The Spectacle of Women by Lisa Tickner - Production p.11-52.pdf

2 • PRODUCTION 1 Sylvia Pankhurst in her studio. Women Artists and the Suffrage Campaign The role, attainments and expectations of the woman artist were fiercely debated in the late Victorian and Edwardian period, in ways that touched on the suffrage campaign and surfaced in its periodicals. Larg...

2 • PRODUCTION 1 Sylvia Pankhurst in her studio. Women Artists and the Suffrage Campaign The role, attainments and expectations of the woman artist were fiercely debated in the late Victorian and Edwardian period, in ways that touched on the suffrage campaign and surfaced in its periodicals. Larger numbers of women than ever before were trained in the new public art schools of the late nineteenth century, in the workshops of the arts and crafts movement, in an expanding network of private institutions and in ateliers abroad.1 Thousands of women were trying to make a living as artists by the turn of the century, 2 but the idea of the woman artist, if in­ creasingly familiar, was uncomfortable and con­ tested. On the one hand the 'profession of a woman painter is now consecrated, enrolled, and amiably regarded', as Octave Uzanne put it in The Modern Parisienne; on the other (and in the same breath), 'a perfect army' of women artists threatened 'to be­ come a veritable plague, a fearful confusion, and a terrifying stream of mediocrity'.3 Art was a suitable accomplishment for middle-class women.4 It might even be an acceptable solution to the prob­ lems of the 'redundant' and impecunious since it could be carried on discreetly and at home.5 But it was understood that the serious pursuit of art was incompatible with the demands of marriage and domesticity - it unsexed women and made them 'irritable, restless, egotistical'6 - just as the attri­ butes of womanliness were incompatible with the production of good art. 7 It cannot be coincidence that a flurry of books devoted to women artists, the first exhibitions that grouped them together as women, the first serious opportunities for their equal education and em­ ployment and the first attempts to demonstrate 'what woman has done, with the general conditions favourable or unfavourable to her efforts',8 accom­ panied the rise and influence of the Victorian women's movement and the development of the suffrage campaign. Mem,bership of the Royal Academy and access to its schools had been closed to women since Mary Moser and Angelica Kauff­ man - both memorialised on suffrage banners were among its founders in the eighteenth century. What Virginia Woolf called the 'battle of the Royal Academy' was one among many (the battle of Westminster, the battle of Whitehall, the battle of Harley Street), all fought by the same combatants, 'that is by professional men v. their sisters and daughters'. 9 And it was a cruel and not insignifi­ cant irony that women gained entry to the academic curriculum only at the point at which the power of academic institutions was being challenged by avant-garde developments elsewhere; 1 0 and that women were often no better placed in these alternatives to the Academy than in the Academy itself. (Vanessa Bell complained of the supposedly radical New English Art Club that its members 'seemed somehow to have the secret of the art universe within their grasp, a secret one was not worthy to learn, especially if one was that terrible low creature, a female painter'.) 11 It was not just the structures of production, the teaching and exhibiting institutions, that posi­ tioned women artists in particular ways, but also the criticism to which they were subject. Giles Edgerton claimed that reviewers 'dipped their pens in treacle' and went forth to women's exhibitions as knights errant 'with powers of analysis laved in chivalry'.12 This condescension was further com­ plicated by the call for a specifically feminine art, one which would reproduce the values ascribed to women in the dominant discourses on femininity. 14 Women artists were caught in a paradox produced out of the clash between ideologies of femininity and of art: good-for-a-woman was all that a woman could be, but that in itself would never produce good art. 13 Women artists, whether they were aware of it or not, were engaged in a struggle with the incompat­ ible terms of their identity.14 They were subject not only to the institutional discrimination they recog­ nised and fought against, but also to its less evident corollary: their powerlessness in the production of social meanings, including social meanings related to the roles of artists and of women. 'Art' was itself complicit in the regulation of sexualities, and in the constructions of femininity which underpinned the identity of the woman artist. (Think of Alma­ Tadema's Roman nudes, Pre-Raphaelite Ophelias, the harem scenes of nineteenth-century Orientalism and a whole category of Victorian narrative paint­ ing devoted to the troubling sexuality of women: Rossetti's 'Found', Augustus Egg's 'Past and Present', Alfred Elmore's 'On the Brink', George Elgar Hicks's 'Woman's Mission' and hundreds more.) 15 Suffragists were interested in the woman artist because she was a type of the skilled and indepen­ dent woman, with attributes of autonomy, creativ­ ity and professional competence, which were still unconventional by contemporary criteria.16 But she was also of interest because the question of women's cultural creativity was constantly raised by their opponents as a 'reason for denying them the vote.'How many times,' as Mary Lowndes asked in the Common Cause, 'have women been reminded in season and out of season, in conversation, by platform speakers, in print - that their sex has produced no Michael Angelo, and that Raphael was a man? These facts are indisputable; and they are supposed, as a rule, to demonstrate clearly to the meanest capacity that creatures so poorly en­ dowed collectively with creative genius should have no voice in determining the destiny of the three­ pence weekly which they contribute to the National THE SPECTACLE OF WOMEN Insurance, or in influencing decisions on house­ hold economy, or the training of midwives as they arise in Parliament.' 17 There were several ways of dealing with this. One was to borrow the high-flown rhetoric of masculine genius, and use it to hail the corre­ sponding identities of the avant-garde artist and the modern suffragette. The effect is slightly ludi­ crous but we are impressed by the attempt, as when Ethel Ducat praises A. E. Rice in Votes for Women 'as a possessor of her own soul who has hewn out her individual path to well-deserved fame - as an admitted Genius'.18 Another was to play down art altogether, or at least, men's practice of it as the guarantee of their social and sexual pre-eminence. Vida Levering, the heroine of Elizabeth Robins's suffragette novel The Convert, is heckled by an art student in the crowd who demands to know, 'Where's their Michael Angelo? . . . where's their Beethoven? Where's their Plato? Where's the woman Shakespeare?' She refuses the bait and asks instead, 'How many Platos are there in this crowd? ... Not one ... Yet that doesn't keep you men off the register. How many Shakespeares are there in all England today? Not one. Yet the State doesn't tumble to pieces. Railroads and ships are built, homes are kept going, and babies are born. The world goes on ... by virtue ofits common people . . . I am not concerned that you should think we women could paint great pictures or compose immortal music, or write good books.I am content . . . that we should be classed with the common people, who keep the world going.' 