Womens Suffrage in Word, Image, Music, Stage and Screen - The Making of a Movement

This collection of essays explores the myriad ways in which the women's suffrage movement in Britain in the nineteenth century and twentieth century engaged with and was expressed through literature, art and craft, music, drama and cinema.

Uniquely, this anthology places developments in the constituent arts side by side, and in dialogue, rather than focusing on a single field in isolation. In so doing, it illustrates how creative endeavours in different artforms converged in support of women's suffrage. Topics encompassed range from the artistic output of such household names as Sylvia Pankhurst and Ethel Smyth, to the recent feature film Suffragette. It also brings to light under-represented figures and neglected works related to the suffrage movement. A wide variety of material is explored, from poems, diaries and newspapers to posters, dress and artefacts to songs, opera, plays and film.

Published in the wake of the centenary of many women receiving the parliamentary vote in the UK, this book will appeal to scholars, undergraduate and graduate students, and members of the public interested in the broad areas of women's history and the women's suffrage movement, as well as across the arts disciplines.

List of contents

Chapter 1 Women’s suffrage and cultural representation: the making of a movement, Part I Literature, Chapter 2 Sylvia Pankhurst: poetry and politics, Chapter 3 A reliable chronicler? Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence and the Pankhurst/Pethick-Lawrence split of 1912, Chapter 4 Suffragette prison narratives: the foreignisation of the carceral experience, Chapter 5 The Scottish suffragettes and the press, Part II The visual arts and visual identity, Chapter 6 Suffrage identity: declaring one’s colours, Chapter 7 Painting a political identity: women and the House of Commons, c.1818–1834, Chapter 8 Victorian paintings under attack: the earliest act of suffrage iconoclasm (1913), Chapter 9 The art of suffrage propaganda: with particular reference to the work of Surrey artists, Part III Music, Chapter 10 Ethel Smyth, music and the suffragette movement: reconsidering The Boatswain’s Mate as feminist opera, Chapter 11 ‘It seemed to me my first duty to signify I was one of the fighters’: Ethel Smyth’s two years of suffrage activities and her suffrage music, Chapter 12 The image of the Suffragette in Vernon Lee’s Music and its Lovers, Part IV Stage and screen, Chapter 13 ‘Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, join the suffrage dance?’: reframing Alice in Wonderland for Edwardian activists, Chapter 14 Radical actors: the Women’s Social and Political Union’s staging of the suffrage campaign, Chapter 15 Suffrage history on our screens: the TV series Shoulder to Shoulder and the feature film Suffragette: Whose stories do they tell?

About the author

Christopher Wiley is Senior Lecturer in Music at the University of Surrey, UK. He is the author of many journal articles and book chapters, and the co-editor of volumes including Researching and Writing on Contemporary Art and Artists (2020), Transnational Perspectives on Artists’ Lives (2020), Writing About Contemporary Musicians (2021) and The Routledge Companion to Autoethnography and Self-Reflexivity in Music Studies (2021).
Lucy Ella Rose is Lecturer in Victorian Literature at the University of Surrey, UK. She is the author of the book Suffragist Artists in Partnership: Gender, Word and Image (2018), and her work focuses on neglected women in nineteenth-century creative partnerships. She presents and publishes on Victorian literature, art, culture and feminisms, and is currently working on feminist networks at the fin de siècle.

Summary

This collection of essays explores the myriad ways in which the women’s suffrage movement in Britain in the nineteenth century and twentieth century engaged with, and was expressed through literature, art and craft, music, drama and cinema.

Product details

• Authors: Christopher (University of Surrey Wiley
• Assisted by: Lucy Ella Rose (Editor), Christopher Wiley (Editor)
• Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd.
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 14.07.2021
• EAN: 9780367361983
• ISBN: 978-0-367-36198-3
• No. of pages: 288
• Subject: Social sciences, law, business > Sociology > Sociological theories