Domesticating Emmeline: Representing the Suffragette, 1930-1993 LAURA E, NYM MAYHALL Through a juxtaposition of readings of the statue of Emmeline Pankhurst, leader of the militant British suffrage organization, the Women’s Social and Political Union, and the blockbuster film of 1964, Walt Disney's Mary Poppins, this article argues that the figure of the suffragette, while potentially a radical disrupter of the political order, in fact, serves to consolidate the authority of the nation-state and women’s subordinate place within it. By the 1960s, the figure of the suffragette emerges in Anglo-American popular culture as a symbol of modernity, standing in for democratization and political progress at a remove from then current political realities of the same struggles on the part of African Americans. Anxieties about shifting configurations of dominance and subordination along the lines of race, class, and gender find expression in a figure removed far enough historically to pose no threat to the established order, yet seemingly radical enough to denote progress, ‘The women’s suffrage movement in Britain occupies a privileged posi- tion within the telling of Anglo-American women’s history, for it has been understood by many men and women—feminist and nonfeminist alike—as the precursor of the modern Women’s Liberation Movement. Members of the public, and indeed, some historians posit a direct link between the suffragettes in Britain and the Women’s Liberation Move ment in the United States and Western Europe in the 1960s (Purvis 1996), No better example of this exists than that mainstream children’s classic, Walt Disney's Mary Poppins, released within a year of Betty Friedan’s record of domestic discontent, The Feminine Mystique (1963). In Walt Disney's Mary Poppins, Mrs. Banks, an ardent suffragette and mother of ‘two, serves as the progenitor of the modern woman. Mary Poppins arrives precisely to save the Banks children from their “liberated” mother, who must be educated into the proper maternal relation with them. The film assumes, as have many people since, a connection to exist between the suffragettes and the growing political consciousness of women in the 1960s, as both appear allied to the project of twentieth-century radical ism, ‘Assuming late-twentieth-century feminism’s connection to an earlier suffragism, I was intrigued to learn of former Conservative Prime Minis. ter Margaret Thatcher's presence at a ceremony honoring the birth of Emmeline Pankhurst at Westminster. This celebration in July 1993, orga nized by Teresa Gorman, a Conservative Member of Parliament, took the ©1999 NWSA Journat, Vou. 11 No. 2 (Summer) This content downloaded from 121212.113.86on Tue, 25 May 2023 11'25:02 +00:00 ‘Alls subject to hips: bout stor. orpterms2 Lavra E, Nvw Mayiaut form of a wreath-laying at the statue of Emmeline Pankhurst in Victoria Tower Gardens, adjacent to the Houses of Parliament. At a private cer- emony following the public wreath-laying, Lady Thatcher dedicated a plaque in honor of the seventy-fifth anniversary of the first extension of the vote to British women in 1918.! These celebrations seemed curious. ‘The laying of flowers at the base of Pankhurst’s statue in Westminster on her birthday in 1993 re-enacted not only a ceremony taking place many times this century—at least 50 times, in fact, between 1930 and the 1980s—but also a ceremony organized originally by former suffragettes. What possible meanings might such a commemoration, organized by female Members of Parliament, have in the 1990s? What does Emmeline Pankhurst and, beyond her, the figure of the suffragette mean at the end of the twentieth century? A juxtaposition of readings—first, of the statue's entry into public space and of the rituals enacted with it as a focus, and second, of the figure of the suffragette in Walt Disney's Mary Poppins— reveals a gradual consolidation of representations of the suffragette. This figure, viewed at the beginning of the twentieth century by those on the left as a symbol of modernity, signifies to a much larger audience at our own fin-de-sigcle an uninterrupted movement for women's political re- bellion and progress, albeit a movement domesticated and operating pri- marily in the service of the nation (Lyon 1994-95, Wright 1985} Commemorating Women’s Suffrage It was by no means inevitable that a statue of Emmeline Pankhurst would be placed within the precincts of Parliament. When the British parliament enfranchised women in 1918, at least three figures contended for the inscription that today describes the base of Pankhurst's statue— “courageous leader of the women’s suffrage