CHAPTER 4
[A] repressed and restive class.—Cicely Hamilton
Mrs. Pankhurst, Founder Champion of Womanhood Famed Far for Deeds of Daring Rectitude.—Words embroidered on an Edwardian suffrage banner and carried at a suffrage procession.
To be shut out from the rights and privileges of law is to be an outlaw. An outlaw must be either a rebel or a willing serf. Anyone who believes in human liberty and self-government is forced to rebel. There is no other way. It is either servile submission to tyranny or rebellion against it.—Teresa Billington-Greig, writing from a cell in Holloway Prison, 1906
Suffrage women’s cognizance of their simultaneous oppression and resistance as revealed in Hamilton’s characterization in the epigraph, is heightened if we consider their transgressive and transformative performances, both on and off the theatre stage. Representative of the incredible shift of women’s place from interior to exterior, from circumscribed domestic realm to the urbanity necessary to a collective congregation of women, it is a shift emblematized in the studio photographs that Connell created of them.1 Public visibility was the key to their vulnerability; it is an experience duplicated in the lives of 20th-century activists like Angela Davis (b. 1944) whose autobiographical narrative of the need for prison reform and defiance echoes the above sentiments and struggles of Billington-Greig’s own prison reflections.2
In a study on photography’s role in creating such spaces for identity formation, Margaret Denny argues that
within the spaces of photographic studios, expositions, salons, and domestic parlors, the medium offered Victorians new opportunities for performance and rituals of fashion presentation and self-construction. [She positions] photography’s propensity to create spaces of and for fashion’s articulation, places to express one’s personae to wear the latest fashionable attire, or to experience vicariously the character of others when donning “dress-up” clothes … [E]ach space elicits a certain type of performance opportunity to elevate, maintain, and/or promote a subject’s status.3
As I have already demonstrated in the previous chapters, Connell’s suffrage output had a significant presence and her imagery was impactful for an eager public. The focus on such representational performances “to elevate, maintain, and/or promote a subject’s status” was Connell’s job. But we must look at her dissemination of such portraits that spoke to suffrage women’s performance within a cult of great women, through the lens of these women’s public suffrage activities. This embodiment came in the form of individual suffrage women taking on “diva citizenship,” defined by Laura Berlant as a person “who stages a dramatic coup in a public sphere in which she does not have privilege.”4 Within this context, such a woman participates in the politics of transgression. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White explain it as a hierarchy in which “the low troubles the high” in the sense that
the high/low opposition in each of our four symbolic domains—psychic forms, the human body, geographical space and the social order—is a fundamental basis of mechanisms of ordering and sense-making in European cultures. Divisions and discriminations in one domain are continually structured, legitimated and dissolved by reference to the vertical symbolic hierarchy which operates in the other three domains…. [T]ransgressing the rules of hierarchy and order in any one of the domains may have major consequences in the others.5
At the center of such domains is the body itself. For Michel Foucault
the body is the object, target, and instrument of power, the field of greatest investment for power’s operations, a stake in the struggle for power’s control over a materiality that is dangerous to it, precisely because it is unpredictable and able to be used in potentially infinite ways, according to infinitely variable cultural dictates.6
In this chapter we will see how Connell’s portraits and the bodies of the women who inhabit them function to counter this “unpredictable” realm (read patriarchy) that is determined to keep women within “divisions and discriminations” that range across domains.
Radical Dissemination Methods
To distribute information about outsider “diva citizenship” behavior and events, and to do so with flyers alongside studio portraits of the players in the outsider event, was to invite the tension Stallybrass and White find to be implicit to the transgressive action. Innovative means of distributing information happened, for example, in the town of Reading where a WSPU shop was located. The local Newbury cycling corps of women rode their bikes to outlying villages to canvass support.7 Of similar cycling activities in London via the Clement’s Inn headquarters of the WSPU, Diane Atkinson explains:
“‘Suffragette scouts’ on bicycles were briefed to circulate and ‘rouse’ the suburbs. Large indoor meetings required tickets, while outdoor meetings had to be arranged and advertised, and summer holiday campaigns planned and supplied with packs of postcards, pamphlets, books and handbills.”8 Most of this work was done by volunteers who also distributed such material on the streets, outside railway stations and even after football and cricket matches. In fact, as a testament both to the expediency and popularity of the bicycle for their work, and the WSPU’s efforts toward circulation, in 1910 they organized a competition to increase sales; the two first prizes were suffragette bicycles painted, of course, purple, white and green.9 This evidence suggests just how well organized and how massive the campaign was in terms of its constant barrage of the public.
Another successful venue for distribution was the two-week long Women’s Exhibition in May 1909 organized by the WSPU at Prince’s Skating Rink in Knightsbridge, London. In addition to having women’s work on offer, they sold postcards and other suffrage paraphernalia for the cause.10
Suffrage women also sold suffrage newspapers on the street. Atkinson estimates that for every copy of the WSPU journal they sold (first as Votes for Women, then as The Suffragette), at least three other people read it. Pair that knowledge with Sylvia Pankhurst’s description of its distribution and you have a sense of their/its prominent presence among the public:
The WSPU and its members made tremendous efforts to extend the circulation of the paper. It was advertised by four-in-hand coaches, women on horse-back, poster and umbrella parades, boats, kites, pavement chalking, and canvassing. Members canvassed shops for advertisements, stood in the gutter to sell it in Piccadilly, Fleet Street, the Strand and anywhere and everywhere of prominence in London and the provinces, and paid for its posters to be exhibited at shops and stations.11
So, it should come as no surprise that the portraits and accompanying interviews of suffrage women, within the WSPU mouthpiece, as with others for the WFL and NUWSS, reached a wide variety of the public and led to the cult worship of the women activists.
