British Suffragettes: Militancy and Iconoclasm

Introduction to the British Suffrage Movement

     As early as 1851, British suffragists marched on the House of Lords with a petition demanding their right to a democratic vote.[1] Throughout the 19th century, the suffrage movement gained traction with as many as 17 groups coming to formation advocating for female enfranchisement. In 1897, these groups joined and established the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) led by Millicent Garret Fawcett. Even though there was broadening support, the movement failed to influence Parliament or affect greater social policy. As a result, Emmeline Pankhurst enacted her own militant branch of suffragists called the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), whose members were later referred to as “suffragettes” (a term conceived in a 1906 Daily Mail article).[2] While the “suffragists” (NUWSS members) pursued legal tactics to achieve their political aims (e.g. distributing petitions and literature), the suffragettes employed militant tactics (e.g. arson, window-breaking, bombings, chaining themselves to railings, and property damage) under the motto: “Deeds not Words.”[3]

  

Emmeline Pethwick-Lawrence and Emmeline Pankhurst at a WSPU
meeting in Caxton Hall, Manchester, 1908 (Wikicommons).

Heightened Militancy

     The WSPU suffragettes experienced a period of heightened militancy from 1905 to the start of the war in 1914. The potential of increased publicity through militancy was realized in 1905 when Emmeline Pankhurst’s daughter, Christabel, spit on an officer after being thrown out of a Liberal meeting in Manchester. Since she declined to pay a fine, she was jailed, shaking the nation and inciting broad media coverage.[4] The suffragettes continued to employ militant tactics to bring greater visibility to their cause in the hope of swaying public opinion.


     They started by publicly jeering at Parliament members during large protests and deputations, but soon turned to tactics aimed at destroying property.[5] Even though suffragettes have been blamed for enacting violence during their militant campaign, these actions very often endangered the suffragettes themselves. For example, during their public rallies, suffragette protesters were subject to physical violence and sexual assault from men and officers and “‘in criticisms of [suffragette] violence it is the WSPU women who [were] effectively blamed for men’s violence towards them.’”[6] The WSPU members who chained themselves to railings and public property were also considered “silly” and were not taken seriously. Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence, a women’s rights activist, responded by saying “‘doing something silly is the woman’s alternative to doing something cruel. The effect is the same. We use no violence because we can win freedom without it; because we have discovered an alternative.’”[7]

“Excelsior! Suffragist. ‘It’s no good talking 

to me about Sisyphus; He was only a man!’” 

Punch Magazine, 13 July 1910. 

As Parliament continued to refuse Conciliation Bills, Amendments, and discussions throughout the early 1910s, increasingly violent events took place (i.e. “Black Friday” where 115 women were arrested and two died).[8] By the beginning of 1914, the general sentiment among the suffragettes was that militancy was the only way to achieve the vote. These sentiments were articulated by Ivy Bon when she said “it is the only way we shall get it.”[9]

“We had exhausted argument. Therefore either we had to give up our agitation altogether, as the suffragists of the eighties virtually had done, or else we must act, and go on acting, until the selfishness and the obstinacy of the Government was broken down, or the Government themselves destroyed.”-Emmeline Pankhurst[10]          

     At this time there was a community of women who feared that the suffragette militancy would reflect negatively on women. In an article from The Times on October, 5 1912, Annie Besant stated that “men have ever used violence to gain their ends, and there is a danger that women may follow their bad example, and become second-rate men in their political methods, instead of heroic women.”[11] But the suffragettes, with steadfast dedication to bringing attention to their cause, believed that if their militancy waned, they would lose public visibility and that it would be a sign of weakness that would reflect negatively on the cause as a whole.[12]

     “I am in a state of constant anxiety touching the safety of the P.M.” remarked Home Secretary Herbert Gladstone on November 1909. [13] This quote reflects the state of anxiety felt by politicians and the general public as a result of the suffragette militancy. The suffragettes expanded their targets—“cutting telegraph wires, destroying letters, defacing golf courses and burning down railway stations” in order to disturb the everyday experience of community members and inflict monetary harm.[14] Militant actions in 1913 alone produced £250,000 worth of damage according to the State Assurance Company.[15] Further than just targeting public spaces, the suffragettes began to target specific objects and places that were important to the nation to bring attention to their political and social concerns. On March 10, 1914, a new target emerged which would bring about a series of nine iconoclastic actions in museum and gallery spaces, now considered a “significant milestone in the history of modern iconoclasm.”[16] Targeting museums as cultural, political, and economically loaded institutions—“conceived as temples of fame as well as art”—would help bring attention to the iconoclasts’ cause. Not only due to the sheer “value publicly attributed to works of art, and especially to very famous ones,”[17] but also the value placed on the institutions themselves. By targeting cultural institutions, notoriously male dominated spaces closely tied to the state, would reveal the complex economic, social, political, and cultural implications embedded in objects.

Timeline of Militancy:
March of 1912: The suffragettes committed a sustained campaign of window smashing that incited heightened precautions taken by government forces.[18] Several cultural institutions including centralized London art galleries and the British Museum closed temporarily, which notified the suffragettes of potentially vulnerable targets.[19]

February 1913: A suffragette, Mrs. Cohen, broke a jewel case at the Tower of London. This act was especially significant because of its premeditation. In choosing her target, Ms. Cohen stated, “‘I pondered the matter very carefully.’”[20] The damage to the case not only drew attention because of its monetary value, but also because of the cultural significance of the location. As a result, the Palace of Kensington, Hampton Court and Holyrood were closed temporarily and additional guards were put around Nottingham.[21]

April 3, 1913: The suffragettes targeted the Manchester City Art Gallery by shattering the glazing on 13 Victorian paintings,[22] perhaps evoking the tradition of window-smashing commonly employed by militant suffragettes.[23]

March 10, 1914: Mary Richardson, attacked The Toilet of Venus (The Rokeby Venus) by Velazquez in the National Gallery in London.