19 Women were not free and had never been free, Mary Lowndes argued, anticipating Virginia Woolf in A Room of One's Own. 20 They would progress towards 'equality' as they were given the opportunity to do so, but more importantly, they might have some­ thing different to say. 'Womanliness' would then lie not in its refraction of the feminine body or of female attributes, socially defined, but in its poten­ tial for the expression of hitherto oppressed or repressed meanings; or, as Cicely Hamilton put it, PRC 'the the� E in tl ists. deg cul awa pri,· re t the not air Ill a Cor vOME . house­ as they th this. oric of correist and ly ludi­ s when Women wn out - as an •wn art as the nence. >bins's an art know, , their 's the it and n this ·p you es are State )S are born. Deople 1k we 1pose ntent 1mon were ·ndes 1?.oom 1ards :o do >me­ then )r of ten­ :i or lt it, 15 PRODUCTION 'the men will have only the old ideas to work on, but they will every one of them be new to us.'21 Experience of the difficulties and contradictions in their situation made many women artists femin­ ists. They needed citizenship as women (it was degrading to be in a position of inferiority, as the sculptor Edith Downing argued). They were well aware of the outside pressures that shaped their private time in the studio, and of the remaining restrictions on their careers.The 'swift response of the woman artist to the Women's Movement' was not the mystery that it first appeared.22 Seventy-six painters endorsed the claim for women's suffrage in a list of supporters published by the Central Committee of the National Society for Women's Suffrage in 1897, among them Barbara Bodichon of the Langham Place circle, well-known exhibi­ tors at the Royal Academy (Lady Butler, Mrs Swynnerton, Henrietta Rae, Mrs Stanhope Forbes), several women on the fringes of the Pre­ Raphaelite Brotherhood (Lucy Madox Rossetti, Mrs Perugini and Evelyn Pickering, wife of William de Morgan) and three women sub­ sequently active in the twentieth-century suffrage campaign (Louise Jopling Rowe, Bessie Wigan and Emily Ford).23 As the campaign progressed so women artists made their contributions as individuals. Marion Wallace Dunlop, illustrator of Fairies, Elves and Flower Babies and The Magic Fruit Garden, was the first hunger-striker and an accomplice who fur­ nished 'hammers, or black bags filled with flints' to window-breakers later in the campaign.24 The sisters Marie and Georgina Brackenbury were prominent speakers, and their mother's house in Campden Hill Square became a refuge for women temporarily released from prison under the terms of the 'Cat and Mouse' Act. Olive Hockin's studio was found to contain a small arsenal when it was raided by police in 1913. But from 1907, with the founding of the Artists' Suffrage League (followed by the Suffrage Atelier in 1909), women were able to organise collectively and contribute their Marion Wallace Dunlop (artist, wsru member and the first hunger-striker) carrying the stamp with which she printed part of the Bill of Rights on the wall inside the House of Commons, 21 June 1909. 2 THE SPECTACLE OF WOMEN professional skills to the suffrage campaign. They designed, printed and embroidered all manner of political material; they taught each other the requi­ site skills from hand-printing to needlework; they designed major demonstrations and took part in them in their own contingents; they lent their studios for meetings and contributed to exhi­ bitions, bazaars and fund-raising activities; they even turned pavement artists and put out collection boxes after sending their paintings into the Royal Academy. 25 Recognising the role of popular imagery in the maintenance and reproduction of anti-feminism, they threw themselves into that 'agitation by symbol' the Common Cause called for, and by its means contested the representation of women, and their association with all those attri­ butes, high or low, serious or comic, moral or depraved, that were used to argue their exclusion from the franchise and from public life. The Artists' Suffrage League The Artists' Suffrage League - the first of the suffrage societies of professional women - was founded in January 1907 to help with the NUWSS demonstration the following month. 26 Its object was 'to further the cause of Women's enfranchise­ ment by the work and professional help of artists'; and to this end it produced posters, postcards and illustrative leaflets that were used both in Great Britain and the United States.27 It participated in the general elections of 191 o and all the by­ elections held after 1907; its members designed and executed an enormous number and a very wide range of banners for NUWSS branches and special­ ised groups; and it organised the decorative schemes for major demonstrations and important public meetings. Looking back on its efforts in the Suffrage Annual and Women's Who's Who in 1913, it claimed to have 'done much to popularize the cause of Woman's Suffrage by bringing in an attractive manner before the public eye the long­ continued demand for the vote'. 28 Its beginnings were modest. By the end of 1 907, according to the National Union's Annual Report, it had contributed two posters which had since been printed, participated in the Wimbledon by­ election, coloured a number of designs by hand to save the expense of colour printing, and cooper­ ated in the organisation of a poster and postcard competition. (The first prize was awarded to Dora Meeson Coates for 'Political Help', subsequently published by the uwss.)29 From this point the Artists' League organised competitions on behalf of the National Union, which was probably only too relieved to hand over the responsibility. 30 There is some suggestion that competitors needed help in formulating their ideas, and designers were encouraged to send in thumbnail sketches in advance. Even trained artists could be ignorant of the particular requirements of a picture poster, and good designs that would make an impact and reproduce efficiently were difficult to come by. In February 1909 a prize of four pounds (later increased to five pounds), together with several smaller prizes of one pound each, was offered by the Artists' League for 'the best design for a poster, suitable for use at elections'. 31 From among thirty entries, the first prize was awarded jointly to W. F. Winter's 'Votes for Workers' and Duncan Grant's 'Handicapped'. 