Caravanning and Postcards
Connell’s portraits translated in public to audiences who could recognize the women they had seen in postcards, but they would have already positioned these women as being part of an express path of transgression, outsiders looking in toward possible citizenship. In this regard, many suffrage organizers participated in by-elections as well as caravan tours, a brand-new form of activity that they invented to cause trouble for their opponents. For example, the Museum of London Suffragette Fellowship Collection includes a campaign photograph of Gladice Keevil, Connell’s first suffrage sitter, showing her smiling, animated, and smartly dressed, as she speaks in front of a banner for the Manchester North West by-election campaign in 1908 (fig. 79).
Fig. 79: Gladice Keevil Speaking in Front of Banner at Manchester North West By-Election Campaign, 1908 (photograph Museum of London).
In the photograph, she is explaining to voters that in order to support votes for women they had to “keep the liberal out,” in this case meaning Winston Churchill.12 The postcard portraits of her would have helped to advertise Keevil’s presence at this campaign and draw interest to her as one of the celebrities of the movement. In turn, Connell’s postcard portrait of her would be ready for purchase at one of the pop-up suffrage shops that accompanied the kind of whirlwind approach the suffrage women took to such events. Mrs. Pankhurst relayed of the WSPU by-election efforts in this regard: “The usual first step … was to hire a vacant shop, fill the windows with suffrage literature, and fling out our purple, green and white flag.” Further, she underlines both how novel and how successful the by-election campaigning was:
Our by-election work was such a new thing in English politics that we attracted an enormous amount of attention wherever we went. It was our custom to begin work the very hour we entered a town. If, on our way from the station to the hotel, we encountered a group of men, say in the market-place, we either stopped and held a meeting on the spot, or else we stayed long enough to tell them when and where our meetings were to be held, and to urge them to attend…. If we got possession of the battle-ground before the men, we sometimes “cornered” all the good halls and left the candidate nothing but schoolhouses for his indoor meetings. Truth to tell, our meetings were so much more popular than theirs that we really needed the larger halls.13
Apart from inspirational images of strong women of the WSPU, like Keevil, Connell also provided photographs for postcards of the WFL which they readily distributed on their caravan tours and through other avenues. As a group they created a postcard series called “Votes for Women,” as in one featuring and signed by Marguerite Sidley (fig. 53). Her signature here is testimony to her fan-base. Women could use these postcards as their own calling cards, Maud Arncliffe-Sennett, for example, who, as a prominent suffrage journalist, used Connell’s portrait of her (fig. 55) for introductions, announcements of lectures and in newspaper by-lines, as evidenced in her extensive suffrage scrapbook that runs to thirty-seven volumes.14
The suffrage caravanners who went on lecture tours, like the by-election participants, were not free from danger, a situation which reflected their outsider status and transgressive actions. Numerous reports in the women’s memoirs attest to the incredible brutality they faced during their visits to various cities in their horse-drawn wagons. But the visual evidence, as in the photograph of Keevil already mentioned, or in the series of images of Muriel Matters with Charlotte Despard and others on the WFL caravan tours, show their incredible energy, gumption, and sense of adventure nonetheless (fig. 80).
Fig. 80: First “Votes for Women” Van Starts on a Tour: Miss Muriel Matters on WFL Caravan with Mrs. Lilian Hicks, Mrs. Despard and Mrs. Billington-Greig, 1909 (reproduced from Daily Mirror, 1909).
They faced violent crowds, Despard’s biographer recording that they often shielded themselves with their large, fashionable hats from stones and bricks. While Matters and Despard were both adept speakers who were savvy in the face of hecklers, not even they could battle a crowd intent on throwing rocks or being unruly by breaking up the chairs they used to address a crowd. The caravans became safe places from which to speak and, one imagines, for quick getaways.15 They had to maintain incredible bravery and stoicism in light of such a barrage of dissent. Despard’s presence in particular on the platform and in marches matched the saintly fervor and resolve that Connell captures in her studio portraits of her (figs. 40–42). Heading up all WFL sections of suffrage marches, she would receive kisses on the hand from admiring working men or witness a cry from the crowd of “Up Lambeth” in reference to her good works in that district or, more generally, enthusiasts exclaimed of her passing, “She’s one of the best!”16
While these women faced heavy opposition just by their presence, much good came from the caravanning work as evidenced in Helen Swanwick’s memoirs. Connell’s stalwart portrait of Swanwick reflects her incredible determination to make a difference on the campaign trail (fig. 43). During the North-West Manchester election, for example, she wrote to her husband to tell him how the working women berated a male speaker who was a local parson for insinuating that their place was in the home: “Their feelings quite overcame them. They sprang to their feet and yelled and shook their fists at him.” This event resulted in a separate “women-only” meeting during which the local women, despite their heavy work and home lives, offered to help the movement as they saw it as being in direct relation to improving their own lot.17 Such scenes were victories for women’s voices, and for the hard-working caravanners who reached them. The heroic nature of their incredible efforts is demonstrated in Swanwick’s lecture circuit record itself. She estimated that, for 1913 alone, she gave fifty-six speeches in England, seventeen of which she gave in London, and those numbers excluded additional private meetings. She argues that these activities “gave meaning and inspiration to thousands of dull lives. ‘When I began to think’ was the opening remark of a new speaker, referring to the moment when our movement had first let light into a dull room of her mind.”18
Postcards as Commemorations and Transactions of Transgressions
Within the Women’s Library archive collection, there are many postcard versions of Connell’s suffrage portraits. I explore them in this section to demonstrate both the dialogue among cult followers and the myriad ways that both they and their leaders utilized the postcards to celebrate their transgressive acts.