movement”—each a strong, charismatic widow with a unique claim to the title. These included Millicent Garrett Fawcett, president of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), the oldest of the women’s suffrage organiza- tions and the largest, with more than 50,000 members in England, Scot- land, and Wales; Charlotte Despard, president of the Women’s Freedom League (WFL}, the only major suffrage organization in Britain to continue its agitation on behalf of women’s enfranchisement during the First World War, and Emmeline Pankhurst, leader of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU}, best known for its use of militancy, which, after 1912, included arson, the burning of post office boxes and the destruction of paintings in public galleries.* Each woman represented a suffrage organi- zation with its own tactics and means of advertisement, and each organi zation made significant contributions to the campaign for women’s par- liamentary suffrage in the years before the First World War. In August 1914, however, the WSPU distinguished itself by the violence of its self This content downloaded from 121212.113.86on Tue, 25 May 2023 11'25:02 +00:00 ‘Alls subject to hips: bout stor. orptermsDowssricarinc EmMeune 3 proclaimed war upon the Liberal Government. While Emmeline Pankhurst’s co-leader, her eldest daughter, Christabel, remained in Paris to avoid arrest and further prosecution, the British government pursued various Union officials on conspiracy charges. Emmeline Pankhurst her- self had spent the previous eighteen months in and out of jail (Rosen 1974, 159-172, 189-202} The status of the relationship between the WSPU and the British Government changed dramatically when Britain went to war with Ger- many in August 1914. The Pankhursts immediately abandoned suffrage work and enthusiastically supported the war effort. By 1916, when the government raised the question of extending the franchise to women and servicemen as part of an attempt to reform voting rights, the WSPU had ong been working to recruit men and women for military and munitions service. Nor did Emmeline Pankhurst’s war work end with exhortations to fellow Britons to support their country in its prosecution of the war. In a series of private communication in 1915 with David Lloyd George, Minister of Munitions, she denounced conscientious objectors in South Wales.’ And by 1916, Emmeline Pankhurst argued that the Government should not jeopardize the enfranchisement of soldiers and sailors by the inclusion of women in the proposed reform bill.* Emmeline Pankhurst’s political career continued after she ceased agi- tating for women’s suffrage. In 1917, she traveled on behalf of the British government to urge Russian women to support their nation’s continued adherence to the Allied War effort. A vocal anti-Bolshevist, in 1926 she stood unsuccessfully as a Conservative Party candidate for the staunchly Labour constituency of Whitechapel and St. George's, in the East End of London. Pankhurst later opposed extension of the franchise to women at the age of 21, on the grounds that ‘full and effective use has not been made of the vote we already have.’” Pankhurst’s conversion from radical ‘opponent of the Government to upholder of the status quo provides context for the commission of the statue and its postwar significance.* However, the most significant players in the creation of a postwar public memory of the suffrage movement were former militant suffrag- ettes themselves, organized in 1926 as the Suffragette Fellowship. Mem bers of this group devoted themselves over the next half-century to me- ‘morializing their campaign.’ Through the creation of an archive, currently housed at the Museum of London, the Fellowship defined the practice of militancy for succeeding generations. The Fellowship devised a question- naire designed to record former suffragettes’ experiences of militancy. Centering on the question “when were you imprisoned?” this survey at once documented and defined suffrage militancy. To be authentic, suf- frage militancy followed one trajectory: from militant action, defined narrowly as violence against property, through arrest, to incarceration and, eventually, the hunger-strike and forcible feeding. The very defini- tion of militancy created by this archive obscured other militant prac This content downloaded from 121212.113.86on Tue, 25 May 2023 11'25:02 +00:00 ‘Alls subject to hips: bout stor. orpterms4 Laura E, Nvw Mavitaut tices, such as civil disobedience or tax and census resistance. As a conse- quence, the brand of militaney that Emmeline Pankhurst had called ‘the argument of the