32 Winter, a Dutchman, remains elusive. Duncan Grant's name, familiar now from his association with the Bloomsbury group and a lifetime as a distinguished British painter, is unex­ pected in this context. He was twenty-four in 1909 and had been living in Paris, studying atJacques­ Emile Blanche's studio La Palette after a period at the Westminster School of Art, in Italy and at the Slade. His parents lived abroad and he had spent much of his childhood with the Strachey family. He was connected with the suffrage movement through his aunt, Lady Julia Strachey, and her daughters Philippa (Secretary of the London So­ ciety for Women's Suffrage) and Pernel. The theme of 'Handicapped' - described in the Com- PRC MEN 907, ':/)Ort, ;ince I by1d to ,per­ card )ora �ntly PRODUCTION M John Bull: Now you greedy boys.I shall not 9ive you any more.until I have he:lped myself� r5 ised 1ion, over that heir din tists ts of take cult ater eral I by ter, irty .F. 1t's ins om da ex- 109 es­ I at :he ily. :nt ter o­ he n- \ l) A \: /;.'";1.i;J 3 'Political Help': winner of the Nuwss/Artists' Suffrage League poster competition in 1907. Designed by Dora Meeson Coates, published by the NUWSS in 1908. The six groups clamouringfor more 'political help' are the Primrose League, the Women '.s Liberal Federation, the Independent Labour Party, the Social Democratic Federation, the Women's Libera/Association and the Trade Unions. The Times Woman's Supplementfor r9 Nuvember r9ro carried a revealing article on 'How to Help your Party', which concluded that: 'At a modest computation some 50,000 women, voluntary workers all, were engaged in the delicate task ofconverting and convincing the electorate, either by personal canvass or platform persuasion, at the last General Election. ' 4 Drawing for 'Handicapped': one of a series in Duncan Grant's sketchbook for 1909. See also colour plate 1. ,•,� •lf.'J_ 18 mon Cause as featuring 'a stalwart young woman of the Grace Darling type'33 - seems to have been proposed by the League's secretary, Barbara Forbes. On the strength of a satisfactory submis­ sion in the 1907 competition Grant was encour­ aged to send in again, and with some diffidence ('good ones are so difficult to find') Barbara Forbes suggested the subject: 'A man in a sailing boat, (the sail represents the Vote).A woman with only oars­ out in the sea ofLabour.' A caption to underline the moral - 'Britons why handicap the weaker vessel' was to have run below, but must have seemed redundant and was never used. The preparatory studies in Grant's sketchbook are more vigorous than the final print, which may have been redrawn on the stone by a commercial lithographer, but 'Handicapped' remains one of the most successful and striking of suffrage designs.34 Information on the League's output as a whole is both scant and contradictory.35 Its most substantial contribution in 1907 was to the 'Mud March' in February. Several further posters and postcards were issued in 1908, and in the months leading up to the NUWSS procession on 13 June the League was responsible for the design and execution of seventy to eighty embroidered banners, which were obviously shared out between a large number of women beyond the membership of the League itself. In 1909 they brought out four posters, one meeting's bill, six postcards and two Christmas cards. The Pageant of Women's Trades and Pro­ fessions for the International Suffrage Alliance in April 1909 was a substantial undertaking, and thirty-four members of the League and their friends decorated the Albert Hall and provided the props for the lamplight procession. With the even greater pressure of two general elections in January and December 1910, the League was at full stretch, sending thousands of postcards, posters and pictorial leaflets around the country. By the end of the year they had published altogether eleven posters, as well as a number of postcards, and with some difficulty the list can be THE SPECTACLE OF WOMEN reconstructed.36 All the posters were coloured lithographs, designed by known (if minor) artists and professionally printed by firms such as Weiners of Acton, David Allen or Carl Hentschel of Fleet Street. The sizes ranged from 20 by 30 inches to 40 by 30 inches, most were in editions of 1000 copies, and the retail cost (with no profit to the artist) was generally fourpence.37 • The exact membership of the League remains hazy, as does what might actually have counted as membership in terms of informal affiliation, sub­ scription or the publication of finished designs. Prize-winning drawings submitted to competitions open to women and men were not necessarily the work of members of the League that published them, all of whom were women.No list of members survives, although the published accounts give 'donations and subscriptions' under a separate heading.38 The Suffrage Annual and Women's Who's Who gives only the League's chairman, Mary Lowndes, and the membership of the 1913 committee.39 Mary Lowndes's album of designs for posters, postcards and banners, many of them by her, is in the Fawcett Collection. It is clear from this and other evidence (including the minutes and corre­ spondence of the NUWSS and the London Society) that she was the chief instigator of the Artists' Suffrage League, its mainstay and organiser. She is an intriguing if elusive figure. She was born in 1857 (and was therefore fifty when the League was founded in 1907), the daughter of Richard Lowndes, rector of Sturminster Newton in Dorset, which contains her earliest window. In the late 1880s or early 1890s she trained with the arts and crafts designer Henry Holiday, after a brief period of study at the Slade in 1883, and had become a free-lance designer herself by 1896 when the Art Journal illustrated her work in a short article on 'Women Workers in the Art Crafts'. 40 Together with Alfred Drury, who left the Southwark firm of Britten and Gilson to join her, she founded Lowndes and Drury in 1897, which became the 1gan � ntribu gner a ~ hool med m Colaros� English ~tan1ey 1 �foSt ;:he mem rum out each oth, i elf is o: together terests a1 aegis and .\ numb( catered t women a tions of ic them botl )F WOMEN PRODUCTION ·e coloured inor) artists .s such as 1 Hentschel n 20 by 30 1 editions of no profit to centre for most of the best British stained-glass artists before 1914. Otherwise, there is little in­ formation on these women, most of them artists who exhibited in a range of venues around the turn of the century. Barbara Forbes, the secretary, was Mary Lowndes's companion and associate at Brittany Studios in the King's Road - their own address, but also that printed on the official note­ paper of the Artists' Suffrage League.41 Emily Ford, the vice-chairman, was the artist sister of Isabella Ford, a prosperous Quaker suffragist and member of the Independent Labour Party in Leeds. (Isabella Ford was also on the executive committee of the N uw s s and an active supporter of the Women's Trade Union League.) Sara Anderson, the treasurer, had exhibited since the 1880s. Bertha Newcombe was a painter and illus­ trator who was a member of the New English Art Club. Mary Wheelhouse was also established as a book illustrator. Dora Meeson Coates had trained in Melbourne, at the Slade and at Julian's in Paris. On Violet Garrard, Bethia Shore and Bessie Wigan there is little information. Other regular contributors included Joan Harvey Drew, a de­ signer and embroiderer trained at Westminster School of Art, and Mary Sargant Florence, a noted mural painter trained at the Slade and at Colarossi's in Paris, who was a member of the New English Art Club and the woman who taught Stanley Spencer how to paint in fresco.42 Most of these artists were middle-aged, and all the members of the committee who can be traced turn out to have lived within walking distance of each other in Chelsea. The structure that suggests itself is one of a loose association of women, bound together by shared professional and political in­ terests and ties of friendship, meeting under the aegis and usually at the studio of Mary Lowndes. A number of formal and informal organisations catered to the specific needs and concerns of women artists in the Edwardian period.43 Ques­ tions of identity and community were important to them both pragmatically and psychologically. They ue