Holiday greetings were popular among the suffrage followers. For example, Connell’s compelling modern portrait of Cicely Hamilton (fig. 64) is pasted into a Christmas card greeting to an unknown recipient from Florence E. Key. It reads: “I turned this up and thought you’d like to have it. Isn’t it good? I also send you her last letter to me. You might like to put the autograph beneath the photograph though they are years apart.”19 We have no record of who Key was, but she was certainly one of many women enamored by the suffrage women, enough to be on a correspondence basis with Hamilton herself. The fact that she shared one of Hamilton’s letters with a third party attests to the great admiration such women had for the leading lights. Further, that she knew Hamilton well enough to realize what a “good” portrait it was attests to Hamilton’s high profile in public representations. Another such holiday gesture exists in a postcard of Connell’s portrait of Edith Craig dressed in her “Votes for Women” sash (fig. 72). It was “sent with Xmas wishes to Mrs. Hinscliff of Regent’s Park from E.S. Fraser, Xmas 1910.”20
Some women used the postcards merely as a place to gather information about the important women. In Connell’s portrait of Edith Craig in Straw Hat, for example (fig. 71) on the back of the postcard it lists: “Edith Craig—daughter of Ellen Terry—Producer-director and costume pageant organizer for W.F.L. and Artists’ Suffrage Society & Actresses’ F. League.”21
Other postcard correspondence seems to be indicative of cult-collecting activities. In this regard, Mrs. Lilian M. Hicks used her postcards to write to other suffrage women (fig. 56). Such an activity cemented a kind of mutual admiration that demonstrated the thrill of collecting each other’s portraits. Such a practice echoes the pastime of Victorian middle-class women who created elaborate scrapbooks as testimony to their female friendships. Similarly, a postcard based on a Connell portrait of George Lansbury MP, an important male advocate for the suffrage cause, is addressed from Helen to Miss Ethel Muil c/o Miss Aitken in Edinburgh. At the end of the note detailing her travel plans, she says, “Hope you’ll care to add this ‘champion’ to your album. Yours ever, Helen.”22 This notation is testimony to the fact that these women actively sent each other cards to augment their personal tributes, including special notations on the sitter’s importance to the cause.
Perhaps the best example of this kind of cult worship is evident in Maud Arncliffe-Sennett’s own scrapbook. She includes many pages of suffrage photographs, including at least one devoted to portraits by Connell that includes an unusual horizontally-formatted portrait of Phillip Snowden at his desk as well as Cicely Hamilton in her three-quarter length pose in a full tailored suit (fig. 64). Next to her Arncliffe-Sennett has pasted in the Edith Craig portrait in straw hat (fig. 71) and at the bottom she includes Connell’s portrait of J. Keir Hardie.23 More important is Arncliffe-Sennett’s own note on this album page:
Whatever one’s political preference no one can deny the power, thought and integrity of all these fine faces. I would not believe one of them to be anything but straight & upright! The two men are the only men who have really fought our fight in the House of Commons and the two women speak for themselves.24
Arncliffe-Sennett’s note attests not only to the cult rhetoric, but also to Connell’s ability to create memorable, impacting portraits of her powerful sitters.
Yet other postcards were places where the suffrage campaigners themselves were transacting business. For example, Connell’s portrait of Marguerite Sidley for the WFL (fig. 53) includes a note in Sidley’s own hand on the back in which she gives a special type of information that is useful in terms of dissemination of such postcards. Sent to a Miss Houstin at the WFL branch in Glasgow, it reads: “This is my p.c. I believe I can bring a couple of hundred up with me. That would save the expense of getting more printed from a new block. Yours sincerely, Marguerite A. Sidley.”25 As a business transaction, it attests to how postcards were distributed, in this case by the sitter herself, while also providing information about the printing process and the sheer numbers of postcards the women distributed. Similarly, in another postcard to Ethel Muil c/o Miss Aitken in Edinburgh from the same Helen we met earlier, she uses Connell’s Miss Anna Munro portrait (fig. 62). She requests: “Will you please send us a copy of ‘Votes for Women.’ We can’t get it here and are anxious to know where the W.S.P.U. meetings are so that we may not clash.” We can identify Helen as Helen Crawfurd (1877–1954) in this instance, since she and Munro were campaigning in Scotland for the Clyde Holiday Campaign in 1912, the date of the postcard. By this time Munro was organizing secretary of the Scottish Council of the WFL so it was apt that she would be campaigning in Scotland. Most noteworthy, Connell herself was on the Scottish campaign with Munro and Crawfurd. This activity is not uncharacteristic of Connell’s pursuits since, apart from her studio practice, she had organized one group for the 1911 Historical Pageant in the Coronation Procession and would go on in 1912–13 to host WSPU meetings in her home and in her studio.26 On the Scottish campaign, Munro was by all reports a gracious and engaging speaker for the WFL. Crawfurd further reports: “It’s very nice down here—big meetings and plenty of sympathy but Miss Munro’s throat is pretty sore. Three meetings a day is really too much. With love Yours, Helen 22.7.12.”27 This note is important in that it shows our correspondent not only praising Munro as a speaker and celebrity, but also it demonstrates how the women obtained information.
