The Rokeby Venus

In this rather hilarious report of the incident in the Times, the attack on the painting is described in almost human terms: ‘probably the most serious blow has caused a cruel wound in the neck’; there is ‘a broad laceration starting near the left shoulder’ and ‘other cuts […] cleanly made in the region of the waist’. The Keeper of the National Gallery, meanwhile, describes ‘seven distinct injuries’ and ‘a ragged bruise’ on the painting, in the language of a post-mortem.

Meanwhile, ‘prominent woman suffragist Mary Richardson’ (note that the noun there is ‘suffragist’, not ‘woman’) is said to have used an instrument ‘similar to [those] used by butchers’ – as if that somehow makes it worse than if she’d used sewing scissors or a hat pin. Clearly the writer considers the Venus as much of a piece of meat (albeit a sacred one) as Mary Richardson – who later said she ‘couldn’t stand the way the men visitors gawped at it’.

The Times counters by saying that this Venus is ‘absolutely natural and absolutely pure’ –  a strange claim that implicitly contrasts this ‘marvellously graceful’ women with the ‘woman suffragist’ who attacks her, in the process making this about much more than the destruction of art.

Art Under Attack

Unfortunately, little has changed in the gallery notes to Tate Britain’s exhibition Art Under Attack: Histories of British Iconoclasm. There’s a whole room devoted to women (after several focusing on those other Wanton Destroyers of Art, the Protestants and the Irish), with accompanying hand-wringing notation:

In 1913 and 1914 the campaign to win women the vote became more militant and turned from window-smashing to attacks on art. Paintings in public museums and galleries – the nation’s cultural heritage – were attacked in order to effect to effect political change.  The militant women who carried out these acts of iconoclasm did so in the name of the Women’s Social and Political Union[.]

– Tate Britain, Histories of British Iconoclasm, Room 6 

It’s couched in the language of facts and neutrality but there’s a nasty undercurrent to the emphasis on ‘public museums and galleries’ and the little clarifying clause that this is ‘the nations’s cultural heritage’ (to which we will return). Together with the repetition of ‘militant’ and the rising pitch of hysteria in the movement ‘from window-smashing to attacks on art’, it’s clear that the writer is no friend to Mary Richardson.

‘Iconoclasm’ is, of course, the term used in the exhibition as a whole, although I find its application to the Rokeby Venus little better than the Times‘ assertion that the painting is ‘universally recognised by good judges as […a] masterpiece’ – it implicitly speaks from the perspective of a white, male, artistic elite, which has confirmed that this painting is ‘objectively’ of almost religious (‘iconic’) importance. In the process, the word comes close to justifying Richardson’s claim that an ‘outcry against my deed […] is an hypocrisy so long as they allow the destruction of Mrs. Pankhurst and other beautiful living women’ – the elite cared more for a painted woman than a living one.

Interestingly, that very perspective appears once again in the next room, where we have Carl Andre’s brick sculpture on display. This was attacked by a member of the public who resented his taxes being spent to acquire it for Tate because it wasn’t ‘proper’ art. Whatever you think about the piece, you can see his point. Yet today, we are told in the gallery notes, ‘Carl Andre’s sculpture remains admired by some and misunderstood by others’.

Photograph of Mary Richardson in 1914

Conserving womanhood

I am by no means condoning the destruction of artworks, but the salient point for me is that the Rokeby Venus is ‘alive’ and well in the National Gallery to this day, and the other canvas victims of the suffragettes’ knives exhibited in ‘Attacks on Art’ are similarly unharmed.

In fact, while the gallery notes assert that paintings such as ‘In Prayer’ by George Frederick Watts (exhibited here) were selected for destruction by the suffragettes because of the problematic image of womanhood they presented, the effect of exhibiting them in their restored form is merely to reassert that complete, beautifully conserved image in the service of a narrative of ‘militant women’ attacking ‘the nation’s cultural heritage’.

About that ‘cultural heritage’. The next room but one in the exhibition focuses on Auto-destructive art, with examples from  Gustav Metzger and Yoko Ono, a fragment of whose Biba dress (destroyed during a performance art piece) is exhibited here. She bought that Biba dress, so she’s entitled to destroy it, is the implicit argument here (from this point on the exhibition is all about ‘good’ iconoclasts, such as Gilbert and George, who had the decency to buy the art before they destroy it). The suffragettes, by contrast (like the Protestants and the Irish) were ruining it for ‘the nation’.

Galleries as a model for citizenship

The National Gallery – where the Venus was hanging in 1914 – was set up in 1824 to provide a space for the poor to view art alongside their social betters. In its original conception, there was a moral reform impetus behind it – many spoke of how museums accessible to the broader public would reduce birth rates and crime among the poor (who would now have a gallery to go to instead!), and there was talk of how, through exposure to their ‘betters’ – including middle-class women, for whom the gallery offered a genteel and ‘safe’ public space – the working classes would learn to regulate their passions and behave in a more orderly (quasi-middle-class) manner. In fact, national galleries – set up throughout Europe during the nineteenth century – were described as instruments in which to learn better citizenship.

You know the punchline, right? Yup – the majority of the people museums were trying to entice in and train up as model citizens – working class men, all women – did not have the vote. That’s the problem. These works may have been the ‘nation’s cultural heritage’, but the nation in question was an incomplete one. The Rokeby Venus didn’t belong to the Suffragettes. It belonged to art-loving, nude-gawping middle-class men.

The most interesting thing in this exhibition, for me, is the admission in the Suffragette room that the Suffragettes prompted as much ‘iconoclasm’ as they enacted. A WSPU pamphlet is exhibited on which Mrs Pankhurst’s face has been so violently ‘de-faced’ the paper has torn, exposing the words on the next page. In this age of Caroline Criado-Perez and Anita Sarkeesian, that should make us think.