broken pane,”* or suffragette attacks upon property, became the only kind of militancy considered authentic. Thus, a contro- versial and contested form of prewar militant protest—one associated with Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst—became the only acceptable definition of militancy after the war (Mayhall 1995, 332) After Emmeline Pankhurst’s death in 1928, the Suffragette Fellowship ‘turned its prodigious energies toward honoring the memory of a woman who, for many, stood for what was most noble in the prewar women's movement. With the partial enfranchisement of women in 1918 (when men and women could vote in parliamentary elections at the ages of 21 and 30, respectively), and their full enfranchisement in 1928 {when both women and men could vote at age 21], the focus of the one-issue suffrage campaign of the earlier period disappeared. Organized feminists con- fronted profound, and sometimes irreconcilable, differences of opinion on a number of issues, including, but not limited to protective legislation for ‘women workers, the need to compensate women for their work in the home, and equal pay for equal work (Smith 1990, 47-83). For many ‘women, Emmeline Pankhurst symbolized a golden age of the women’s movement, when women worked together, united by loyalty, obedience, and discipline (Davis, et al. 1982, 316) No clearer example exists of how much Pankhurst meant to former participants in the suffrage movement than the campaign to create three memorials honoring her in London.” Soon after her death in June 1928, a committee formed to raise the funds necessary to mount a statue of Pankhurst in Westminster, to place a portrait of her in the National Portrait Gallery, and to install a headstone at her gravesite in Brompton Cemetery. All three memorials shaped the public memory of the suffrage movement to varying degrees over the course of the century." Arguably the statue at Westminster constituted the most significant of the memorials to be created by the committee. Its prominent placement in the gardens adjacent to what is a premier attraction for tourists to the capital city has guaranteed a wide audience for its account of the prewar campaign."! The original appeal for funds for the statue in 1928 urged that a statue is the recognized form of tribute paid to historic personalities, the highest and most lasting honour that humanity has ever been able to pay to those who have rendered great services to civilisation. As in ancient days, so how, men commemorate their heroes and liberators by erecting statues; shall not women claim equal honour for her who led them to victory?” As one historian has noted, this argument recognized the ideological significance of mounting a statue to a female heroine in public space (Midgley 1984, 80-1), Subsequent developments confirmed that both former suffragettes and the male civil servants with whom they sparred This content downloaded from 121212.113.86on Tue, 25 May 2023 11'25:02 +00:00 ‘Alls subject to hips: bout stor. orptermsDonesricarine EMseuine 5 over its creation accurately gauged the political significance of such a memorial. In June 1928, a member of the Suffragette Fellowship, Katharine Mar- shall, informed Lionel Earle, Minister of Works, that the Fellowship would commission a statue of their late leader to be placed either opposite the Prime Minister's official residence at Number Ten, Downing Street, or somewhere within the precincts of Westminster." Officials within the Ministry of Works perceived her request as deliberately provocative as both locations had been sites of major battles between suffragettes and the police during the prewar suffrage movement. The Minister of Works gave Marshall no encouragement, and in fact, internal memoranda of that department indicate that, at the very least, the Ministry determined to stall on this question indefinitely, if not avoid it outright." In January 1929, however, then Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin announced that he would dedicate the proposed statue after the upcoming General Elec tion.'