remains counted as .ation, sub­ !d designs. Jmpetitions essarily the . published Jf members ounts give a separate i Women's chairman, ,f the 1913 or posters, ,y her, is in n this and and corre­ Jn Society) he Artists' iser. She is 1s born in 1e League >f Richard in Dorset, n the late 1e arts and rief period become a en the Art article on Together wark firm ! founded !came the complained of being poorly hung, badly reviewed, excluded from facilities that were crucial to their livelihoods, and they did not like being conde­ scended to. Some insight into this sense of female community, as it straddled the worlds of the studio and of suffrage politics, can be found in Dora Meeson Coates's biography of her husband George. Dora Meeson was born in New Zealand and had studied in Melbourne, Paris and at the Slade. Some time after she married the painter George Coates in 1903, they rented 9 Trafalgar Studios from Augustus John. (She remarked thatJohn did not remember her from the Slade, 'though he had a compelling stare when he looked at a woman that I much resented'.) Trafalgar Studios in Manresa Road, Chelsea, was 'a nest of busy workers' that included Ambrose McEvoy at number 10, Charles Conder at number 6 and Florence Haig - later a member of the local w s Pu - at number 4. Before moving into their own studio the Coateses held a private view of their work in one of the others. Mary Sargant Florence wandered into their ex­ hibition by mistake, looking for the studio where a suffrage meeting was taking place, and through the friendship which they struck up Dora met other women and suffragists in the locality. She made many friends in the movement and remembered particularly Mary Lowndes and Emily Ford, whose cottage and studio at 44 Glebe Place provided the meeting ground for 'artists, suffragists, people who did things'. She was introduced to Cicely Hamilton at a meeting in Florence Haig's studio at which Mrs Pankhurst spoke, and lent her own for a gathering addressed by Charlotte Despard of the Women's Freedom League; the artist's studio, spacious, central and convenient, was a useful alternative to the cramped intimacy of the private drawing room and the expense of the public hall. Dora Meeson Coates became a member of the WFL and desi gned a number of suffrage posters and a banner for the Commonwealth of Australia. Her husband George joined the Men's League for 20 Women's Suffrage, walked with her in processions and held the paste-pot, keeping watch while she fly-posted pillar boxes and hoardings at night. In this he was not typical. As his wife recalled, the 'Chelsea men artists - always conservative - were not partisans of the women's suffrage movement . . . It was the women-artists, not the men, who welcomed us as new-comers to Chelsea.'44 At moments like this we glimpse a different set of relations behind the familiar narratives of the pre-war art world which centre on the activities of men: the controversies stirred by Roger Fry's Post­ Impressionist exhibitions of 1 9 1 o and 1 9 1 1 ; the acrimony surrounding the secession of certain members of the Omega Workshop in 1 9 1 3 ; the bohemian rompings of Augustus John. Women were artists, and political activists; they were not only models, mistresses and muses in this scenario. But it would be sentimental to suggest that all was sweetness and sisterhood among them, or that their political commitments did not cause diffi­ culties for their art. 'Oh! my odious Committee! !' Mary Lowndes complained privately to Philippa Strachey. 'They were here till nearly 1 1 last night­ cross, quarrelsome, undecided and prolix - A team of artists is an awful team to drive.'45 And the conflict between paid and unpaid commitments plagued women trying to square a political con­ tribution with a professional career. Referring to them in shorthand as 'suffrage artists' is in this sense misleading, since it unites them under a label they would have recognised for only part of their work at one point in their lives. Suffrage imagery was not their true vocation (it was not something they had set out to do), and it could prove a real drain on their time and energy and interfere with their capacity to earn an independent living. Barbara Forbes once complained that she could not deputise for Mary Lowndes because 'we have a lot of work, and as she spends all her time on suffrage I must do what little I can for the despised customer.'46 Sylvia Pankhurst's suffrage com­ mitments effectively terminated her artistic career. T H E S PE C T A C L E O F W O M E !\" The Suffrage Atelier The Suffrage Atelier began with a group of artists meeting from February 1 909 'with the special object of training in the arts and crafts of effective picture propaganda for the Suffrage', and of forwarding 'the women's movement by supplying pictorial Advertisements, Banners and Decorations'.47 In this their general aims were parallel to those of the Artists' Suffrage League (which might have been surprised to learn from the Vote that 'little had been done in the way of pictorial propaganda'),48 but they differed in several important respects. Most of the Artists' Suffrage League had been trained, and exhibited, as fine artists; they turned to illustration, as many contemporary artists did, to earn a living or to help the cause. The Atelier advertised itself specifically as 'An Arts and Crafts Society Working for the Enfranchisement of Women'.49 A number of its members had been trained in the crafts, and were familiar with print­ ing processes such as engraving. Unlike the League they held exhibitions of their art and design work as well as their propaganda, advertising their broader skills and offering to sell their services in aid of the suffrage movement. so They saw themselves as aiding the women' movement by a whole variety of means. An early note from Miss E. B. Willis, the Honorary Sec­ retary, lists seventeen ways of forwarding the cause. These included sending in designs for propaganda, or fine art and craft work for exhibi­ tion; helping with secretarial work; selling poster and postcards or getting them placed in the press· contributing to pageants and decorative schemes· collecting funds and obtaining more members· forming local branches (there is no evidence that these existed); contributing cuttings, including photographs, illustrations and cartoons for general reference; providing hospitality in studios or drawing rooms for meetings, exhibitions and social occasions; and in two further ways that were at the WOMEN of artists e special ::rafts of ,uffrage', :ment by ners and ms were : League am from e way of fered in 1ad been turned to s did, to e Atelier 1d Crafts ment of 1ad been th print1like the 1d design .ing their :rvices in women's An early ary Sec­ :ling the . igns for r exhibi­ s posters 1e press; :chemes; 1embers; :nee that ncluding r general 1dios or nd social :re at the PRODUCTION heart of the Atelier enterprise, by 'supplying the Society with hand-printed publications - made from wood blocks, etchings, stencil plates etc.' and by 'organising Local Meetings for the encourage­ ment of Stencilling, Wood Engraving etc., in order that members may learn or improve themselves in the art of printing by hand'. 5 1 In June they held their first public meeting at Caxton Hall with Laurence Housman in the chair, and the Common Cause reported their activities. 