The campaign speakers also used their own portraits in gratitude to their helpers at various events which made up just one part of their campaigning activity. On another copy of the signed Munro postcard, in this regard, Munro has sent a note to an unnamed recipient that places her in Sheffield around this time: “Anna Munro March 1912 With pleasant remembrances of Sheffield.”28
A further example of the celebrities’ use of their own images to transact business exists in a rather amusing attempt at both self-promotion and self-preservation on the part of Maud Arncliffe-Sennett. Connell’s image of Maud Arncliffe-Sennett (fig. 55) exists in several copies in the Women’s Library and on one such, reproduced as a postcard, the subject herself writes to Miss R.M. Billinghurst at Blackheath29: “When I heard who you were I felt I must help you. I can come down on Friday evening/June 2 if that will suit you. Sat and Sun I am engaged. Let me know where the meetings are held. M.A. Sennett.” Then a postscript: “Don’t report me in ‘Votes for Women.’ Because it brings so many requests I haven’t time to fulfill.”30
In one other instance, we see suffrage activists arranging appointments with each other through this postcard medium: a woman by the name of A. Mitt writing from Hampstead sent a note to Mrs. Sadd Brown (Myra Eleanor) [1872–1938] who supported Sylvia Pankhurst’s ELFS efforts) to arrange a meeting, using Connell’s postcard portrait of Mrs. Lilian M. Hicks (fig. 56).31
As to the reasons for such a cult reverence for these suffrage women, we must reflect closely on their experiences of caravanning and campaigning. While women had in the past been canvassers for male candidates, the Edwardian suffrage movement was the moment when suffrage women canvassed against certain candidates and for others, based on those candidates’ support or lack thereof, of the cause. In their travels, these women became cult figures for women in the audience, important examples to follow in deed, word and action. The Connell portraits then could act as catalysts for change and inspiration for the women who collected them, a time to reflect on the movement and its importance to their futures.
Other Public Platforms
Cicely Hamilton argues that the strict, conventional dress code that Emmeline Pankhurst imposed on WSPU women for platform speaking, marches, and other arenas lent itself to the remembrance of Mrs. Pankhurst as full of “womanly gentleness and charm,” but, in some senses, it undermined her presence on the suffrage platform:
I thought of Mrs. Pankhurst’s back as I had once seen it while she preached defiance to her followers; the stubborn set of her shoulders and the determined set of her head—and the voice, the even more determined voice, with its queer pronunciation of the all-important word ‘Women’! Whatever Emmeline Pankhurst may have been in private life, her characteristic on the platform was a forcefulness, a driving energy that is not usually associated with women one describes as “so feminine”! And it was on the platform that she counted, urging her women to defiance of the law—on the platform and not in private life!32
This observation is ironic in light of how hard the women fought to present themselves as respectable beings, worthy of citizenship. Yet it speaks to Connell’s accurate representation of Mrs. Pankhurst (fig. 38), one reflected in the quote that opens this chapter that is embroidered on a banner that bears Mrs. Pankhurst’s image and honors her for such “deeds of daring rectitude.”33 In Connell’s portrait she sits ramrod straight and engages the viewer directly and boldly, actually conflating this call for the feminine with rebelliousness.
A somewhat opposing view comes from the Daily Mail which opened in 1908 after one suffrage event that it was sure
a great many people never realized until yesterday how young and dainty and elegant and charming most of the leaders of the movement are. And how well they spoke—with what free and graceful gesture; never at a loss for a word or an apt reply to an interruption; calm and collected; forcible, yet so far as I heard, not violent; earnest, but happily humourous as well.34
Suffrage women had been trained to expect every unpleasantness and to maintain their cool in spite of considerable rudeness and, in many cases, outright assault. That one body can maintain multiple narratives is apparent from these observations; and they invite and indeed can absorb multiple readings as public bodies, yet, what both quotes show, too, is that they are transgressors nonetheless.
A portrait of Cicely Hamilton, in this context, was published in an article in The Vote in 1911 as part of a review of a speech she gave at the Bijou Theatre for the Central London Branch of the WFL.35 (See a similar portrait in fig. 31.) In the portrait she wears her own style of tailored dress rather than the more feminine style that Mrs. Pankhurst promoted and she looks directly at the viewer, confident and engaged. She was ambivalent about speaking in public, yet the image suggests a woman in charge.36 This form of dissemination was one of many ways that Connell contributed to the cult of celebrity for her sitters. But what separated Hamilton was her feminist philosophy; she did not so much want the vote as what it represented: a chance for women to live independently, free from marriage.37 In Lis Whitelaw’s analysis of Hamilton’s stance, she sees it best reflected in Hamilton’s publication, Marriage as a Trade (1909). In the Literary Digest in 1912, Hamilton reiterates this ideology, one which ends with the opening comment from the epigraph of this chapter:
Thus long before I had learned to dispute, in so many words, the proposition that woman’s place is in the home, I knew that women situated as I was could not stay at home unless they wished to starve … and [this helped] in no small degree to develop me from a mere rebel, conscious only of personal misfit in the scheme of things, to a full-fledged feminist—that is to say a woman who understood that her sense of misfit and restiveness was not peculiar to herself, but the characteristic of a repressed and restive class.38
Hamilton’s radical position was quite influential; she collapsed the public and private by arguing that marriage was an economic system.39 Conflated with this view was her attitude toward self-presentation. In a letter to fellow playwright Elizabeth Robins, she said: “[I]t represents what ‘Votes for Women’ means to me—the refusal to be judged only by the standard of ‘attractiveness,’ and therefore, whatever its faults and blindnesses, it has a bit of faith behind it….”40 Thus, Connell’s representation of Hamilton mirrors Hamilton’s own self-presentation; it is a necessarily transgressive one that refuses to bow to conventions of dress and appearance.