* Further opposition to the statue within the Ministry of Works abruptly disappeared, and the intransigence of officials ended with the announcement in April of the same year that the Government had granted assite for the statue in Victoria Tower Gardens, adjacent to the Houses of Parliament." Former suffragettes gathered tthe dedication of Emmeline Pankhurst memorial, March 6, 1980 Muriel Perot Papers, /AMP/D1/4, weet Library, London Guildhall University] “This content dorloaded from 2113.86 on Tue, 28 May 2023 11:25:02 +00:00, “Alas subject ois: aout stor arg ters6 Laura E. NyM MAYALL The Suffragette Fellowship staged the statue’s dedication on March 6, 1930, to attribute the enfranchisement of women in Britain solely to the efforts of the WSPU. Even though women belonging toa number of prewar suffrage societies comprised the Fellowship's membership, the group organizing the event acted to ensure the iconographic dominance of the WSPU. In November 1929, those planning the dedication requested an estimate for the bunting, banners, and canopy for the March festivities, the London firm consulted was asked to provide all decorations in purple, white, and green. One participant at the ceremonies the following spring noted that even the clergymen present exchanged their red cassocks for black, to avoid compromising the colors of the WSPU."” The Times made much of the fact that the Metropolitan Police Band entertained the crowd in the hour before the unveiling, for many of the women present had battled members of the constabulary in the streets outside the Houses of Parliament during the campaign before the War."* Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin’s speech dedicating the statue points to two of the primary ways in which the statue, and Pankhurst herself, were to be read in subsequent years. While acknowledging Emmeline Pankhurst’s role as a revolutionary, Baldwin situated her within a British tradition of gradual, peaceful reform, a tradition he viewed as evidence of Britain's distinctiveness from the rest of Europe. More specifically, Bald- win took care to point to the “very English” nature of the proceedings themselves: groups at odds years before now gathered to honor a contro- versial leader. By claiming Pankhurst as part of a long tradition of gradual reform, Baldwin effectively domesticated her, removing from her the more radical assertion of rights that had galvanized the prewar movement and had made it seem so threatening to the government in power. Domesticating Emmeline had multiple resonances. Certainly, the more conventional connotation applies: Baldwin's speech attempted to tame her political rhetoric, to bring her into the realm of the familiar and the safe, Pethaps more significantly, however, by rendering her and the pro- tests associated with her as quintessentially “English,” Baldwin removed the taint of foreignness from her ideas. Emmeline Pankhurst, and indeed, numerous suffragettes, claimed the French Revolution as inspiration for their political activism (West 1933, 261). By 1930, however, the Russian Revolution served as the barometer by which political radicalism would be measured. Baldwin placed Pankhurst’s political agitation and, by im- plication, her conversion to Conservatism, as the logical outcome of two centuries of political reform in Britain. Faced by the new political land- scape in Europe created by the Revolution in Russia, Baldwin sought to redefine acceptable and unacceptable political activism. Emmeline Pank- hurst, incorporated into the pantheon of great fighters for English liber- ties, thus helped form what Bill Schwarz has called “the Conservative articulation of people and nation” so skillfully brought under the um- This content downloaded from 121212.113.86on Tue, 25 May 2023 11'25:02 +00:00 ‘Alls subject to hips: bout stor. orptermsDonssricarine Enaeuin 7 brella of the constitution by Stanley Baldwin in the late-1920s (Schwartz, 1984, 6}, However, Baldwin's speech laid out additional meanings for this statue. Baldwin attempted to placate those who had opposed women’s suffrage prior to the war by pointing out that opponents of women’s suffrage in the earlier period fell well within that era’s mainstream of opinion. Including himself in his characterization of opponents of women’s suffrage as “men of culture and broad minds,” Baldwin led with apparent inevitability to the conclusion that the war—and women’s work for the nation during the ‘war—had brought about the enfranchisement of women. For Baldwin, the war defined the political movement epitomized by Emmeline Pankhurst because it provided the arena in which women could prove their fitness for citizenship, their willingness, in his words, “to put on their overalls and {to go] into the factories and the fields, [where] they were nursing, and they made munitions, and they endured sacrifices with the men." It was “in the furnace of the war” that opposition to women’s suffrage would melt.” No room exists in this rhetoric for those women whose suffrage agitation continued during the First World War, or for those who publicly opposed the war. By elevating Emmeline Pankhurst, the Prime Minister effaced the spectrum of women’s