BadRep: Tell us a little bit about the series in your own words.

Kathrynne Wolf: The Scarlet Line is an action-drama about a secret lineage of female bodyguards who are, when on active duty, code-named “Scarlet”.

Our premise is that the Line started with the famous “Jujitsuffragette” bodyguard team in Edwardian London. In the world of our story, after the First World War the organisation – ‘The Scarlet Line’ – went international and Scarlets have operated ever since then, protecting people who need their help.

“We blow the Bechdel test straight out of the water.”

Our main character, Amanda, is a retired Scarlet whose very ordinary life is suddenly thrown into chaos. Details of the reasons for this disruption, the purpose, history and future of the line get revealed throughout the season.

BR: What gave you the idea to do this?

KW: I was literally falling asleep one night when I had the idea for a secret lineage of female bodyguards, quietly going about the business of making the streets safer.

This is the sort of story I wanted to see on screen. It’s an old adage that you should write the story you want to read, be the change you want to see, and so on. I had been distressed by the narrow representation of women – and the UNDERrepresentation of interesting roles and stories for women in media – for a long time.

Two issues I find particularly insidious are the tendency for any female protagonist driving the story to be called a “Strong Female Character”, where this adjective seems unnecessary for a male protagonist, and the tendency for “Strong Female Characters” either to a) be somehow supernaturally or technologically augmented, or b) have a tendency to cry, even when on the job.

I wanted to see a story of a woman who kicks butt and takes names as a matter of course. It’s her job. She does her job, she does it well. The fact that she’s female is not excused, it’s not augmented, it’s not commented on; it is not, in fact, the point. The point is the story – there’s a crisis that needs solving, there are obstacles, stakes get raised, we wrestle with issues of morality, trust, crime, betrayal…

“The fact that she’s female is not excused, it’s not augmented, it’s not commented on; it is not, in fact, the point. The point is the story.”

The other major factor that made me want to tackle this project is that I come from a background of what is generally referred to as ‘Chicago Storefront Theatre’. We have over 150 small theatre companies in Chicago, producing shows in all kinds of spaces that weren’t originally intended to hold a theatre, because they have stories they want to tell. It’s very much a ‘do it yourself’ mindset.

That’s why I produced the web-series myself, rather than writing a screenplay and then sending it off to Hollywood, hoping it would catch someone’s eye and that it wouldn’t get lost in ‘option-land’… I wanted to see it happen.

BR: What made you decide to set the series in the US rather than Britain?

KW: The main factor is that I live in Chicago, and this is where I have connections, know the locations, and where it was, in fact, possible to produce the series.

That said, the ‘mythology’ of the Scarlet Line definitely lends itself to satellite stories. It would make a great CSI-style franchise. I would love to see The Scarlet Line: London, The Scarlet Line: Seattle, The Scarlet Line: Barcelona – I’d just need to figure out how to go about licensing the sucker.

BR: The lead Scarlet’s wig and makeup are very striking, and call to mind vigilante superheroes such as Catwoman, Silk Spectre from ‘Watchmen’ and Hit Girl from ‘Kick-Ass’. In other press, you’ve previously mentioned Wonder Woman in connection with the unusual ‘web’ weapon used by the Scarlets – are you inspired at all by comics, as well as martial arts and action cinema?

KW: I was raised on Wonder Woman and Kitty Pryde was my favourite X-Man. Like all storytellers, I can’t help but draw from everything I’ve studied, read and seen.

I would say the Scarlet character was drawn as much from The Equalizer and the Guardian Angels as from comic books and movies.

The lack of a current TV show like Wonder Woman is part of what goaded me into this. One of my oldest friends in the world had a baby daughter, and I had a “what will she WATCH???” moment of panic, as I considered the statistics that show that women’s representation in media has actually shrunk in the last few years.

I wanted to contribute to the ongoing development of a wider range of roles available to actresses and, therefore, role models available to young girls.

I don’t only mean morally upright ‘ideals’, I mean characters that represent the spectrum – that model all kinds of ways of being and behaving, living in the world, experiencing victories and consequences. The wider the spectrum presented, the more agency is given to young girls to figure out how they want to live for themselves.

The other major factor involved in the Scarlet wig and makeup is modern surveillance technology. The Scarlets have to keep their true identities secret, and research on the advances in facial recognition software led me to take the disguise angle to more extreme lengths than I’d originally planned.

It turns out that software has gotten scarily good at working around minor augmentations. Diana Prince’s glasses were NOT going to cut it.

BR: You perform quite a bit of realistic fighting in the episodes, as well as very kinetic movement with the Web weapons. Is it difficult to find film or theatre roles for women which showcase more realistic techniques?

KW: It is maddeningly difficult. For 13 years, I belonged to Babes With Blades Theatre Company, which is a Chicago company whose mission is to ‘place women and their stories centre stage’ using combat as a major part of their expressive vocabulary.

To do this, they’ve focused on developing new work, and they include an all-female-cast Shakespeare in every other season, as there simply are not many plays out there where women get to explore this range of human expression.

Again, it’s ridiculously rare in Western cinema, TV, and theatre that a female character is allowed to simply be proficient at combat without being superhuman, having a ‘super suit’, or being the ‘chosen one’.

Again, it’s ridiculously rare in Western cinema, TV, and theatre that a female character is allowed to simply be proficient at combat without being superhuman, having a ‘super suit’, or being the ‘chosen one’.

Don’t get me wrong – I love superhero stories, and am always happy for any opportunity actresses get to be that kind of hero. I just wanted to help open up the field so that they didn’t have to be somehow ‘other’ in order to do so.

BR: There are more women in TV and film who are action heroines these days, but they’re still often lone figures. Already in the trailers for early episodes we’re seeing that relationships (such as the one between Amanda and Marcus) are a big part of the story – are the relationships between female characters also focused on, alongside the ass-kicking?

