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.

Monday 8th March, 1907. The Ladies’ Gallery of the House of Commons is closed as a precaution as the Dickinson bill receives its second reading. The bill, which would see the enfranchisement of around a million propertied women in the UK, is talked out. In protest, the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) decide to march on Westminster.

Twelve days later, several hundred women gather to make their discontent known. Among them are local WSPU groups from Yorkshire and Lancashire, a ‘clog and shawl brigade’ of workers from cotton and worsted mills. The House of Commons is defended by more than 500 police.

Seventy-five women are arrested. The following day a photograph appears on the front page of the Daily Mirror of a young woman, flanked by a pair of police officers. Her skirts and shawl in disarray, her hair wild. She appears to be shouting. Her name is Dora Thewlis, a weaver in a Huddersfield mill. She is just sixteen years old.

When she appears in front of the magistrate, one Mr Horace Smith, he is aghast:

The child cannot be a delegate or anything else. She doesn’t know what she’s doing. You ought to be at school. It is really a shocking thing that you should be brought up to London to be turned loose […]. Where is your Mother?

Later:

Here is a young girl of seventeen [in fact she is 16] enticed from her home in Yorkshire and let loose in the streets of London to come into collision with the police. It is disgraceful for everybody concerned.

Like the prosecutor who, during the Chatterley trial, asked “Is it a book you would wish your wife or servants to read?”, Smith reveals by his indignation just how out of touch the establishment is with the lives of working people. Says Jill Liddington in her book Rebel Girls:

First, men like Horace Smith had not the remotest understanding of child labour, let alone the half-time system widespread in the north. His pontification is tragically revealing about the dimensions of inequality. Second, Smith saw ‘young girls’ and ‘London streets’ as having only one possible reading: moral looseness and semi-prostitution. The word ‘entice’ says it all: Dora had been ‘enticed’ down onto the London streets, in her turn to ‘entice’ innocent young men. […] It remained unthinkable for respectable women to demand citizenship by taking to the streets.

Dora Thewlis was borne of an environment hostile towards working women; an environment that relied heavily upon the textile industry, but one in which trade unionism was heavily resisted by factory managers and owners and in which the Yorkshire Warp Twisters had fought two strikes,
successfully, to prevent women entering their profession. As an active member of the Independent Labour Party (ILP), who (according to her mother) had since the age of seven, ‘been a diligent reader of the newspapers, [able to] hold her own in debate on politics (Liddington, p 112), Thewlis was well aware of the inequity of society.

For the mill workers of Yorkshire and Lancashire, the failures of capitalism were apparent in the hierarchies of the factories. Mill workers were encouraged by their physical environment to isolate themselves by specialism so that ordinary labourers were looked down upon by spinners and sorters, who in turn were sniffed at by the overseers. This segregation, inevitably, extended outside the factory walls, and for workers of different grades to socialise together was unusual. Outside of large factories small firms too held a paternalistic sway over the lives of their workers, fighting constantly to keep down costs and able to ruin the reputation of any worker that refused to toe the line. The ILP sought a number of economic reforms, summarised by Robert Haggard in this book as “an eight hour working day; the abolition of overtime and piecework; the prohibition of the employment of children; public provision for the sick, the disabled, the aged, widows and orphans [and] free, non-sectarian primary, secondary and university education”, as well as a fair minimum wage. The party was evangelical in its belief that the world could be a better place for everyone through socialism.

Ardently supporting the ILP, it was not surprising that Dora Thewlis would embrace suffrage with the same fervour, and she joined the Huddersfield branch of the WSPU as a founding member in December 1906.

So it was that Thewlis found herself arrested and remanded to Holloway. Once in prison, Thewlis was bathed, given a prison number and uniform and separated from her comrades. Inside the once belligerent, combative Thewlis grew lonely and wan, convinced she had been forgotten. Though she remained in Holloway only six days, Thelwis became a cause célèbre. Christened the ‘Baby Suffragette’ by the Daily Mirror, she was dogged by reporters at both ends of her journey back to Huddersfield. Portentously, no members of the local WSPU came to meet her.

Following her return home Thewlis regained a little of her spirit. “Don’t call me the ‘Baby Suffragette'”, she told one reporter, “I am not a baby really. In May next year I shall be eighteen years of age. Surely for a girl that is a good age?”. The sobriquet belittled Thewlis, just as Horace
Smith had, opening her up to ridicule both in the press and from her fellow suffragists. There was a feeling of alienation among the Huddersfield suffragists who felt attention had been drawn away from their cause by disputes over Thewlis’ age and Mr Smith’s comments about “enticement”.

By August of 1907 the image of young Thewlis being arrested had been turned into a picture postcard, and, though Dora herself had remained largely quiet on the matter, relations between the Thewlis women and the WSPU had become strained. It’s difficult to know exactly what caused the tension, though Dora’s mother Eliza, who tended to claim a greater role than she ought in the branch dealings, undoubtedly did not help the situation. A letter was dispatched to the Thewlis home asking Eliza Thewlis to work agreeably or resign from the branch.

All Thewlis and her cohorts wanted was to be granted the right to vote. The had to abide by the law of the land, they argued, so why could they not have a hand in creating it? It is worth noting that, despite the WSPU’s significant working class membership, they did not fight for universal suffrage, but the right for women to vote on the same terms as men. It was, in the words of one nameless critic, “not votes for women, but votes for ladies”; only a meagre few would meet the property qualification required by law. Dora Thewlis, with her socialist zeal and youthful indignation, would not be one of those women.

The WSPU, with their motto of “Deeds Not Words” was founded in 1903, in the wake of perceived inertia in the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS). They became increasingly militant, with a policy of breaking the windows of government buildings introduced in 1908, with
the first hunger strikes taking place the following year. In 1912 they began attacking the contents of post boxes, and the campaign of violence and arson escalated. The following year Emily Davison became a martyr to the cause, dying following head injuries sustained in what is likely to have been an attempt to grab the bridle of the King’s horse at the Derby.

It is frequently argued that such militancy did more to harm the suffragist cause than to progress it, and that the constitutional actions of Millicent Fawcett’s NUWSS and the Women’s Freedom League did more to earn the enfranchisement of Women.

The Qualification of Women Act was passed in 1918, allowing female householders (or wives of householders), women with an annual household rent of at least £5, and female graduates of British universities to vote if they were over the age of 30. Thewlis, who had emigrated to Australia (where women had been granted the vote in 1901) before the outbreak of war, never saw the enfranchisement she fought for. She never returned to Britain, and died in 1976.

• Libby earned her feminist stripes interning for the Fawcett Society where she was horrified by most of the stories she heard. An accidental activist, she is a regular contributor to BCN, the UK’s only 100% bisexual publication. Her latest project, TreasuryIslands, is the home of her other passion – children’s literature. Libby is very proud of her bad reputation.

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