Connell’s portraits went at the cause just as directly in such WFL images as Muriel Matters Speaking (fig. 6) and Muriel Matters (fig. 74), both of which show her delivering a speech. Women on platforms were considered especially dangerous because they were usurping men’s places in public. It was direct evidence of Stallybrass and White’s summation of transgression and Foucault’s argument for the centrality of the body in public discourse. Connell mitigates that troublesome space of “diva citizenship” by presenting Matters as a glowing angel of divine light, gently raising her hand to share a message. This bold act is further softened by Matters’ signature hat which she wears in both images. We know that she would have used such a feminine accessory as a way of attracting an admiring audience but, underlying that goal, as discussed earlier, it became a defense against rock throwers too!
Connell’s portrait of Sylvia Pankhurst is one of her best in terms of representing a transgressive and controversial figure in the movement in a very attractive light (fig. 28). She positions Sylvia, soon to be leader of ELFS, in soft light, looking up from perusing a photograph. Dressed modestly in a high-necked, dress-reform frock, she gazes thoughtfully at the viewer in a moment of calm. Yet, when we read Sylvia’s accounts of the struggle itself, it is a rabble rouser we meet, a woman who resisted in prison as she did during political meetings. One great instance comes from a Churchill meeting in 1905 during which she asked when women would have the franchise. First Churchill roughly positioned her in a chair behind him on stage, then berated her for asking the question. But that was not enough: the men on stage hustled her into a room and locked her in. It was only with help from people outside that she escaped through the window. She says: “They helped me out and called for a speech. Someone brought me a chair and I had a rousing time of it.”41
So, does the portrait defy the authorities and honor the battle as ennobling? Is the portrait then heroic? Instead of showing her on the battlefield, she is positioned in a studio, as were all of Connell’s portraits. I have argued in this study that the studio photographers created these calm, reasoned images in part to counteract the fictive press images of the suffrage women as harridans. That does not exclude the fact that Sylvia’s own report, and those of others, suggest that they were provoked into battle and hence effectively showed their anger and grit in public.
The posed portraits are then sometimes somewhat deceptive, offering another side of these women, presenting them as blissful, peaceful, and often content. As propaganda, they certainly offered a different public presentation than the ones the women themselves were putting forward in public and perhaps that was partly the point: to keep the “enemy” off guard. Ignoring the “high/low opposition” of the hierarchic order of the patriarchy, they inserted their bodies, both physically and in imaged form, into formerly men’s spaces as “instrument[s] of power” in order to bring justice to women.
Police Skirmishes and Prison Stays
If these fighting women suffered much from the crowds while speaking on platforms and caravan tours, it was as nothing compared to what they experienced from the police. The incredibly uncouth, violent treatment they suffered at the hands of the law was in direct violation of their rights to petition an audience with Parliamentary representatives. Black Friday, as discussed in chapter one, was one of the worst events. After that date, 18 November 1910, they decided such deputations of large numbers of women were too dangerous to accomplish their goals so, at least among the WSPU, they began to wage “guerrilla warfare” using underground tactics against the Liberal Government.42 For the press to take such images of this struggle and similar ones out of context and make them a representation of the “true” suffragist was adding considerable insult to literal injury. Yet, members of the public reiterated this kind of vitriol. For example, consider this anti-suffrage postcard commentary. A man writes on an image of a husband and wife brawling under the bittersweet title “Home Sweet Home”: “Striking example of a suffragette’s home [underlined three times] if they have [underlined for emphasis] any homes.” If that weren’t profound enough, the note on the postcard correspondence section, addressed to “Miss Pankhurst and her crew” runs: “You set of sickening fools—If you have no homes, no husbands—no children—no relations—Why don’t you drown yourselves out of the way?”43 Significant for this chapter is the implication that the women are non-persons, defined only by those who give them identities as hearth keepers, wives, mothers, and family; not, notably, as single women who pose a threat to that order. In addition, as single women they are hence non-entities and valueless.
Countering such attitudes, Connell further contributed to a cult of honor for these brave women when she imaged women who fought for women of all classes, who, like Constance, Lady Lytton, suffered severely in prison (fig. 50). She is shown here proudly wearing her prison medals and a necklace with an iron gate, or portcullis, a symbol of Holloway Prison. She was one of the bravest, disguising herself as the fictional Jane Warton, a lower-class, stereotypical harridan type, and then getting herself arrested to show that women of different classes received different treatment in prison. In this disguise, she suffered the effects of forced feeding which resulted in two strokes. She never regained her health. Connell presents her with great reserve, positioning her above us as if we are her willing worshippers. But, for all that, she is approachable and inspiring. This image reverberates in her stirring memoir of her experiences, Prisons and Prisoners (1914). As a result of the prison experiences that she recorded in this publication, she gained many admirers. Just as one example, a fellow WSPU member wrote to Lady Constance’s sister, Betty Balfour: “The adoration of Suffragettes for ‘Lady Conny’ is a thing to see, not tho’ to wonder at.”44
Similarly, Connell’s portrait of Leonora Tyson (fig. 30) was probably done to commemorate her time in prison. The Museum of London houses both this portrait and her prison medal which, in past displays at the museum, have been exhibited together to highlight Tyson’s heroism for the cause.