KW: Most of the major characters in the series are women. We blow the Bechdel test straight out of the water.

The relationships are very important, and they’re explored much more deeply in Season 2. Season 1 is very much the set-up – it’s where the ball gets rolling. We introduce the major players, the major conflicts, the major themes, and some things get resolved by the final episode, but not all.

BR: What were the challenges of creating a web-series? Did the format give you more freedom to pursue feminist themes?

KW: The fact that we’re doing it all ourselves means we have no one to answer to. There’s no studio executive or marketing department saying ‘You have to include a male authority figure! She has to cry or it’s not believable!’ or any such nonsense.

The challenge, of course, is that we do not have studio resources. The good side of that is that no one is working on this project for any reason other than that they want to.

BR: What do you hope the series will achieve?

KW: I would love to inspire other folks with good stories to stop waiting for permission and MAKE THEM. I think the online short-form potential is evolving rapidly. The democratization of access to technical production capability is an amazingly wonderful thing, if you’ve got a story to tell.

I’d also like to help raise some awareness of some of the ass-kicking women of history – in fact, that is the subject of a panel I am doing at GeekGirlCon in Seattle in October – drawing from history to find inspirational stories of “non-super” superheroines.

If the series reaches some young (or not so young) folks who hadn’t yet realised that they’re allowed to take charge of their own stories and get them out there, and maybe some who hadn’t considered that there might be more roles for women than eye candy, damsel in distress or obstacle, even better.

The Scarlet Line Trailer 1 from Wolf Point Media on Vimeo.

• Huge thanks to Kathrynne Wolf for the interview, and we wish her all the best with the series! There’s a kickass trailer for Season 1 over here, and more info on the Facebook group and Scarlet Line website.
• Thanks also to Kathrynne’s husband Tony Wolf who wrote the book about the life of Edith Garrud, which prompted the original piece in our 2011 ‘Revolting Women’ series. Tony is currently working on a three-part graphic novel series inspired by the Ju-jutsuffragettes titled Mrs Pankhurst’s Amazons, due in 2014.

My choice of subject for our Revolting Women series was decided the moment I saw the picture below, an event which caused me to loudly shout “GET IN!” and do an air-punch with great abandon.

The lady in this image is Mrs Edith Margaret Garrud (1872-1971), and she appears to have a policeman in an armlock.

It turns out that it’s only an actor playing the hapless bobby, because Edith is the person responsible for teaching the Suffragettes jujutsu.

Before we ask how a middle-aged woman in a respectable hat was able to learn the (then barely discovered) Japanese martial art, let’s look at why she’d bother:

We have not yet made ourselves a match for the police, and we have got to do it. The police know jiu-jitsu. I advise you to learn jiu-jitsu. Women should practise it as well as men.

We have got to have [military] drilling in the East End. If there is any man who has been in the Army or who knows anything about drilling, will he please communicate with me, and we will start drilling.

You should all go out with your sticks [Indian clubs which were popular for exercise at the time, and easily hidden in clothing]. What is the use of demonstrating for freedom and going unarmed? Don’t come to meetings without sticks in future, men and women alike. It is worth while really striking. It is no use pretending. We have got to fight.
– Sylvia Pankhurst, quoted in the New York Times on Aug 12th 1913, shortly before she was arrested.

With the recent practice of police using “kettling” to contain students during anti-cuts protests, and any (very predictable) resulting violence against police by the protesters subsequently being loudly criticised in newspapers, it’s refreshing to see the sentiments above. ‘Well, we have to learn jujutsu too, or the police might be able to stop us. And obviously we can’t have THAT. This is a protest! Get someone who can make it happen and have him report to me immediately. Next?’ While the actions may cause debate today, the sheer ‘nothing will stop us’ attitude is amazing.

But Sylvia is not the focus of this post, much as we love her here on BadRep. It’s Edith who is less well known but also truly remarkable. She taught PE at a school and married William, also a PE instructor, when she was 21 and he 22. They moved to London and met the intriguing Edward William Barton-Wright, who in 1899 started to teach them both jujutsu.

I have to pause again and talk about Barton-Wright, because England produces a unique brand of truly bonkers things and he was definitely responsible for one of them which is of great importance to this narrative.

Stances from Bartitsu, and in the centre E.W. Barton-Wright and his terrifying moustache. (Image = Public Domain from Wikipedia)

Sherlock Holmes, as well as being a boxer, was written in a later story as knowing the gentleman’s martial art of “Baritsu”. This was a mis-spelling of Barton’s invention, “Bartitsu” (Barton-jujitsu). Asian martial arts weren’t very widely known in the West before 1900, and he was one of the first instructors in Europe. It was a time when… well, when men had moustaches and hats like those in the accompanying image. Barton-Wright had learned Shinden Fudo Ryu jujutsu and judo, and developed a new system for English people of ‘class and bearing’ to use with dignity (and often a walking stick or umbrella).

It was his academy that Edith and her husband attended, and they both went on to become students of Sadakazu Uyenishi who taught there. When Uyenishi left his own dojo a few years later, they took over as teachers of that club in Soho. (Their daughter, Isabel, also assisted them in running the dojo from 1911 onwards, at the age of fifteen.)

Edith was almost certainly the first female jujutsu instructor in Europe. She and her husband continued teaching until 1925 – but from 1908 she alone ran some classes which were only open to suffragettes.

And if you thought that Sylvia was a straight-talker in the quotes above, Edith didn’t hold back either. There is far, far too much awesomeness going on to fit it all into this post, so I strongly recommend you read the pages on the other end of these links:

In her article “Damsel Vs Desperado” for Health and Strength magazine in 1910, Edith said that jujutsu was not just for protesters to use against police (as the newspapers were gleefully retelling) but that

Woman is exposed to many perils nowadays, because so many who call themselves ‘men’ are not worthy of that exalted title.