'Weekly cartoon-meetings are held for illustra­ tions, with practical demonstrations of the methods of drawing required for the various processes of pictorial reproduction, so that members may be properly qualified to turn out work adapted to reproduction as cartoons, posters etc. Hand­ printing is also practised, so that the society can produce some of its own publications.By this latter process fresh cartoons could be got out at very short notice and very little expense. This should be particularly valuable at election times, when some­ thing topical is often needed at once. The Society would be glad to send trained workers to take the pictorial and decorative work off the hands of organisers and speakers during elections, when their time and energy are otherwise fully occupied.'5 2 Two things are significant here. The first is the emphasis, not just on the general usefulness of ,isual propaganda and skilled artists to take reponsibility for it, but on the importance of cheap­ ness, immediacy, appropriate reproductive skills and access to a hand-printing press (all of which differs from League policy), since the Atelier printed its own designs.53 This enabled its mem­ bers to avoid some of the difficulties the League faced in getting images that would reproduce well and in raising the money to have them commer­ cially lithographed in colour. Most Atelier posters and postcards are block prints such as wood or lino-cuts, available in a range of sizes, and in black and white or hand-coloured. In 1 9 1 2 they pub­ lished their first broadsheet, which reproduced 21 twenty-nine available designs in miniature (almost three times as many as the Artists' Suffrage League produced in the same period), 54 and despite their ephemeral nature over forty different posters and about fifty postcards still survive. Compared with the League, they produced a larger number of design s over a longer period: a rougher but livelier and more unorthodox oeuvre. The second sign ificant point of difference be­ tween them lay in the Atelier's educational activi­ ties. The members of the Artists' Suffrage League were professional artists, and although their com­ petitions were not framed to exclude amateurs, only work that reached their professional standards was acknowledged with prizes or publication. They sometimes had difficulty in acquiring designs that were appropriate, effective, and suitable to reproduce. The Atelier - which also solicited contributions and offered prizes for successful designs - tried to reconcile two aims at the same time: to be of use to suffrage societies in the campaign , but also to afford women artists 'oppor­ tunities to experiment and . . . to become ac­ quainted with the processes of reproduction'.55 It functioned as an educational and social centre with a regular programme of activities that mixed in­ struction, criticism, design ing, printing, banner­ making and !ife drawing with exhibitions, guest speakers, and a speakers' class.This was the curri­ culum in February I 9 I o when the Atelier resumed its normal programme after the general election in January: 'Tuesdays. - Decorative painting and stencilling.Wednesdays.- Designers' day, 10 am, model posed; 1.30, Criticism of designs; 2.45, Address; 4.30, Committee meeting. Thursdays. Demonstration of printing processes. Fridays. Banner-making and embroidery . . , The office and workshop . . . is open every week-day from I O am to 4 pm.'5 6 'Membership', and the status of membership, is hard to define here too. The Atelier had a formal constitution and, apparently, weekly committee meetings.Its constitution required that its commit- THE SPECTACLE OF WO ME . • 22 l �t,_ �: .. ........ ,c._ t ,,:,·-,, - ,.,,, ' - •v � t ....---.- /' j .. • - - =• I • i . L , ...,..t,,,--4i\,;=� �� TIC CR<1.JJNG MOvtMOO ,�.;r.� �.., -�� L...,.,_ � 'i � � � � .- � � 5 The Suffrage Atelier Broadsheet, 1 9 1 3 . There are three suroivingAtelier broadsheets which reproduce available designs in miniature so that prospective customers could make their selection. They help to identify and date Atelier products. tee of eight members, together with the officials of the society, be elected annually at a general meet­ ing.For that meeting to be quorate, a quarter of the full membership had to be present.57 The mini­ mum subscription was one shilling and sixpence, which suggests that all subscribers were officially members of the Atelier, although presumably some supporters did not necessarily contribute designs. There seem to have been in practice, if not consti­ tutionally, different kinds of membership. Con­ tributions were drawn from men and women all over the country, 5 8 but the Vote emphasised that the Atelier itself was run entirely by women, 'who make their own designs, cut blocks and do the printing,' dressed in a uniform of 'a bright blue workmanlike coat, a black skirt, and a big black bow like that beloved of the artists who dwell near the Luxembourg'.59 If its programme is any guide, we should perhaps imagine the Atelier as a central OF WOMEN PRODUCTION officials of 1eral meet­ arter ofthe The mini­ \ sixpence, ·e officially 1ably some te designs. 1ot consti­ hip. Con­ women all 1sised that men, 'who 1d do the right blue black bow J near the guide, we a central core of women members (their blue coats and floppy bows in honour of Parisian ateliers or Rosa Bonheur) who produced designs and also printed them, together with a floating periphery of subcribers who contributed in one of the seventeen ways recommended by the honorary secretary, coming to take classes, attend discussions or use the !ife model. Beyond them lay that section of the 0eneral public which took an interest in the .-\telier's work, bought its products and attended open meetings and social engagements. The address given over the honorary sec­ retary's name until 1 9 1 2 - 1 , Pembroke Cottages, Edwardes Square - was actually that shared by Laurence and Clemence Housman, with others the co-founders of the Atelier in 1 909. 60 Probably i nucleus had been formed the year before, as a y-product of preparations for the WSPU demonstration of 2 1 June, when members of the • • ensington branch came together to make up Laurence Housman's 'From Prison to Citizenship' anner in the studio at the bottom of his garden.6 1 Laurence and Clemence Housman were two of the seven children of a Bromsgrove solicitor, rought up in rural Worcestershire. The poet _-\. E. Housman was one of their brothers. 62 Their mother died when Laurence was five and Oemence, four years older, promised her that she ould look after him. Together they studied at the al art school and then, with the help of a small egacy, established themselves in London in . 3 . 