Illustration of Mary Richardson slashing the

Rokeby Venus (Photo by Stefano Bianchetti/Corbis 

via Getty Images).

May 4, 1914: Mary Wood damaged a portrait of Henry James on the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition opening day.

May 12, 1914: Gertrude (Mary) Ansell attacked Hubert von Herkomer’s portrait, The Duke of Wellington, at the Royal Academy.[24]

May 21, 1914: Suffragettes attempted and failed to lead a Deputation at the Buckingham Palace. As the King refused to speak with them, violence erupted with the arrest of 60 protesters. [25]

May 22, 1914: Mary Spencer attacked George Clausen’s Primavera in the Royal Academy with a cleaver.
Freda Graham hammered five paintings in the Venetian Room at the National Gallery: Portrait of a Mathematician by Gentile Bellini, The Death of St Peter, Martyr, The Agony in the Garden, and The Madonna of the Pomegranate by Giovanni Bellini, and a votive picture from the School of Gentile Bellini. After Graham’s attack, the National Gallery was closed indefinitely.

George Clausen, Primavera, current
location unknown, 1914.

May 23, 1914: Following the failed Buckingham Palace deputation, iconoclastic attacks began to appear around the country. Maude Edwards’ attack of John Lavery’s Portrait Study of the King for The Royal Family at Buckingham Palace, 1913 with a hatchet at the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh was seen as a direct reply to the unsuccessful deputation days earlier.[26]

June 3, 1914: Ivy Bonn damaged Francesco Bartolozzi’s Love Wounded and John Shapland’s The Grand Canal in the Doré Gallery in London.

June 9, 1914: Bertha Ryland attacked George Romney’s portrait of Master John Bensley Thornhill with a hatchet at the Birmingham City Art Gallery. This work had been placed at a height so that Ryland could only damage its lower portion. Since iconoclastic actions and ensuing arrests brought increased publicity to the suffragette cause, Ryland deliberately left a slip of paper identifying her name, address, and a statement of intent at the scene to ensure her arrest.[27]

June 17, 1914: Margaret Gibb attacked Everett Millais’s portrait of Thomas Carlyle in the National Portrait Gallery. At her trial Gibb remarked that “‘this picture will have an added value and be of great historical interest because it has been honored by the attention of a militant.’”[28]

July 28, 1914: World War I brought a decline in suffragette militancy.

1918: The Representation of the People Act by gave women older than 30 the right to vote if they were married or part of the Local Government Register [29]– “opening the franchise to 8.5 million women.”[30]

1928: The Equal Franchise Act gave full and equal suffrage to women brought the minimum voter age down to 21.[31]

-Maia Kamehiro-Stockwell

“At Last,” Punch Magazine, 23 January 1918.

---

[1] Myers, Rebecca, “General History of Women’s Suffrage in Britain.” Independent, 27 May 2013, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/general-history-of-women-s-suffrage-in-britain-8631733.html. Accessed 22 October 2017.

[2] Ibid. 

[3] Scott, Helen E., “’Their campaign of wanton attacks’: Suffragette Iconoclasm in British Museums and Galleries during 1914.” The Museum Review, Vol. 1, Number 1. (Rogers Publishing, 2016).

Myers, (2013).

[4] Raeburn, Antonia, The Militant Suffragettes (London, 1973): 8.

[5] Scott, (2016).

[6] Myers, (2013).

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid.

     Scott, (2016)

[9] Bon quoted in “Dore Gallery Outrage,” The Times, 4 June 1914.

    Scott, (2016).

[10] Emmeline Pankhurst, “My Own Story,” The Suffragettes: Towards Emancipation (London and Tokyo, 1993): 116.

[11] Annie Besant, “Letters to the Editor: The New Militancy,” The Times, 5 October 1912.

[12] Scott, (2016).

[13] Harrison, 57.

[14] Scott, (2016).

[15] “Suffragist Fires,” The Times, 21 April 1914.

[16] Scott, (2016).

[17] Gamboni, Dario D., Destruction of Art: Iconoclasm and Vandalism since the French Revolution (Reaktion Books, 1997): 191.

[18] E. Sylvia Pankhurst, The Suffragette Movement: An Intimate Account of Persons and Ideals (London, New York and Toronto, 1931): 374.

[19] Scott, (2016).

[20] Raeburn, Antonia, The Militant Suffragettes (Victoria (& Modern History) Book Club, 1973): 188.

[21] Metcalfe, A.E., Woman’s Effort, 21 July 1917. 245.

[22] Scott, (2016).

[23] Fowler, Rowena, “Why Did Suffragettes Attack Works of Art?,” Journal of Women’s History, Volume 2, Number 3 (1991): 125.

[24] Ibid.,120.

[25] Scott, (2016).

[26] Ibid.

[27] Ibid.

[28] The Suffragette, 31 July 1914, in Fowler, 122.

[29] Myers, (2013).

[30] Scott citing Purvis, June, ‘‘Deeds, Not Words’ Daily Life in the Women’s Social and Political Union in Edwardian Britain’, Votes for Women (London and New York, 2000): 150.

[31] Myers, (2013).