She then goes on to write a short story (with illustrations!) about a woman being attacked while “returning home along a lonely country road.” It contains lines such as:

Believing that he has had enough by now and that she has shown him what she can do, she gives him a severe twinge that makes him fairly squeal, and throws him off as a “thing” beneath contempt.

It was this magazine which came up with the title “Ju-jutsuffragettes”, one which Edith seemed to quite like, and in 1911 they printed another article describing a short sketch also written by her, in which a wife defends herself against her violently drunk husband. The headline proudly announced
“Ju-Jutsu as a Husband-Tamer: A Suffragette Play with a Moral“(!) The photos are brilliant (I am all too familiar with the wrist-lock in no.4, ouch) and the short script contains some comedy:

“I’ll learn this ‘ere jucy jujubes, Liz, for I could do for you if I was sober,” he says.
“No,” answers Liz; “you’re a good husband to me then, and wouldn’t want to, but when you’re drunk I’ll always be a match for you.”

The reminder that domestic violence was (and is) widespread enough to make the play relevant to the audience is chilling, however.

What makes Edith of particular importance to the protest movement she was part of is not just that she was a suffragette, or taught others to take on police during protests, but that she trained the 30 women known as “The Bodyguard”. This group was set up to prevent the frequent arrest of top suffragette protesters (the police would release those who were on hunger strike and then quickly re-arrest them). As well as pitched hand-to-hand fighting between ladies and Her Majesty’s constabulary, the Bodyguard used disguises, decoys and all sorts of other tricks to get the known leaders away after a protest. For many years, she was their chief trainer.

I ordered a copy of a charming book by Tony Wolf called “Edith Garrud: The suffragette who knew Jujutsu“. It’s one of the most fully-researched works on the woman and her deeds, but is written for children, leading to sentences such as ‘The Police, of course, didn’t like the idea of the Suffragettes’ new Bodyguard society one little bit.’ It also provides some amazing quotes and stories: during one public demonstration, a reporter from the Daily Mirror was invited to attack the 4’11” Edith on stage. After trying several attacks and being roundly thrown or wristlocked each time, he wrote of his experiences in an article for the newspaper:

I rose convinced of the efficiency of Jujutsu, and, aching in every limb, crawled painfully away, pitying the constable whose ill-fortune it should be to lay hands on Mrs. Garrud.

Again and again in her story we see parallels to the student and anti-cuts protests earlier this year. The suffragettes knew that property damage meant headlines, but there were generally strict boundaries – no people were to be hurt, and no factory or other workplace was to be damaged where people’s jobs would be affected. One incident Edith was involved in was a gathering of women on Oxford Street, who, when Edith blew a whistle, pulled hammers and rocks from under their clothes and threw them through shop windows. This was seen as a logical, necessary and entirely justified action which had a place in protest, not just empty vandalism, and she defends it eloquently. Newspapers and blogs are still having that debate today.

She presented a suffragette petition to Lloyd George, who started to argue with her. Edith replied “Now then, you are dealing with a fellow countrywoman from the Welsh Valleys. Be sensible, man!” (She was born in Bath but grew up in Wales). They then had entirely civil conversations on more than one occasion, although never agreed on ideals.

Edith depicted in the July 1910 edition of Punch magazine.

In an interview for Woman magazine when she was 94, she said that self-discipline had been the key to jujutsu and protest – discipline of the body, but much more of the mind. Even at that age she presented as someone with unbending levels of determination. Reading about women’s voices in protest then and now, the difference comes over as a directness in attitude: of being entirely sure that your cause is just and that you must therefore do everything to help protest succeed. The conversation in those circles would be “So the police are using kettling and ‘pre-emptive arrests’ to suppress dissent. How do we make sure those techniques never work on us again?”

Edith Garrud died in 1971 at the age of 99. She was instrumental in teaching the suffragettes the skills they used to evade capture and speak in public for longer. She also broke new ground in being a woman who taught martial arts only recently discovered in Europe to women. This year, Edith will be honoured with a permanent memorial by Islington council – an ‘Islington People’s Plaque’ – because she won a public vote to be one of the five people or places thus celebrated.

Comemmorative dollar for the Little Rock Nine, six of whom were women

Often women’s involvement in protest has drawn on their gendered role within families and communities. Women played a significant part, for instance, in the riots over food supply, quality and price which swept Europe during its transition to a capitalist market economy from the 16th century to the 19th. Historians like Temma Kaplan, E P Thompson and Natalie Zemon Davis (and, er, me) have seen female participation in these protests as an extension of their role in the sexual division of labour, including food procurement and preparation, which lent legitimacy and authority to their involvement. The prominence of women in local networks of communication, and their presence in social centres like market squares as part of their daily routine, also allowed them to collectively mobilise and organise – the equivalent, under agrarian capitalism, of creating a Facebook Events page.

There is, however, a myriad of other movements and moments in which women have taken part as workers, students, trade union organisers, family members, and consumers, as well as on grounds of class, race, sexuality, and political principle. There’s even a Wikipedia list of female rebel leaders dating from the 9th century BC to this year’s uprising in Ivory Coast, which, even though this series is concerned less with individuals and more with women’s mass participation in protest, is still pretty cool.

Just as their presence is still being obscured in reports of current events in the Middle East, so women have historically been absent from many popular and academic accounts of protest. The advent of feminist-influenced social history from the mid-20th century sought to correct masculine bias within traditional narratives of labour history or liberal teleologies, both of which had marginalised or misrepresented the involvement of women. Conversely, strictly purist or doctrinaire feminist narratives of history have also tended to ignore popular movements which did not advance a specifically feminist programme, regardless of how heavily women may have been involved. Both of these approaches resulted in the omission, until recently, of women from the histories of protest movements like Chartism in which they played a significant part.