political activism before the war.” Baldwin's emphasis on the centrality of the war to the enfranchisement of women mirrored public discourse on women in the 1920s, a discourse placing renewed value on women’s sacrifice and loss. In the decade after the Great War, commentators valorized, and indeed, romanticized, Em- meine Pankhurst and her organization’s use of militancy as a form of political violence, perhaps in part because what had transpired during the War so completely eclipsed it. The very qualities for which Emmeline Pankhurst was lauded—martyrdom, sacrifice, and loss—described an- other category of postwar women, mothers who had lost sons in the war (Grayzel 1999). One contemporary observer noted that, “assuredly, too, their movement, despite all its errors and follies, was full of the true heroic spirit. A leadership which inspired to martyrdom deserves its niche in history.’”" Suffrage militancy thus emerged in the 1920s as an accept- able sacrifice made by women for the nation, and former suffragettes ‘quickly embraced it as such. “Days of Obligation” But how does the statue of Emmeline Pankhurst, unveiled by Stanley Baldwin in 1930, acquire the cachet that would assure its use as a symbol ‘of women's political rights by a Conservative member of parliament, and a Conservative prime minister, in the 1990s? In order to explain how this statue became emblematic of women’s political rights some six decades This content downloaded from 121212.113.86on Tue, 25 May 2023 11'25:02 +00:00 ‘Alls subject to hips: bout stor. orpterms8 Laura BE, NyM MAvHAL after its commission, we must turn to the public rituals associated with the statue, rituals highly formalized, repetitive, and calendrical (Conner- ton 1989, 44-5). Organized by the Suffragette Fellowship, these rituals created, conveyed, and sustained a public memory of the women’s suf- frage movement, fulfilling the projection of Baldwin's speech, and con- tinuing the process of winnowing the memory of a complicated and contentious movement to. single, unified, and idealized point: the statue of Emmeline Pankhurst. Asearly as 1928, the Suffragette Fellowship organized what one partici- pant would refer to later as “Days of Obligation,” or ritual commemora- tions of events significant within the suffrage movement.* Three such days celebrated annually were February 6, Women’s Suffrage Day, ac- knowledging passage of the 1918 Representation of the People Act; July 14, Emmeline Pankhurst’s birthday; and October 13, Prisoners’ Day, commemorating the first imprisonments {1905} suffered by members of the WSPU in the course of agitating for women’s suffrage. Members of the Suffragette Fellowship celebrated all three days, with the assistance of various celebrities and members of the public, during the next 50 years. Emmeline Pankhurst’s birthday, especially, became a focus of the organi- zation’s energies.® Suffragette Fellowship celebrations of Pankhurst’s birthday continued well into the 1980s. Early celebrations, from roughly 1930 to 1945, em- phasized the bodily connection of the many women in the Suffragette Fellowship who had known Emmeline Pankhurst personally. These cel- ebrations followed the same pattern every year: a service memorialized Pankhurst at St. John’s Church, Smith Square, Westminster, after which members formed a procession outside the church for a walk to the Gar- dens, where they laid flowers and wreaths at the foot of the statue. Tea or a supper party followed. After the Second World War, the birthday celebra tions of 14 July assumed a different form. Members of the Fellowship met at the statue, where they laid flowers and wreaths. Those present then proceeded to Caxton Hall, in Westminster, for a political meeting at which women of various party affiliations, either Members of Parliament or women working in local government authorities, addressed the group on issues concerning women in politics. A young Conservative Member of Parliament, Margaret Thatcher, spoke at the 1960 commemoration.”* Birthday meetings appear to have grown in size as the years passed, with the largest meetings held at the centenary of Pankhurst’s birth in 1958, and upon the fiftieth anniversary of the extension of the suffrage to ‘women in 1968. The difference in form between early and later celebrations parallels the shift begun by Stanley Baldwin's 1930 speech, away from the signifi- cance of Emmeline Pankhurst the individual, and toward Emmeline Pankhurst the ideal. Baldwin had argued that just as “there would have This content downloaded from 121212.113.86on Tue, 25 May 2023 11'25:02 +00:00 ‘Alls subject to hips: bout stor. orpterms