Each month, we offer the spotlight to one of our researchers to exhibit their research projects in more detail.
The Featured Researcher for August – September 2024 was Sue John, with a project titled, ‘Satire and Suffragettes: Women’s Rights in Everyday Material Culture in Britain, 1900-1930’
HEIs: University of Glasgow, College of Arts & Humanities
Supervisors: Professor Maud Bracke, Dr Alexandra Ross & Dr Caroline Gausden (Glasgow Women’s Library)
I am a part-time (fourth year) PhD researcher undertaking a Collaborative Doctoral Award at the University of Glasgow, with Glasgow Women’s Library (GWL) as the non-academic partner. GWL is the UK’s sole accredited museum dedicated to women’s history, and I also work there as Co-Director so I know the organisation and its collections well!
The period 1900-1930 in Britain was one of intense feminist activism and debates over women’s suffrage rights, by those deploying both militant and constitutional methods towards securing voting reform. During this time, the British public bought, posted and gifted a wide variety of suffrage related memorabilia, including postcards, ceramics, decorative items and board games. My thesis explores this field material culture further, an area that relatively little academic research has examined in depth so far, and in particular ‘comic’ postcards, primarily ‘anti-suffrage’, produced by dozens of private companies. What these postcards have in common in their imagery is the ridiculing of the suffrage campaign, its activists, the very notion of women’s rights, and indeed women in general. Many satirise contemporary events, revealing a fascinating insight into societal attitudes at the time, in particular the added dimension provided throughout the senders’ handwritten messages on the back of the postcards.
My introductory chapter outlines the historical context and factors that fuelled the phenomenal demand for postcards: I reference contemporary popular cultural pastimes that folded into postcard imagery and narratives, for example early cinema and music hall.
I then structure the thesis around recurring themes and tropes found in the postcards, starting with a chapter on dress and fashion in relation to lampooning women, especially those demanding the vote.
Published by the Cynicus Publishing Co. Ltd. Posted in Sheffield on 18 September 1905 to Mrs H. [? Gredland (?), 64 Andover St, Pitswood, Sheffield. From the collection of Glasgow Women’s Library: GWL-2021-19-2.
A postcard sample above demonstrates how publishers had no reservations about representing women suffrage activists as ‘manly’ through the caricaturing of specific dress codes and behaviours (the spectacle of women smoking, cycling and golf). Combined with the caption, ‘E-man-cipated!’ it alludes to the satirisation in such postcards of masculine (possibly lesbian) women. This postcard was posted in 1905, suggesting that even before the coining of the term ‘suffragette’, and the start of militant campaigning, women’s activism was fuelling satirical responses in this popular cultural form.
In a further chapter, I explore representations of gender violence as a theme for satire in anti-suffrage postcards, including how postcard manufacturers (mis)represented the many forms of violence, abuse and hostility experienced by suffrage activists perpetrated at the hands of the police, in court and in prison. Alongside images of these ‘funny’ postcards, I juxtapose personal testimonies of the reality of the violence that suffrage campaigners endured.
Published by Bamforth & Co. Series No. 1712. Posted in Sheffield on 16 June 1911 to Miss C. Naylor, 17 Princess Street, West Melton, Nr. Rotherham. From the collection of Glasgow Women’s Library: GWL-2022-26-24.
By way of illustration, the postcard above depicts a police officer ‘removing’ a campaigning suffragette from a public space. His hand is depicted as positioned up her petticoat skirt (here, the suffragette is a man dressed ridiculously caricaturing a woman – another routinely employed device of anti-suffrage postcard publishers). The image uses innuendo to infer that the suffragette is enjoying this experience – ‘having the time of my life’ and minimises sexual violence by giving it comic value, and suggesting that molestation might be a rationale for older women protesting.
By July 1911, when this postcard was in circulation, stories of routine police brutality, including sexual violence, towards suffrage activists were widespread, well documented and publicised in the press.
My next chapter analyses the depiction of the domestic chaos and subverted gender roles in an imagined dystopian scenario precipitated by suffrage rights.
Published by W R & S (William Ritchie & Sons Ltd.), ’Reliable Series’ No.9339. Posted in Musselburgh on 28 September 1908 to Miss M. Cuthbertson, Bambro’ Castle Hotel, Seahouses. From the collection of Glasgow Women’s Library: GWL-2010-57.
Postcards of the suffrage movement constitute small, prosaic examples of material culture: with complex meanings. The two sides of one postcard can reveal manifold narratives; two sides of one issue, pro and anti-suffrage, reflecting the turbulence of the earliest decades of the twentieth century. Postcards had the ability to create dissonance, disrupt and undermine suffrage discourse. Millions were produced, but relatively few survive, those that do provide us with a commentary (through the images and text, and in comments added by those sending them) on one of the most important movements of social change in British history.