The place and properness of women in protest has long been a bone of contention, with discourse surrounding their involvement portraying them as hysterical, unwomanly, deviant, or deranged. Sheila Rowbotham, in her historical study of women and protest, notes that:

It is at the point where the revolution starts to move women out of their passivity into the conscious and active role of militants that the mockery, the caricatures, the laughter with strong sexual undertones begin.

The vicious alarmism and mockery drawn by female involvement in politics, with which suffragists and civil rights agitators found themselves contending, is already evident in several cartoons on female Jacobins and campaigners for constitutional reform. Political cartoons of the 18th and 19th century were rarely noted for their subtlety, and caricaturists tended to focus upon the disorderly nature of political females, as well as imputing to them an ‘unwomanly’ loose or aggressive sexuality. Cruikshanks depicted ‘The Female Reformers of Blackburn’ as vulgarly outspoken and blowsily dressed, distastefully dominating their political platform, and J L Marks’ ‘Much Wanted: A Reform Among Females!!!’ gives its female protagonists suggestively brandished rolled-up papers, poles clutched between their knees, and – oh yes – hands clasped in their laps to form a gaping dark hole, setting out their desire to usurp male power as well as their own wantonness. As, perhaps, does the presence of all those upthrust pikes, swords and cannons in depictions of the women’s march to Versailles. And of course Cath Elliot’s recent piece on online harassment, by which politically uppity women are impugned as frigid, or sluts, or lesbians, provides a piquant reminder of this glorious tradition.

Women in protest don’t merely have attacks from the right to worry about. Their involvement does not take place in a vacuum – women protest not only as women but for multiple reasons of sectional interest, and the gender identification of protestors has historically generated conflict and tension with identities based on race, class, sexuality, and ideology. To take just one example, the involvement of women in 20th century industrial conflict, acting in support of or solidarity with male industrial workers, has been criticised by some feminists who view such conflict as manifestations of an unhelpfully macho patriarchal culture from which women should separate themselves.

Nor can it be assumed that female involvement in social protest will naturally result in an outcome which is cognisant of, sympathetic to, or even comfortable for women. After the Women’s March to Versailles, women as revolutionaries became a potent symbol of the power of the French Revolution, and the young Republic was eventually personified in the figure of Marianne. But, as Joan Landes has argued, Marianne’s visual prominence did not mean that women obtained significant political, social, or economic advantages during the French Revolution; the new Republic’s politics was one of laws and texts in which Marianne’s image bore no concrete significance. Similar tensions are apparent in the complex relationship of Iranian women with the after-effects of the 1979 revolution, and the contention that the presence of women in the current ‘Arab spring’ uprisings, when acknowledged at all, is being appropriated and used symbolically.

In addition to the examples given in links above, this series will look in greater detail at case-studies of women’s involvement in social, political, and economic protest, their motivations and methods, their successes and setbacks. It’s been a long, hot summer of discontent and it shouldn’t be any surprise to see women as well as men taking their place in the sun.

*

• Rhian Jones also blogs at Velvet Coalmine.

For any of our Irish-folklore-unfamiliar readers, “róisín dubh” is gaelic for “dark rose” and the title of a traditional Irish folk song. You’ve studied Anglo-Irish supernatural fiction at university, Abhartach appears in Róisín Dubh and the ghost of Oscar Wilde turns up in your other comics project, Jennifer Wilde. Which other myths or historical figures can we expect to turn up in Róisín Dubh, and do you have any favourite people, legends or mythological monsters from Irish history and folklore?

“Robert Curley at Atomic Diner comics pitched the core idea of Róisín Dubh to me and told me about the existing myth around Abhartach. I did what I always do: research. I thought a great deal about the time period, the story of Abhartach, Róisín herself and her situation.

For me, I need to find what I think of a ‘mythic resonance’ in a story that I’m trying to create. Making a character swing a sword and lop off a head is easy: making a story with horror and fantasy elements feel like it could possibly be real requires that it resemble mythology itself.

So, I went back to my books on Irish mythology – of which I have many – and kept reading until elements connected with what I already had in my head about the story. I added a few Irish gods into the mix, a companion character and a couple of magical items. I widened the canvas. And I gave Róisín a very painful thing to do, which happens in issue 2 and is something that will haunt her forever.

Equally, I thought a lot about Abhartach. I don’t like simplistic villains. I added to his backstory and made him into a person who does unpleasant things, but who has motivations and reasons for his view of the world. Thankfully, Rob was very receptive to me bringing all this to the characters and the story!

I’ve been reading mythological stories from all cultures since childhood. One story that holds a lot of fascination for me is ‘the descent into the underworld’. There is a variation on that in issue 1 of Róisín Dubh – though I’m not always aware of every element like this that I’m tapping into when I write the story. Sometimes it doesn’t become obvious until later.

Ultimately, when writing I try to feed my subconscious to stuffing point with lots of influences and then allow it to serve me up suggestions as I’m going on. I trust it to give me the right element at the right time. Then, some time afterwards, I marvel at how it all came together. That’s when it’s really doing its job.

But I have days when it gives me nothing and I soldier on anyway.”

Creating a comic book in this way, with a separate writer and artist, is a collaborative process, and one that tends to be favoured by most American and European publishers. How did this process work for you, how much input did the artists have, and what was it like seeing your character come to life in their hands?

“The collaborative element is what I enjoy the most. I can’t tell you how amazing it is to see the words I’ve written translated into images. Mostly, it’s better than I hoped. Sometimes we’ll discuss how a certain panel is working and ask for changes.