63 They enrolled at an art school near their gings in Kennington which taught wood en­ gnning, taking classes at the same time at the . filler's Lane School in South Lambeth. Here .hey met Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon, :md through them Laurence met Oscar Wilde and as encouraged to read Ruskin and contribute .irawings to The Yellow Book. He established him­ - If as an influential illustrator and brought out a k of poems, The GreenArras, in 1 896.64 From 1 885 Clemence had earned her living and Laurence's too to begin with) as a commercial engraver for weekly papers like the Graphic and the Illustrated London News. She was employed by an office in Chancery Lane, but as the introduction of photo-mechanical 'process' engraving displaced the craftsman's skill she found herself redundant and turned to the private presses for work. At the same time as process work met the public appetite for illustrated journalism (saving the publishers money but putting skilled engravers out of busi­ ness), the private presses of the 1 890s set out to preserve or revive the art of fine printing. Clemence Housman cut most of the blocks for her brother's desi gns, and worked forJames Guthrie at the Pear Tree Press and C. R. Asbee at the Essex House Press, as well as for Kegan Paul, Grant Richards and John Lane. Her work was very highly respected and scholars of fine printing consider her the last great exponent of the English tradition of wood engraving that had flourished in the 1 86os.65 Both she and Laurence worked tirelessly for the suffrage cause in the Edwardian period. Laurence, who claimed he had not been a political animal in the 1 890s, found himself converted by a speech of Emmeline Pankhurst's and possessed in conse­ quence of 'that most uncomfortable thing a social conscience'. It interfered with his writing, he said, and he would far rather have done without it. But he credited the women's suffrage movement with bringing him 'into active sympathy with the aims and doings of my own generation' and involving him in the 'political problems and controversies of the present day'.66 From 1 895 he had been art critic of the Manchester Guardian, in succession to R. A. M. Stevenson, and during this period he published more than a dozen books and a number of controversial plays; but at the same time he was active in the Men's League for Women's Suffrage, designed banners and demonstrations, wrote pam­ phlets and mounted platforms in parks and on street corners, and lent his studio for the Suffrage Atelier where 'presently Clemence became chief worker'. 67 THE SPECTACLE OF WOME!\ 6 Edith Craig. Clemence was a member of the wsru and a committed supporter of the Women's Tax Resist­ ance League, in whose cause she spent a week in Holloway prison in October 1 9 1 1 . 68 The Hous­ mans approved of militancy in its early stages, but like others parted company with the Pankhursts over the arson campaign of 1 9 1 3. Laurence de­ scribed the 'stab in the back given to the Rokeby Venus' as hurting his artistic feelings. 'After that came the burning of churches; and I felt myself obliged to cease subscribing to w s r u funds.' 69 Edith Craig, daughter of the architect E. W. Godwin and the actress Ellen Terry, was a princi­ pal member of the Atelier too, although in quite what capacity is unclear. (She claimed to have belonged to at least eight different suffrage societies - 'when one considers all the cause means, one cannot belong to too many' - and to have ended up organising for all of them.) Perhaps it was her mother's influence, since she was herself an ardent suffragist, or the result of the school that Edith went to, where the 'interminable addressing of envelopes' for suffrage petitions was a regular duty. Edith Craig was a costume designer who had worked for Henry Irving, and a theatre director by profession. This makes it unlikely that she was responsible for any of the Atelier's graphic ma­ terial, but she was indispensable for pageants and processions. She was just the sort of person, with exactly the kind of skills, that the suffrage move­ ment needed to turn a political argument into a carefully orchestrated spectacle. She designed a number of banners (which have not survived) and decorative schemes for the processions of 1 9 I O. She produced Cicely Hamilton's Pageant of Great Women in 1 909, appearing as Rosa Bonheur, and her mother as the actress Nancy Oldfield.And she was the major link, as a prominent member of all three, between the Suffrage Atelier, the Actresses' Franchise League and the Women's Freedom League.70 The Suffrage Atelier had been founded as a non-party organisation that would 'work as far as vOMEN PRODUCTION J and a Resist­ week in Hous­ ;es, but khursts ice de­ Rokeby ter that myself i)Ossible for all the Women's Suffrage Societies impartially'. 7 1 In practice it was affiliated with the \\·omen's Freedom League, for which it designed rrocessional schemes and with which it embarked on the joint venture of a 'pictorial supplement' to the Vote in 1 9 1 2 . These coloured inserts (almost always missing from surviving copies) were also • ued as posters and postcards.7 2 The scheme was mtended to prove mutually beneficial. The Atelier d embarked on a special poster campaign at the • eginning of 1 9 1 2 and its regular appearance in the • ote was intended to bring it publicity and perhaps ::iew supporters and subscribers. On its part the • ote, which had as Charlotte Despard put it ·eathered many a storm', 7 3 hoped to attract new -eaders and improve its circulation. �rs Despard's editorial introducing the supple­ =nent emphasised that it would bring the Atelier's ~ork 'into more intimate relation' with the move­ ment and the public as a whole, while at the same ::ime illustrating 'the advance of the Cause and the uctuations of the political barometer'.74 What she o stressed was the Atelier's role in relation to ·the definite campaign on foot to drive women out of the printing trades'. This referred to the de­ ·elopment of photographic methods which had • placed skilled engravers like Clemence Hous­ =nan from commercial publishing.The main ques­ ·on was how to train women in the new mechanical ethods and the kinds of drawing appropriate to - em, while preserving for the arts and crafts dition the hand-printing skills that were being -eplaced. The editorial is fascinating for the glimpse it offers of 'the real work and scope of the .\relier', its 'inner working, the aim and ideals of e artists'. 'The printing and publishing of pic­ orial matter in black and white, or colours, and the �ing of pupils who have passed through the Art - hools in the work, mechanical and otherwise, of di.is branch of the artistic profession, is what the uffrage Atelier has attempted, with a very large measure of success. It is obvious that this opens up a rnst field for energy and enterprise, both manual ; _ ,6 9 E. W. princi­ :1 quite o have uffrage cause and to erhaps herself 101 that :essing ·egular ho had :tor by 1e was .c ma­ its and 1, with move­ into a ;ned a d) and 1 9 1 0. Great r, and 1d she • of all ·esses' :edom I as a far as 25 and imaginative. It is common knowledge that in journalistic, advertising, and poster illustrative work, the artist, on leaving the schools, frequently has so little real knowledge of the style and subject lending itself most effectively to printing work, that the idea for his work has to be chosen and planned for him before he can execute it. Too little atten­ tion is paid to a practical side of the training, viz., the consideration of the market value of certain forms of work, so as to provide art pupils not only with an art training, but with a working career which will have a definite commercial value. This is the line on which the Atelier has struck out boldly. Training in subject as well as in craftsmanship is part of its curriculum; and an exceptionally in­ teresting feature of the work is the inventive ability which has been brought out, in designing and constructing plant, which shall in most inexpensive fashion best serve the purpose of the working artist . . . The advantage to our organ in obtaining a pictorial supplement is too patent to require com­ ment. The interest which will be evoked in the artist world will