Maud Arncliffe-Sennett was an incredibly transgressive suffrage advocate in relation to police custody. She broke a window of the offices of the Daily Mail, using a hammer, dogwhip and chain, the receipts for which she included in her scrapbook. At her trial she protested with the following statement:
Sir, I broke the windows of the Daily Mail as a protest against the corruption of the Press for withholding, with malice and forethought the truth about the Suffrage Movement from the great British public. I am an employee of male labour, and the men who earn their living through the power of my poor brain, the men whose children I pay to educate, whose members of Parliament I pay for and to whose old-age pension I contribute—these are allowed the vote, while I am voteless.45
Running the family confectioners’ business in Clerkenwell gave Arncliffe-Sennett special insight into the deprivations of women without a vote. Further, her language is strong, to the point, and rational. And in her speech and actions she reflects the frustrations that Billington-Greig enumerates in her speech which partially opens this chapter. She is brave, forthright, and visibly angry, yet Connell’s portrait of her shows her as dignified and self-composed for all that (fig. 55).
Mrs. Pankhurst, as with others in the movement, was aghast at police treatment of women at political meetings. While heckling was a common practice for men in the crowds, when women exercised it they would receive responses from the political candidate, such as Mr. Lloyd-George, of “Pay no attention to those cats mewing.” Such jeering on their part resulted in the stewards’ often-violent ejection of them.46
Mrs. Pankhurst further relays the fall out of an attempt to give a resolution to the Prime Minister in a deputation on March 20, 1907, which, while totally legal, resulted in a brawl and the women’s arrests. She seems quite pleased in her retelling that some of the women were able to provide a dose of humor into their transgressive behavior, Mary Leigh being given thirty days “because she offended the magistrate’s dignity by hanging a ‘Votes for Women’ banner on the edge of the dock.” Pankhurst inserts her own embattled response to this event, saying:
Those of my readers who are unable to connect the word “militancy” with anything milder than arson are invited to reflect that within the first two months of the year 1907 the English Government sent to prison one hundred and thirty women whose “militancy” consisted merely of trying to carry a resolution from a hall to the Prime Minister in the House of Commons…. Our crime was called obstructing the police…. [I]t was the police who did the obstructing.47
Leigh’s defense statement before the judge was equally direct, which echoes Billington-Greig’s opening statement: “We have no other course but to rebel against oppression and if necessary to resort to stronger measures. This fight is going on.”48
One last example is Evelina Haverfield who was arrested on Black Friday and charged with assault. She had struck a policeman in the mouth and when she came up on charges she said forthrightly, “It was not hard enough. Next time I will bring a revolver!”49 Connell’s portrait of Haverfield in her riding attire (fig. 49), with her hands crossed over her chest, and straightforward expression, reflect this determined stance of the brave warrior.
I use these examples to illustrate just what level of venom the women were fighting in the streets, a place where they did not belong, as in the “diva citizenship” argument, but in which they nonetheless had to assert their voices. Thus, they continually troubled Stallybrass and White’s “high/low opposition” through their physical presence. These activities which resulted in their arrests offer us then a prime example of the push-back to their desire for representation in which, Foucault would argue, their bodies were at once “the object, target, and instrument[s] of power.”
Other Public Stagings
The Case of Muriel Matters
Matters had other sides apart from her mesmerizing stage presence that Connell captures in Muriel Matters Speaking (fig. 6) and Muriel Matters (fig. 74); she was a bit of an envelope pusher, embodying Berlant’s characterization of “diva citizenship” perhaps better than any other suffragist. In this regard, her activities I explore here embodied Stallybrass and White’s troubling of the domains of order just as her body acted as a symbol of Foucaultian power. She held within her the confidence that comes with a continued stage presence and additional status as a voting woman in her own native state of South Australia. She was also possessed of considerable enthusiasm, reveling in her own interventions and never seeming to tire of the fight. Just as one example, there is a joyous photograph of her walking arm in arm with Edy Craig as they are on their way to a deputation. They are both smiling widely with looks of triumph and hope on their faces. Both women have signed the photograph. Matters’ own note on the photograph reflects the gleeful moment. It reads: “Edith Craig (Ellen Terry’s daughter) with me in Whitehall discussing a visit with Asquith!!!”50
Matters’ fame stems in part from her hiring of an airship to fly over the House of Commons in 1909 on the day of the opening of Parliament. The airship was emblazoned with the slogan, “Votes for Women” (fig. 81).
Fig. 81: Muriel Matters’ “Votes for Women” Airship, 1909. Reproduction from Illustrated London News, 1909 (© Illustrated London News Ltd/Mary Evans).
Always in style, the press image of her in the basket before the launch shows her in a large protective scarf firmly secured over her hat in a moment of laughter (fig. 82).
Fig. 82: Muriel Matters in Basket of “Votes for Women” Airship, 1909 (photograph www.alamy.com stock photo).
She dispensed WFL leaflets from the balloon with the full intention of having them rain down on the King’s carriage as he approached the Parliament gates. This tactic made big headlines, such as “Votes for Women More in the Air than Ever,” Matters’ disruptive body somewhat obviated by the dirigible’s apparent invisibility due to the necessity of flying high above the scene. In the event, it went off course and ended up stuck in a tree from which Matters, much to her delight, had to be extricated!51 Inserting herself into airspace represented a new frontier for women suffragists. An assault from above was not what the King would have expected. The event, even though it went off course, confirmed Matters’ incredibly inventive solutions to disseminating the suffrage message. Further, it demonstrated Stallybrass and White’s disruption theory at its best.