No one is going to draw the Róisín in my head unless I do – so I have to allow the artists to bring their version of her to the page. A successful comic book collaboration – in my experience – is about respecting the strengths each person brings to the project. The writer understands story dynamics and the artist knows visual storytelling. You have to learn to depend on the other person’s knowledge and experience to guide changes in the comic book.

Also, you have to be open to seeing things from a different perspective, and accepting change. I’m always happy when the artist makes suggestions that are innovative and work better than my original concept. We’re all pulling together for the same goal: to create a comic book people will enjoy.”

I’ve heard good things about your upcoming comic Jennifer Wilde, and when fantasy author Juliet McKenna recently told me about a charity anthology of flash fiction she was part of, Voices From The Past, I was pleased to see your name on the cover. You’re a busy woman! Why don’t you tell us a bit more about the projects you’re working on at the moment besides Róisín Dubh?

“Jennifer Wilde is a fun project. Again, Robert Curley came to me with the core idea, and I went off and did my research – and that was just brilliant. The 1920s was an amazing era of change: social, economic, and cultural. The story is lighter, and more in the detective genre – albeit with a supernatural element. Jennifer is a French artist who – through personal tragedy – becomes embroiled in a mystery that takes her from France, to England and finally to Ireland – all helped by the ghost of Oscar Wilde.

Writing Wilde is the most intimidating aspect of the project. I’ve done a lot of research on him, and he was a brilliant, complex man, but not always wonderful. I try to be respectful of who he was and to bring as much of that to the project as possible.

Most of the art is complete on issue 1, and it should be out in about six weeks. Our artist Stephen Downey has done a fantastic job. I’m currently working on the scripts for issue 2 and 3. Issue 2 of Róisín Dubh is in the editing stage at the moment, so that should be good to go soon enough.

I usually have other projects in the sidelines, in various stages of completion: non-fiction, screenplays short stories, poetry, a novel. I even have an idea for a comic book strip, which I would draw as well as write. These projects go up and down in priority depending on deadlines.

All things going well, I’ll probably write another volume of Róisín Dubh and Jennifer Wilde for Atomic Diner. I’d also like to create and write my own comic book series. I have several stories in development.

As well as this I have my job with the Irish Playwrights’ and Screenwriters’ Guild as their blogger and website-wrangler.

It’s good to be busy!”

• Maura McHugh is an Irish writer with films, comics and short stories to her name. She blogs at Splinister and you can read her recent guest post for BadRep, in which she recommended us some horror writers, here. Róisín Dubh is published by Atomic Diner and the first issue can be bought online here, or go pester your local comic shop to order copies! Warm thanks to Maura for talking to BadRep.

One of the best and oddest moments in the Disney canon is the appearance, halfway through Mary Poppins, of an all-singing all-dancing campaign for civil liberties. ‘Sister Suffragette’ isn’t without its problems – the song is half-pisstake, half-pastiche, and the film makes Mrs Banks’ dizzy preoccupation with Votes for Women another instance of parental neglect – but come on, it’s a subversively fluffy aside that puts a smile on the face, and it’s sometimes the first encounter with that fabulous creature, a suffragette, that people remember having.

The campaign for women’s suffrage in this country is such a great story that I’m surprised it’s never been the subject of its own Disney film. Apart from its narrative of struggle towards a goal undeniably justified in modern eyes, it’s got a whole array of glamorous heroines in petticoats and picture-hats and, eventually – after the false dawn of the 1918 Representation of the People Act which only included women property-owners aged over thirty – a happy ending. In particular, the Suffragette taste for militantly iconoclastic protest would lend itself to iconic on-screen moments: women chained to the Downing Street railings, smashing windows, occupying civic buildings, enduring imprisonment and force-feeding and, not least, Emily Wilding Davison’s much-disputed martyrdom at the social event of the season, which actually was captured on film at the time.

Contrary to the Pathé News intertitle, Davison was not killed by her collision with George V’s horse at the 1913 Epsom Derby, but died four days later of the injuries sustained. She was forty. When people say women died for your right to vote, a fair proportion of them will be thinking of her.

Davison’s intentions on the day of the Derby are lost to history. Some historians believe her to have been intent on martyrdom, pointing to a previous incident during her imprisonment in Strangeways where she threw herself off a balcony. On the other hand, the fact that she had purchased a return train ticket – and also a ticket to a suffragette dance later that day – suggests that she intended to return having only interrupted or disrupted the race – possibly by attaching a suffragette flag to the King’s horse. This would have been one more instance of Davison’s dedication to gaining attention for her chosen cause through publicity stunt and spectacle.

Davison was born at Blackheath on 11th October, 1872. Sylvia Pankhurst recalled her as ‘tall and slender… Her illusive, whimsical green eyes and thin, half-smiling mouth, bore often the mocking expression of the Mona Lisa’. She performed well at school, and defying many of the social orthodoxies imposed by Victorian society, won a place at Royal Holloway College, funding her own education through teaching work. In 1895 she studied for a term at Oxford, gaining First Class Honours in Modern Languages – despite, Oxford degrees being closed to women, having no opportunity to graduate. Having resumed her teaching career, Davison joined the Women’s Social and Political Union in 1906, quickly becoming its head steward as well as an active member of the socialist Workers’ Educational Association and the Central Labour College.

Davison was one of around a thousand women imprisoned for political activities between 1903 and the outbreak of WWI. In March 1909, she was arrested for disturbance while attempting to hand a petition to the Liberal Prime Minister Herbert Asquith, and sentenced to one month in prison. Four months later, she attempted to gain access to a hall where the Chancellor of the Exchequer, David Lloyd George, was giving a speech, and was imprisoned for two months. Later in the same year, she and two other women were arrested for throwing stones at Lloyd George’s car, and sentenced to a month’s hard labour at Strangeways prison. The stones were wrapped in paper bearing Emily’s favourite saying: Rebellion against tyrants is obedience to God.

