Suffragettes in the city
International Women’s Day (Thursday 8 March) seemed to get a lot more attention this year. It’s always been something of interest to museums, but I saw commentary from much wider news sources and organisations. My female friends and I had a long conversation about this brilliant Guardian discussion of the managerial load of household chores.
Perhaps all this has been higher in the collective consciousness this year because of the centenary of the 1918 Representation of the People Act, as well of course as the #MeToo movement. The 1918 act extended the vote to men over the age of 21 and women over 30 who were householders or married to householders. A decade later in 1928, the Amendment of the Representation of the People Act finally created equal suffrage between men and women in the UK.
This anniversary has been marked by cultural institutions in various ways and last night I experienced one particularly enlightening version. The National Trust and the National Archives have joined forces to create ‘Suffragette City’ exploring the life of a suffragette in the years before 1918. They have taken over the London Pavilion, a building just off Piccadilly Circus, which was one of the main London meeting spaces of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU). There at any time you can enter the WSPU cafe to buy a cup of tea or milk punch, or sign up for the kind of classes run at the time, from Jujitsu to screen printing and choral singing to craftivism.
But the bolder among you can join their immersive ‘missions’ to experience being a suffragette yourself in the recreated WSPU headquarters and a prison cell. You re-enact the life of Lillian Ball, a dressmaker and mother from Tooting, arrested for smashing a window in 1912, whose experiences are documented in the National Archives through Home Office, Metropolitan Police and Cabinet papers, as well as pamphlets and letters seized in raids on the WSPU’s headquarters.
The mission forces you to face your own convictions and consider how hard you would have fought, what lengths you’d have gone to, what hardships you’d have faced, to win the vote like those women 100 years ago. It was honestly quite unsettling, and left me unsure whether I’d have stood the test, even though I did get a lovely green, purple and white rosette for being brave and proud.
It’s odd to leave the re-created world of 1912 and walk out into the modern cacophony of Piccadilly Circus on a Friday night. But yet again the National Trust have given me a deeper understanding of the complex heritage of London’s buildings and left me thinking about how my life might look through archive records.