Matters’ other successful publicity stunt was to be the first woman speaker in the House of Commons by chaining herself to the Ladies’ Gallery grille (fig. 83) and disturbing proceedings with shouts of “Votes for Women!” while a male colleague below distributed leaflets.
Fig. 83: Muriel Matters in the Ladies’ Gallery: “The Grille Incident,” 1908. Reproduced from Illustrated London News, 1908 (©Illustrated London News Ltd/Mary Evans).
Matters and her sister partner-in-crime, a Miss Helen Fox, had worked together behind the Ladies’ grille to make this event spectacular, so much so that according to some reports, the Miss Fox in question put the key to Matters’ chain lock in her cleavage (or, according to other reports, Matters put in down her own back). In either case, the key was unreachable in terms of propriety so officers took Matters downstairs, along with the grille, as the image shows, where she could be separated from it. The cartoon, published in the Illustrated London News, announces their intervention with “Woman Officially Placed Within the House of Commons.” As a result of this event the British press dubbed Matters “that daring Australian girl.” The suffrage women of the WFL acknowledged Matters for such firsts, arguing for the propaganda and exposure value of such stunts. Further, as Laura E. Nym Mayhall characterizes this event:
The protest forced M.P.s to choose between listening to the women’s claims for political representation and removing a symbol of their exclusion from that representation.52
A woman in chains was indicative of her repression; a woman chained to a grille was a double representation of her exclusion. She was prohibited by virtue of being a woman from direct contact with parliamentary discourse and prevented from representation by virtue of her sex as well. By inserting her body into a male domain, and chaining herself to an emblem of her exclusion, she demonstrated diva citizenship on multiple levels and literally embodied Foucault’s rhetoric about power dynamics.
The action, according to the WFL, not only made Matters famous, but also showed that she had the real grit of rare courage that the group recognized was necessary for battle.53 That was not the end of the infamy of this event, however. Cicely Hamilton and Christopher St John memorialized it in their 1909 suffrage play, Pot and Kettle, in which one of the main characters, Nell, celebrates her camaraderie with Lady Susan Pengarvon, whom she met when they were “chucked out of the Ladies’ Gallery the night the grille was shifted.”54 Matters as legend and her own legacy become conflated in such a narration.
The Case of Evelina Haverfield
Women worked as organizers for the suffrage processions. Connell honors that work, even in studio portraits. While I have already discussed her portrait of Evelina Haverfield in the context of leadership in chapter two and in the context of police riots earlier in this chapter, this portrait (fig. 49), by showing her in her riding attire, also pays tribute to Haverfield’s position as marshal for many events, including the “votes for women” demonstration, June 18, 1910, for the WSPU.
In Haverfield’s march activities, she mimics other leaders on horseback who led the parades, such as the suffrage women who dressed as Joan of Arc. Other suffrage members would have appreciated Connell’s presentation of her, since she was a skilled horsewoman and used her understanding of horses to fight mounted police. For example, she knew how to make horses sit down by touching a back joint in their legs, a tactic which effectually disabled both horse and rider.55 That suffrage women had to revert to such tactics is testimony to their bravery and their ability to take on transgressive acts in order to battle their own repression from these very forces, the police in such instances as stand ins for the larger patriarchal realm.
This book has probed Edwardian suffrage portraits through Connell’s lens to show what self (or selves) these professional women wished to reveal and their power and effect both within the movement and beyond it. Connell created a new art market that addressed multiple visual agendas through her dissemination practices in various popular media that both advertised the suffrage cause and her own professional business. In this regard, she both engaged in and challenged British political and business practices through visual culture and popular culture avenues. But, beyond those goals, this chapter specifically has sought to establish the interaction between the static studio portraits and the women’s activities on the campaign trail, in platform speaking, and in the discourse within prison stays and police skirmishes, in order to establish how Connell was part of a large, resistant machine moving ever forward for women’s rights. The enthusiasm with which women collected her images and shared them and the ways they circulated such images in their correspondence was truly a resistant and transformative experience. Through Connell’s studio work and its dissemination, she brought professional women before the public for the first time as visible contributors to a cult of great women. She created not stale, formal painted portraits but living, breathing, fighting women. If ever there were a body of imagery to counteract the invisible flâneuse, and to establish instead the existence of the “separate spheres imaginary,” here she is: visible, courageous, engaged, prepared, impassioned, and purposeful.
1. See Colleen Denney, “Epilogue: From the Hammer to the Fist: March, Process, Progress and Protest,” The Visual Culture of Women’s Activism in London, Paris and Beyond: An Analytical Art History, 1860 to the Present (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2018), 133–170, for a study of suffrage body language and its legacy within suffrage visual rhetoric other than in studio portraits.
2. Angela Davis, Angela Davis: An Autobiography (New York: Random House, 1974).
3. Margaret Denny, “Framing the Victorians: Photography, Fashion, and Identity,” in The Places and Spaces of Fashion, 1800–2007, ed., John Potvin (London, New York: Routledge, 2009), 34–51.
4. Laura Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 223.
5. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), 3.
6. Cited in Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington/Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994), 146.