While inside Strangeways, Davison went on hunger-strike. The prison authorities, in line with government policy, responded by force-feeding her and, when she barricaded herself inside her cell to avoid this, came close to causing her death by flooding the cell with ice-cold water. This treatment appalled the public and was discussed in Parliament, with Labour leader James Keir Hardie advocating her release. Undaunted, Davison spent the next few years in and out of prison for setting fire to London post boxes, attacking a vicar she mistook for Lloyd George, and planting a bomb which severely damaged Lloyd George’s house in Surrey.

The Davison family monument in Morpeth, Northumberland. You might *just* see Deeds Not Words if you click to enlarge. Nearest Creative Commons shot we could locate... Photo from Flickr, shared under Creative Commons, taken by Daniel Weir (user danielweiresq).

The public response to Davison’s death at the Epsom Derby was not immediately sympathetic: more information was printed about the health of the King’s horse and jockey (the latter making a full recovery and the former ‘suffering bruised shins’) than about the suffragettes’ cause, and the Daily Herald went on to print a cartoon in dubious taste showing ‘Miss Davison’ as a skeleton holding a Votes For Women placard. Posterity has been scarcely kinder, dismissing Davison as a mentally ill fanatic and proto-terrorist whose actions horrified both supporters and opponents of her cause, and which enabled the persistence of old arguments founded on the idea that women’s intrinsically irrational nature made them unsuited to political discourse and decision-making. Populist historian George Dangerfield’s depiction of the suffragettes as a frivolous frilly edge to the fall of Liberal England was a cue picked up by succeeding historians, who viewed the majority of women involved as playing at politics, succumbing to a fashionably edgy craze, indulging their innate feminine tendency to hysteria, and even masochistically courting the treatment they received from police and prison authorities. Not until the advent of women’s history in the 1970s were they treated more seriously and their struggle linked to that for wider suffrage in earlier decades: the first Woman’s Suffrage Bill was presented to Parliament in 1832, as part of the general struggle for reform and extension of the franchise to non-property-holding and working men. (It’s worth pointing out that the King’s jockey at the 1913 Derby, Herbert Jones, was not entitled to the vote either.)

The census sit-in commemorative plaque at the House of Commons, with the three suffragette colours shown as stripes on the corner of Emily's portrait

Davison is buried at Morpeth Church with the WSPU motto ‘Deeds Not Words’ engraved on her headstone. Memorials to her are hard to find – like the suffragette monument tucked away in Victoria – but one is in the House of Commons crypt, placed there by the Labour MP Tony Benn. It commemorates the night of the 1911 census when Davison hid in a cupboard in the Palace of Westminster overnight so that on the census form she could legitimately give ‘the House of Commons’ as her place of residence that night. (Ironically enough, other suffragettes were spending the night evading the census in protest at their exclusion from the franchise.) The census documents from 2nd April 1911 state that Davison was found ‘hiding in the crypt’ in the Houses of Parliament. Whatever the suffragettes’ brand of protest represents today – a reckless eye for spectacle, a disregard for personal safety and security in pursuit of political goals, and a willingness to draw attention to oneself, all of which are valid weapons in the arsenal of political activists – escapades like that of Emily Davison on census night are the kind of minor gems that make the historical record sparkle.

Some links to suffragettes on the page, stage and screen – feel free to add your own in comments:

• Publications by suffrage historian Jill Liddington.
• Two IMDB searches bring up some hilarious-to-horrifying-sounding works from the time of the movement itself.
• Contemporary news reports on the suffrage movement.
• Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s 2008 play Her Naked Skin, the first to be performed on the National Theatre’s Olivier stage by a living female playwright.
• Shoulder to Shoulder, a BBC series from 1974.

And of course Mrs Banks.

(I could say something on how the temporary alliance of Mrs Banks and her domestics with the chimney-sweeps at the end of ‘Step in Time’, and their consequent disruption of the bourgeois patriarchal hegemony of the Banks household through dance, is a commendable representation of a socialist-feminist popular front, but that’s a whole other post.)

Rhian Jones also blogs at Velvet Coalmine

VITRIOL

Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned,
Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned.

William Congreve, The Mourning Bride (1697)

This Corrosion.

Vitriol is more properly known by its scientific name: sulphuric acid. Or additionally, ‘Any of various sulphates of metallic elements, especially ferrous sulphate.’ The only reason I get to do it for V is because the late c13th had a rather fanciful approach to science (no offence guys), and dubbed this chemical vitriol, from the Latin vitreus (= ‘of glass, glassy’). Cos, in certain states, sulphuric acid looks ‘glassy’. Geddit?? Ahem. Actually, there’s nothing whimsical about vitriol in its everyday life: it’s extremely corrosive (hi, GCSE Chemistry), and has an exothermic reaction with water, basically meaning it dehydrates anything it comes into contact with… but then liberates extra heat through the very process of reacting with water, causing more burns. Nasty.

Catherine de Medici, attributed to Francois Clouet, c.1555

Of course, like its sibling term acid, vitriol is also a lovely little example of a word whose literal and figurative meanings have almost equal prominence in modern English. Thus, around 1769, vitriol started meaning ‘Acrimonious, caustic or scathing speech, criticism or feeling’ and – naturally – this sense was in figurative relation to sulphuric acid’s ‘corrosive’ qualities. These are the same corrosive properties that made sulphuric acid every murderer’s friend throughout criminal history – every Wikipedia fan given to perverse procrastination knows about John George Haigh, the Acid Bath Murderer, who dissolved the bodies of his victims in a bath full of acid (but was eventually dobbed in by a couple of stray gallstones and part of a denture)… Shudder.

My pain, your thrill.

