost 100 came from women artists. Women’s art societies in London and around the country were meeting places for suffragists, and also promoted women’s professional advancement through art classes and exhibition spaces. When the campaign for women’s suffrage accelerated in the first years of the twentieth century, it was no surprise that artists became key players.
A turning point in the relationship between artists and the suffrage movement came with the founding of the Artists’ Suffrage League and the Suffrage Atelier, organisations that merged artistic, political and professional interests. Founded by Arts and Crafts stained-glass artist Mary Lowndes in 1907, the Artists’ Suffrage League aimed to ‘further the cause of women’s enfranchisement … by bringing in an attractive manner before the public eye the long-continued demand for the vote’. The League, made up of professional artists, worked with the NUWSS. Some of their earliest products were displayed at the NUWSS procession of June 1908, during which 10,000 people marched on parliament to demonstrate their determination for the vote to the newly instated prime minister, Herbert Asquith. The League designed and made eighty embroidered banners for the march, which constituted the ‘most beautiful art exhibition of the year’.
The choice of medium was no accident. Political marches were antithetical to conventional standards and expectations of female behaviour. One of the key goals of the procession – and of the NUWSS more broadly – was to demonstrate the dignity and ‘womanliness’ of the suffrage campaign, as a means to prove that they ‘deserved’ enfranchisement. The well-organised, orderly and beautifully outfitted marchers were a firm riposte to anti-suffragists’ claims that the movement was hysterical, shrieking and crazed. Embroidery was the art form most closely associated with traditional definitions of femininity and with the private sphere of the home. By harnessing a medium that epitomised women’s domesticity and using it for political ends, the Artists’ Suffrage League helped forge a new visual language of femininity, and define a new role for women in society. Creating embroidered banners was time-consuming compared to making placards or signs, but Mary Lowndes was convinced that their association with religious processions and noble revolutions would spark bystanders’ fervour and loyalty. She explained to The Englishwoman magazine, ‘A banner is a thing to float in the wind, to flicker in the breeze, to flirt its colours for your pleasure, to half show and half conceal a device you long to unravel: you do not want to read it, you want to worship it’.
The symbolism of the League’s embroidered banners was not lost on the press of the day. James Douglas of the Morning Leader declared that the procession was ‘more stately and more splendid and more beautiful than any procession I ever saw. When men march … they carry huge banners with ugly paintings … the colours are violently crude … [the women] have revived the pomp and glory of the procession. They have recreated the beauty of blown silk and tossing embroidery’. The Daily News reported that the women’s ‘bravery, their admirable organisation and their skilful use of beautiful and decorative banners, impressed a crowd which obviously came prepared to laugh’.
Just days after the NUWSS Arts and Crafts–inspired banners captured the public’s imagination, an even larger suffrage march defined the ‘suffrage look’ for years to come. The Women’s Social and Political Union had broken away from the NUWSS in 1903. Tightly controlled by Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters, the WSPU advocated for direct action and civil disobedience. Their members were pejoratively deemed ‘suffragettes’ in 1906, a term the WSPU claimed as their own, and which came to denote their militancy. It was the WSPU’s treasurer, Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence, who recognised the importance of colour, symbols and iconography to mainstreaming the suffrage cause. In the lead-up to the June 1908 ‘Women’s Sunday’ rally, Pethick-Lawrence selected the colours white (for purity), purple (for royalty, freedom and dignity) and green (for hope) to represent the WSPU. Writing of the colour scheme in the WSPU’s weekly newspaper Votes for Women, Pethick-Lawrence declared:
You may think that this is a small and trivial matter. But there is no action and no service that can be considered as small or trivial in this movement. I wish I could impress on every mind as deeply as I feel myself the importance of popularising the colours in every way open to us. If every individual woman in this union would do her part, the colours would become the reigning fashion. And strange as it may seem, nothing would so help to popularise the Women’s Social and Political Union.
Pethick-Lawrence rightly believed that the WSPU colours would become synonymous with the suffrage cause and make suffragettes immediately identifiable to onlookers. Participants in the 1908 rally were instructed to wear a pale or white dress, a sash in white, purple and green, and purple and green accessories. The effect was remarkable. Heeding Pethick-Lawrence’s advice that ‘the effect will be very much lost unless the colours are carried out in the dress of every woman’, the 300,000 marchers formed an ‘extraordinary scene’. The Times reported: ‘Each group marched under a banner of its own and each woman walking in the procession wore the purple, white and green either in the favours pinned to the breast, or in the trimmings of the hat, in belt ribbons or in shoulder sashes; many of the ladies wore costumes designed in an arrangement of purple, white and green’.