7. Diane Atkinson, The Suffragettes in Pictures (London: Museum of London, 2010), 14.
8. Atkinson, The Suffragettes in Pictures, 42.
9. Ibid., 54.
10. See Atkinson, The Suffragettes in Pictures, 90, for an image of the exhibition teaming with crowds of women. See also, Naomi Paxton, “Exhibition,” Stage Rights! The Actresses’ Franchise League, Activism and Politics 1908–58 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018), 17–49.
11. E. Sylvia Pankhurst, The Suffragette Movement: An Intimate Account of Persons and Ideals (London: Longmans Green, 1931), 268–69.
12. Sylvia Pankhurst, The Suffragette Movement, 5.
13. Emmeline Pankhurst, My Own Story (New York: Hearst’s International Library, 1914), 87.
14. Maud Arncliffe-Sennett Collection, British Library, London.
15. Margaret Mulvihill, Charlotte Despard: A Biography (London: Pandora, 1989), 90–91.
16. Mulvihill, Despard, 92.
17. Helen Swanwick, I Have Been Young, with an introduction by Lord Ponsonby (London: Victor Gollancz, 1935), 198–199.
18. Swanwick, I Have Been Young, 202–204.
19. 7AMP/O/092, A. Muriel Pierotti Papers, Women’s Library, London School of Economics and Political Science.
20. TWL.2009.02/165, Postcard Collection, Women’s Library, London School of Economics and Political Science.
21. GB106/7/TBG2/W/12, Teresa Billington-Greig Papers, Women’s Library, London School of Economics and Political Science.
22. TWL.2009.02/110, Postcard Collection, Women’s Library, London School of Economics and Political Science.
23. This page from her scrapbook includes the only evidence I have found of Connell’s portrait of Hardie. It has not survived in public collections. The Snowden portrait is in the Museum of London collection (50.82/918).
24. Maud Arncliffe-Sennett Collection, Vol. 11, reel 3 (8 July-Oct, 1910): 82.
25. 7TBG/2/W/8, Teresa Billington-Greig Papers.
26. On Helen Crawfurd see Elizabeth Crawford, The Women’s Suffrage Movement: A Reference Guide 1866–1928 (London, New York: Routledge, 2001), 151–152. On Munro’s campaign work in 1912 see “With the Campaigners,” The Vote IV (July 20, 1912): 231; “With the Campaigners,” The Vote IV (July 27, 1912): 245; and on Connell’s movements and activities alongside Munro see “Clyde Holiday Campaign,” The Vote IV (Sept. 14, 1912): 361. On Connell’s other suffrage activities see Crawford, Women’s Suffrage Movement, 548.
27. TWL.2009.02/122, Postcard Collection, Women’s Library, London School of Economics and Political Science.
28. TWL.2002.93, Postcard Collection, Women’s Library, London School of Economics and Political Science.
29. The listing of “Mrs. B. M. Billinghurst” in the transcript of the Women’s Library record seems to be an error, as the address listed on the postcard belonged to a different person, namely one of the staunch campaigners, Miss Rosa May Billinghurst (1875–1953), who attended marches in her invalid tricycle due to a total paralysis she suffered as a child. TWL.2002.10, Postcard Box 01, Postcard Collection, Women’s Library, London School of Economics and Political Science. See also Crawford, Women’s Suffrage Movement, 53–54.
30. TWL.2002.10, Postcard Box 01, Postcard Collection.
31. Diane Atkinson, Rise Up Women! The Remarkable Lives of the Suffragettes (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 529.
32. Cicely Hamilton, Life Errant (London: Dent, 1935), 76–77.
33. Included in 7EWD/J/18, Emily Wilding Davison Papers, Women’s Library, London School of Economics and Political Science.
34. Daily Mail quoted in Votes for Women (25 June 1908); cited in Diane Atkinson, Mrs. Broom’s Suffragette Photographs: Photographs by Christina Broom (London: Dirk Nishen Publishing, 1988), 5.
35. “The Spirit of the Movement,” The Vote (January 14, 1911): 140–41.
36. This portrait does not exist in any of the surviving collections, but it is also reproduced in Hamilton, Life Errant, opposite 65.
37. “Spirit of the Movement,” 140–41.
38. Quoted in Lis Whitelaw, The Life and Rebellious Times of Cicely Hamilton (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1991), 66.
39. Whitelaw, The Life and Rebellious Times of Cicely Hamilton, 102.
40. Quoted in Whitelaw, The Life and Rebellious Times of Cicely Hamilton, 102.
41. Sylvia Pankhurst, The Suffragette Movement, 193–4.
42. Atkinson, The Suffragettes in Pictures, 136, includes some of the testimony of this event.
43. 50.82/839, Museum of London.
44. Quoted in Crawford, Women’s Suffrage Movement, 362.
45. Quoted in Crawford, Women’s Suffrage Movement, 624.
46. Emmeline Pankhurst, My Own Story, 67.
47. Ibid., 86.
48. Quoted in Emmeline Pankhurst, My Own Story, 119.
49. Quoted in Crawford, Women’s Suffrage Movement, 279.
50. Included in 7EWD/J/10, Album 1, Emily Wilding Davison Papers.
51. “Votes for Women More in the Air than Ever,” Illustrated London News (February 20, 1909): 260.
52. Laura E. Nym Mayhall, “Defining Militancy: Radical Protest, the Constitutional Idiom, and Women’s Suffrage in Britain, 1908–1909,” Journal of British Studies 39 (2000): 359.
53. See Marion Holmes, “Miss Muriel Matters,” The Vote (19 February 1910): 196.
54. Cited in Paxton, Stage Rights!, 117.
55. Crawford, Women’s Suffrage Movement, 280.