also bring a new element into action, greatly to the advantage of the Cause.'75 Charlotte Despard's editorial, which we may be confident was written or informed by the Suffrage Atelier, argues that artists are not fitted by their training for the demands of reproductive work. The Atelier appears to have been offering classes in drawing for process work (that is, photo ­ mechanical reproduction). Laurence Housman mourned the passing of hand-engraving and Clemence lost her livelihood in it. But process was a method with its own demands and some of the younger and less orthodox artists - pre-eminently Aubrey Beardsley - adapted their drawing styles to its possibilities and did not try to imitate the appearance of hand-engraving. There was no room for sentiment where women's employment was concerned and process methods were clearly triumphant commercially. What this meant was that the Suffrage Atelier was training women in drawing for sophisticated reproductive processes it 26 - VOTE S 7 'Votes for Women (Bogies)': anon., Suffrage Atelier. Petticoat g(!Vernment, the unwashed babe, and woman unsexed. THE SPECTACLE OF WOMEN could not itself employ, and at the same time, and with some ingenuity, in much simpler hand­ printing methods that it could. Process had re­ placed hand wood engraving as wood engraving had replaced the woodcut, for commercial pur­ poses, by the mid-nineteenth century. 76 The Artists' Suffrage League (and artists designing for the WSPU) were more conventional and up-to-date in sending their designs to commercial litho­ graphers for printing. The woodcut was in technical terms an archaic method when the Suffrage Atelier adopted it, presumably for ease of production, cheapness, speed and boldness of effect. But this carried certain stylistic consequences. The woodcut poster in the Edwardian period would have been suf­ ficiently unusual to stand out against the techni­ cally more refined products that had largely super­ seded it. Its archaic technique and the associations it aroused could be exploited for impact and urgency, and for the sense of the popular they now invoked. Atelier posters are with hindsight curiously attractive in their ability to face both ways: back to the woodcut poster of the turn of the eighteenth century, an era before the commercial application of wood engraving or lithography, and forward to the political poster of the twentieth century (lino-cut or silk-screen), which suffers the same constraints on its production but holds the same desire for the accumulated associations of hand-prints as popular, expressive and self­ consciously unrefined. Alfred Pearse, Sylvia Pankhurst and the W S P U Unlike the National Union, which could call on the Artists' Suffrage League, or the Women's Freedom League which developed a special relationship with the Suffrage Atelier, the WSP was not served by any organised group of artists. It seems to have relied instead on a small number of individuals: most notably Sylvia Pankhurst, but VOMEN PRODUCTION ne, and hand1ad re­ graving al pur6 The ting for :o-date litho- also Marion Wallace Dunlop and Edith Downing ho provided schemes for processions, and Alfred Pearse, who as 'A Patriot ' provided illustrations to i otes for Women and designs for posters and post­ ards over many years. Alfred Pearse ( 1 856- 1 933) had studied wood engraving in the early 1 870s and was a prolific illustrator for family journals (Punch, Cassell 's Jiagazine, the Strand Magazine, the Illustrated London News), with a particular penchant for oys' adventure stories such as those by G. A. Henty. He worked as a special artist for Piaorial World ( 1 879-86) and for the Sphere on the royal olonial tour of 1 90 1 -03, and for forty-five years ontributed illustrations to the Boy 's Own Paper 1878-1 923). He seems to have given his services free to the W S P U, presumably as an act of political S)mpathy, and they were indeed fortunate in finding an engraver who would reproduce his deigns without charge. 77 Pearse was a highly compe­ tent illustrator, and his cartoons for Votesfor Women - pithy and apt - helped give the paper its attractive and professional tone. (It compared favourably ith its rivals in this respect, and put to shame the uninviting print of the Anti-Suffrage Review.) :vlost of the WSPU posters that survive are signed by Pearse or in his style, with the exception of those advertising Votesfor Women or the Suffragette, which are the work of Hilda Dallas and M. Bartels. The ingle best known suffrage image, the WSPU's 'Cat and Mouse' poster, remains anonymous, but Pearse is the closest candidate for it. (The style of draughtsmanship is fairly conventional, but this in its own way serves to heighten an image of dream­ like intensity.) 78 The notoriety of the WSPU campaign and the fame of particular images like the 'Cat and Mouse' poster have obscured the fact that the W S P U pub­ lished very few designs. This was not because militancy displaced other kinds of propaganda in its campaign - at least not until its final years - but because the WSPU seems to have concentrated on photographic postcards and on spectacle. Its motto 1rchaic ted it, pness, :arried poster n suf­ �chni­ ;uper­ ations t and r they dsight both of the ercial ', and 1tieth s the s the ns of self- II on 1en's ecial SPU ts. It :r of but 27 required it, after all, to place a priority on 'Deeds Not Words', and as the militant campai gn inten­ sified so did its rhetoric of crusade and martyrdom. The WSPU relied a great deal on the charismatic personalities of its leaders, particularly Christabel, and these factors helped to determine its concen­ tration on public spectacle, the production of large numbers of photographic postcards which recorded the major processions, and portrait photographs which took their place in a kind of martyrology of the campaign. (Other societies produced these too, but not in the same numbers or with the same kind of emphasis.) Sylvia Pankhurst was the trained artist most prominent in the suffrage movement, by reason of her political sympathies and family connections. But she was not consistently active in it as an artist and it is thus an exaggeration to describe her as 'virtually the official artist'79 of the campaign, de­ spite some influential designs and two ambitious decorative schemes. The richly blended politico­ aesthetic ambience of her childhood was not un­ typical of radical middle-class homes in the 1 88os and 1 890s. Her parents owned wallpapers by William Morris and books from his Kelmscott Press, together with reproductions of Walter Crane's Cartoons for the Cause. 80 Under their influence she conceived 'the longing to be a painter and draughtsman in the service of the great move­ ments for social betterment': 'I would decorate halls where people would foregather in the move­ ment to win the new world, and make banners for the meetings and processions. I had been with my parents to meetings of the Social Democratic Fed­ eration in dingy rooms in back streets, and to drab and dreary demonstrations in Hyde Park; I wanted to make these beautiful.' 