As art historian Lisa Tickner explains, the genius of the WSPU colours was the universality of their application. Following the branding triumph of Women’s Sunday, anything rendered in purple, white and green became a symbol of suffrage advocacy. Prime minister Herbert Asquith remained unmoved by the suffrage campaign, but retailers quickly recognised the potential profitability of the suffrage brand and the middle-class female dollar behind it. Within a month, businesses ranging from Selfridges and Liberty to florists and button-makers were advertising their branded wares to suffrage supporters. There was tricolour underwear and corsets, stockings and garters, suffrage-branded tea, and boots made for ‘suffragette wear’. The WSPU was keen for its supporters to patronise these companies and a regular column on fashion appeared in the WSPU newspaper Votes for Women, which endorsed specific purveyors who advertised in their pages. There was no concern about mixing politics, fashion and consumerism. ‘All good suffragists must realise that in giving their custom to the suffragists advertising in Votes for Women they are very materially helping the cause’. Fine jewellery from designers such as Mappin & Webb made the colours even more desirable, and reinforced that suffrage women valued elegance and femininity. Long before today’s era of feminist T-shirts designed by the likes of by Maria Grazia-Chuiri for Dior, the WSPU made the suffrage cause fashionable.
The success of the WSPU’s visual identity was due in part to the fact that it had an artist as one of its leaders. Sylvia Pankhurst’s twin passions were art and the rights of working women. Influenced by the work of William Morris and Walter Crane as a child, Pankhurst won a studentship to the Manchester School of Art and then a scholarship at the Royal College of Art (RCA) in 1904. Her interest in women’s equality permeated her artistic studies. Noting that the distribution of scholarships at the RCA was weighted towards male students, she persuaded the Labour politician Keir Hardie to raise the issue. There was no concern about mixing politics, fashion and consumerism. ‘All good suffragists must realise that in giving their custom to the suffragists advertising in Votes for Women they are very materially helping the cause.’in parliament. The answer was unsatisfactory–three out of sixteen scholarships were allocated to women and the school would not consider any change–but the inequalities Pankhurst witnessed led to a lifelong interest in the welfare of young artists.
As her mother and sister intensified their campaigning, Pankhurst felt torn between her career as an artist and her vocation as an activist. ‘The idea of giving up the artist’s life’, she wrote, ‘laying aside the beloved pigments and brushes, to wear out one’s life on the platform and the chair at the street corner was a prospect too tragically grey and barren to endure’. On the other hand, Pankhurst’s belief in socialist and collectivist ideals made a career creating art for the wealthy middle classes unappealing. In 1906, Pankhurst devoted herself full time to the suffrage cause. She largely abandoned the representational social realism that had characterised her art to that point, and embraced artistic labour as a vehicle of political change.
Among Pankhurst’s earliest and most enduring contributions to the suffrage movement was its logo, ‘the angel of freedom’. Conceived in 1908, the design may have been inspired by her travels in Venice, where she had spent two years studying Renaissance frescoes. Standing on tiptoe, Pankhurst’s winged angel sounds a curved trumpet and unfurls a banner reading ‘freedom’, heralding the dawn of a new era. In the background sit prison bars and the WPSU letters, wrapped in flowers and prison chains. A symbolic representation of the WSPU’s ideals, the angel of freedom became a ubiquitous feature on suffrage merchandise over the following few years. It was reproduced on the cover of the inaugural issue of Votes for Women, pressed onto tin badges and featured on a commemorative thirteen-piece tea service, commissioned to sell at the 1909 Women’s Exhibition. Once again, the suffrage campaign melded traditional symbols of feminine domesticity with a radical political agenda; one of the WSPU banners Sylvia designed featured the provocative slogan, ‘rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God’.
When Sylvia Pankhurst designed the Holloway brooch in 1909, she was drawing on personal experience. She was sent to jail for the first time in late 1906. As the WSPU grew more militant in the following years, Sylvia was imprisoned and subjected to force-feeding on several occasions, until she left the WSPU to pursue more peaceful tactics in 1913. The Holloway brooch and the Hunger Strike Medal, also introduced in 1909, were modelled on traditional military honours. Many prominent suffragettes, including Emmeline Pankhurst, wore their brooches in official, widely distributed photographs. They were conceived as a reward for recipients’ bravery and loyalty, but they were also meant as a public symbol of women’s endurance. The medals, along with many other aspects of the suffrage campaign, were not just designed to win the vote; they were designed to change the conversation about women.
What did the suffrage movement achieve? The eventual granting of women’s right to vote in England in 1918 and 1928 was not a neat conclusion or culmination of their campaign; it was linked instead to women’s contribution in the First World War. Where the suffrage movement really effected change was in broadening the ideological and discursive meaning of ‘woman’ as an identity. By using art and design to create a strongly defined visual aesthetic for both themselves and their campaign, suffragists and suffragettes did not just cause a political spectacle, they made a spectacle out of themselves. In doing so, they moved women–and the idea of ‘womanly’ behaviour–decisively into the modern era, a time when many different definitions and representations of femininity could co-exist at once. Their brand was daringly conceived, brilliantly stage-managed and strategically crafted to achieve its dreamed-for outcome: a new, glorious dawn of thundering freedoms.
Dr. Maria Quirk is NGV Assistant Curator, Collections and Research. This article was originally published in the Jul-Aug 2019 NGV Magazine.