Anyway, vitriol has apparently been around since ancient times, but came into prominence during the late c19th, owing to its use as a cleaning product. Of course, since it was suddenly considered fine for trying at home, it was easily purchased at your local chemist by every housewife on her weekly shop.

In this context, I’ve always thought of vitriol as a pendant to arsenic, a household poison used for pest-control, cosmetics and suicide (if you’re French, bourgeois and in a Flaubert novel). Particularly suggestible Victorian women would mix this one with chalk and vinegar to improve their complexion, with occasionally fatal consequences for their hapless spouses. History is correspondingly full of tales of malevolent arsenic-armed females, including the eighteenth-century Mary Blandy, who put it in her father’s tea so she could marry her lover. (In a little pendant of my own: she continued to take tea herself in prison – and to receive visitors for tea – apparently unencumbered by squeamishness, or the leg-irons she had to wear as a murderess on death row).

Vitriol throwing in Le Petit Journal - image from http://theatredamned.blogspot.com/

These cases are part of a long tradition of female poisoners going back to Catherine de Medici and the Emperor Augustus’ wife Livia, both politically powerful women who were the subject of (probably apocryphal) rumours of poisonous ingenuity. Livia supposedly killed Augustus by poisoning figs that were still on the tree (the last in a line of such crimes, if you like a bit of I, Claudius. As everyone should.) and that old gossip-monger Alexandre Dumas describes how Catherine de Medici used to poison casual household objects – ranging from books and gloves to lipsticks – to relieve herself of Inconveniences who just happened to be breathing.

The logic behind this tradition seems clear enough: unaccustomed to the brutalities of war and macho posturing, the female murderer is nonetheless skilled in the arts of household management, food preparation and cosmetics. Her arsenal is correspondingly domestic, and widespread reporting of female poisoners presumably relates to a kind of fear of the unknowably deadly potential of the home (and all it represents), not to mention the oft-observed ‘fact’ that the female of the species will tend towards silent attack, backstabbing and general wiliness when settling her battles. The bitch! Thus, like vitriol, poison too has a transferred sense: to be poisonous is to be ‘deeply malicious, malevolent’ – ‘sly’ – in a way which is almost antonymic to simple ‘brutality’.

Don’t look back in anger.

But in the late 1800s something changed, and there was an apparent epidemic of vitriol throwing in addition to arsenic poisoning – so much so, that it got its own verb: to vitriolize was to ‘throw sulphuric acid at a person with intent to injure’. Thankfully, this verb is now ‘rare’ (although on this, see more below), but its usage was overwhelmingly nineteenth-century. Moreover, a cursory look at newspaper records reveals these were overwhelmingly perceived to be female crimes against an erstwhile lover or a rival. A ‘crime of passion’, in fact, in a way that poisoning (slow and subtle) is not. My pal Stewart has recently started resurrecting the Parisian Grand Guignol, a Parisian theatre of horror whose depiction of acid-throwing was only one of many acts of mutilation presented onstage between 1897-1962, and I’m quoting him quoting Anne-Louise Shapiro:

In the 1880s, vitriol began to acquire the symbolic associations traditionally linked to poison; l’empoisonneuse was joined by a new rhetorical (and actual) figure, the vitrioleuse. […] Women who were dangerous through their very domesticity – who transformed the ordinary and the womanly into the menacing – underscored not only female duplicity but male dependency.

Anne-Louise Shapiro, Breaking the Codes: Female Criminality in fin-de-siecle Paris

The Grand Guignol play La Baisir dans la Nuit hinges around a disfigured acid victim exercising (literal) eye-for-an-eye revenge on the lover responsible for his wretched state. This sort of thing is perhaps to be expected in a ‘theatre of horror’, but vitriol throwing also appears in the broadly passion-free Sherlock Holmes stories, most fully in the Adventure of the Illustrious Client (1924) where the crime in question is perpetrated by a Fallen Woman on her Base Seducer – over ten years after the frequency of cases had prompted calls to make the purchase of vitriol more difficult.

Anyway, this ‘Kitty Winter’ is full of vitriol of both kinds: as Watson puts it, ‘there was an intensity of hatred in her white, set face and her blazing eyes such as woman seldom and man never can attain’, and her hysterical ranting and raving against the ‘instrument of her demise’ is – throughout the story – placed in opposition to the calm and aristocratic air of her Don Juan’s next victim. Throughout the story it is made clear that vitriol throwing is the sort of thing possible only for a woman full of a special kind of fury – and, as Watson makes clear, that fury is something ‘man never can attain’. The lambs.

The interesting thing here, of course, is the transition from silent, wily domestic poisons to public acid attacks that hinge around the old adage that ‘Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned’ (a misquote from Congreve that endures to this day). This, of course, is a woman armed with vitriol of one kind or another, and the idea was clearly much-repeated, because by the mid-century we also had the word vitriolic, meaning… well… ‘like vitriol’. That said, it is frequently unclear whether this is vitriol in a literal or figurative sense: in 1919 the Sarah Palin of the nineteenth century, Mary Kilbreth (President of the American National Association to Oppose Woman Suffrage), questioned Emmeline Pankhurst’s patriotism on the grounds that Pankhurst and the Suffragettes had led a ‘reign of terror’ that involved ‘bombs, kerosene and vitriol throwing‘, but whether she meant words or household cleaner remains tantalisingly unclear.

Unfortunately, for many around the world today vitriol is all too literal. This article has been interested in exploring the criminal female in history but – in the UK and abroad – acid attacks are still common, particularly (but not exclusively) as part of a culture of ‘honour violence’ directed against women. While it would be disingenuous to suggest exclusivity on either side, it does seem that these are increasingly male-on-female attacks in contrast to the apparent gender-split in the nineteenth century. This article has a rather good summary of the current situation, and recommends places you can find out more, including the Acid Survivors Trust.

NEXT WEEK: W is for Widow