8 1 She studied first at Manchester Art School, where in 1 902 she won a National Silver Medal for mosaic desi gns, a Primrose Medal and the Proctor Travelling Studentship (which took her to Flor­ ence and Venice to study frescoes and mosaics). In 1 904 she won a scholarship to the Royal College of THE SPECTACLE OF WOMEI\" 28 8 Sylvia Pankhurst, WSPU membership card, c. 1 90 5 . Sylvia Pankhurst 's design, so differentfrom the allegorical style ofher murals for the Prince's Skating Rink Exhibition in r909, reflects the origins ofthe wsPu in the Manchester labour movement in I 903, and her workfor Keir Hardie 's proposed poster campaignfor the unemployed in r905. By r905-06 it was already in conflict with Christabel 's desire to sever the wspu's ties with the tLP and recruit more middle-class women into !he movement. Art, heading the list of competitors for the whole country. ('I was surprised, but not elated; the standard is not very high, I concluded.')82 External scholarships were conducted anonymously. At the Royal College she encountered a level of dis­ crimination against the women students that disturbed her, and fighting it only increased the hostility she faced. In 1 906 her award ended and she took two rooms in Cheyne Walk.83 For some time she had been combining her studies with paid work and political activity; now she became the focal point for WSPU activity as it shifted from Manchester to London. At the end of 1 906 or early in 1 907 she designed the WSPU membership card - the exclusively working-class women it portrays were at just this point ceasing to find a place in the militant cam­ paign - and published a series of prison sketches from Holloway in the Pal/Mal/Magazine in the first half of 1 907. Her 'trumpeting angel' design was widely adopted on printed ephemera, for banners, on the bound volumes of Votes for Women and even on a tea service. Her allegorical scheme decorating the interior of the Prince's Skating Rink Exhibition in 1 909 (reused in the Portman Rooms in 1 9 1 1 ) was much admired. But despite her skills and her political sympathies she was subject to several different conflicts that together prevented her from making a more substantial contribution to the pictorial propaganda of the campaign. She was increasingly divided from her mother and Chris­ tabel over questions of allegiance and strategy.She deplored what she saw as their neglect of the needs of working-class women, and the severing of ties with the socialist movement. In her working life, she was torn between her political commitments and those of the artist she wanted to be. And as an artist, her work is itself divided between two kinds of pictorial vocabulary: the embryonic socialist realism of her paintings of working-class women, and that dilute Pre-Raphaelite allegory, derived from Walter Crane, which is her chief contribution to suffrage iconography. I f WOME N PRODUCTION • the whole elated; the 82 External 1sly.At the ,el of dis­ dents that reased the ended and 1 For some s with paid ecame the ifted from In the summer of 1 907, the year the Artists' Suffrage League was founded, Sylvia Pankhurst was painting the women chainmakers in Cradley Heath and studying the conditions in which they worked. She was active in various by-elections on the WS P U's behalf, and then left for the border counties to paint 'the neat, quiet women farm labourers of the locality, and the casual potato­ pickers imported by the day from the slums of Berwick-on-Tweed'.84 Art and politics pulled tubbornly apart for her: the project of working as an artist in the cause of the suffrage and of social­ ism was hard to realise. She had no inclination for commercial work, and little desire to sell to private patrons, but there was no market for the largecale decorative schemes she had hoped to pro­ duce.She was deprecatory of the National Union's Ylud March' in February - 'Its authors were so proud of it that they forgot such efforts were already habitual in the w s P u '85 - but it was in fact the constitutionalists and the Artists' Suffrage League which led the way in suffrage propaganda, in part because they did not enjoy the equivocal publicity gained by the W S P U's militancy. For Sylvia Pankhurst public struggles and pri­ vate aims proved less and less reconcilable. 'As a speaker, a pamphlet-seller, a chalker of pavements, a canvasser on doorsteps, you are wanted: as an artist the world has no real use for you.' 86 The idea of giving up the artist's life for the platform and the street corner was 'a prospect too tragically barren o endure',87 but at the same time she doubted 'whether it was worthwhile to fight one's individual -nuggle ... to make one's way as an artist, to bring out of oneself the best possible, and to induce the arid to accept one's creations, and give one in return one's daily bread, when all the time the great struggles to better the world for humanity demand other service'.88 Within a couple of years she had made her decision and given up her painting. '\lathers came to me with their wasted little ones.I saw starvation look at me from patient eyes. I knew then that I should never return to my art.' 89 e designed exclusively at just this itant cam­ n sketches • in the first iesign was ir banners, n and even decorating Exhibition s in 1 9 1 1 ) Us and her to several d her from on to the . She was .nd Chris­ ategy.She 'the needs ing of ties irking life, unitrnents And as an two kinds c socialist ;s women, y, derived ntribution 29 9 Sylvia Pankhurst working on the murals for the Prince's Skating Rink Exhibition, 1909. THE SPECTACLE OF WOMEN Pictorial Resources The suffrage artists drew on a repertoire of pic­ torial components which were not only technical, but stylistic and thematic.Different styles coexisted among different groups in the campaign, and some of the same resources were drawn on by their opponents and by other artists including those working for the labour movement. As combina­ tions of thematic, formal and technical elements, styles embody values that relate to the interests of particular ideologies and social groups, but they are essentially mobile and open to a degree of co-option and adaptation by others. A group does not generate spontaneously the style or 'visual ideology' appropriate to its needs.90 (And women, whose images were everywhere disseminated in this period, were peculiarly placed in deciding what their needs were and how they might best be pictured.) To trace the processes by which elements are gathered or discarded, emptied or refilled, coaxed and manipulated to new ends, we need to refer to suffrage artists as social subjects with particular skills and resources at their disposal. They were not a homogenous group with a unified ideology any more than were suffragists at large - but some generalisations can be made about their position. They were almost all women. They were middle class. They were trained in the liberalising art­ educational institutions of the later nineteenth century. Their class politics, when specifically ar­ ticulated, appear to have leaned towards the radical end of liberalism and socialism (there were links with the Fabians, and the socialist side of the arts and crafts movement). Many of them had indepen­ dent careers at a time when this was still unusual for women. They were all by definition feminists and actively committed to the furtherance of women's suffrage 'by the work and professional help of artists' in the production of 'effective picture propaganda' for the cause.9 1 Many of the artists were trained illustrators or engravers, some specialising in children's books. (The self-consciously coy style of C. Hedley Charlton, adapted to the suffrage context, was calculated to render innocent, humorous and domestic a campaign characterised by its op­ ponen