Gathering dust in a charity shop in Leeds, a seemingly innocuous roll of purple material was left unnoticed for nearly a decade before it was recently discovered to be a suffragette banner dating back to 1908.
The banner was first unveiled by suffragettes Mary Gawthorpe and Rona Robinson in Stevenson Square on 20 June 1908 before it shared the stage with Emmeline Pankhurst at a rally in Manchester’s Heaton Park on 19 July 1908, when she spoke to a crowd of 50,000 people.
The People’s History Museum in Manchester (the city from where the banner originated) looked to purchase the banner and were able to do so in part because of a ground swell of support and crowd-funding contributions. Over a century after it was first unveiled, the banner will be on display in Manchester as part of the commemorative exhibition this year: see here.
A hundred years on, it is perhaps easy to diminish the efforts of those people who fought for suffrage. Those individuals who bought that material, stitched and made that banner before transporting and unveiling it did so because they believed that something needed to change to make society fairer. To make society better.
The last hundred years has seen the first woman elected to the Commons (1918 and to take the seat, 1919); work as a train driver (1977); sit as judge in High Court (1965) and the Old Bailey (1972); director of MI5 (1991); reach the top of Mount Everest without a partner or extra oxygen (1995); FTSE 100 CEO (1997); poet laureate (2009); serving on the front line for British Army (2017); director of the Tate (2017); Dr Who (2017); to have a statue in Parliament Square (2018).
Yet last year there was a huge campaign which saw ‘This is what a feminist looks like’ and ‘Everyone should be a feminist’ emblazoned on top fashion houses’ products, finding itself as the most Instagrammed image from Paris Fashion week. So, what does a feminist look like and should we all be feminists?
The definition of feminism, according to oxforddictionaries.com, is ‘The advocacy of women's rights on the ground of the equality of the sexes’.
Ms Waller shares her thoughts in response to this question:
'It was not a book that made me a feminist. It was a human. My History of Art teacher at St Paul’s Girls’ School, Kate Evans, was the first person to really challenge how I thought about gender. Previously, I had dismissed feminism as no longer necessary, as something uptight people talked about who didn’t want relaxed people to have any fun. I didn’t really understand what it was at all.
In the A Level years, however, we spent hours of every week in a darkened room by the Art Department, gazing at slides of paintings and sculptures, often representing human figures, questioning them in every way. We started simply: what, exactly, is in the picture? Who was the artist? How was it created? Who commissioned and paid for it? Where was it displayed? We moved on to more politically interesting matters: What has been left out? Whose implied point of view do we share? Who would have viewed it? Who is the model? What is the angle? Is the viewer given a powerful, privileged position, because we see or know more than the figure? Whose gaze follows whose? Who is higher, foregrounded, seen from a low angle, portrayed as strong, active, dynamic? Who is lower, seen from above, decorative, passive, resigned? Who has the power? What attitude is the viewer supposed to have towards the figures and how does that reinforce or subvert convention? Is there any symbolism here?
Questions, questions, by the end of which I realised that, at that time, much of the ‘History’ I had absorbed really was mostly ‘his’, and not the whole ‘story’. I started to interrogate every text – the novels, poetry and drama I read and studied, the television and film I consumed, and everything else I experienced, to evaluate the assumptions made and the script that was implicitly written for me and for all consumers, of any gender. We need to read and hear about reality as perceived by as many types of people as possible, questioning and evaluating every account, and teachers like Kate Evans make it possible for us to do so.'
The banner found in a charity shop in Leeds is powerful because it connects us to a time in history, to the women who spent time making it in support of a cause, the women who spoke in front of it and the people who heard what she said and paid a little more attention to the injustices and inequalities around. A hundred years on, society has made great progress toward equality but, like the banner, it is still important to preserve and remember the efforts of those who fought for the rights people enjoy today and like an art student asking questions of a painting or sculpture or a student of literature questioning a text, we can challenge ourselves to look a little closer, pay a little more attention and, in doing so, we can do our bit to call out injustice and promote equality.
Want to read more? Click here for Waterstone's top ten books on women's suffrage.
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