Histories of Violence

Kevin BaconCurator of Photographs

Royal Pavilion and Museums

What is it?

• Anti-suffragette postcard from 1909

• Rare local history purchase for RPM

• Material evidence of anti-suffragette violence

Material culture and telling stories

• Museums attract big audiences and play a big role in writing history…

• …but the stories they tell are shaped by their collections

• Struggle for women’s suffrage difficult to tell through material culture. Photographs, film and spoken word are effective, but emerge from narrow circumstances of creation.

Material culture and telling stories

• This postcard is more than its image and / or text

• Few other artefacts of political male violence against women

• What story does it tell?

The image

This is ‘The House’ that man built, And these are the Suffragettes of noteDetermined to fight for their right to voteFor they mean to be, each one an MPAnd they’ll keep their vow some fine day you’ll seeFor the Suffragette is determined to getInto ‘The House’ that man built.

The image

• Made by Birn Brothers. Ltd, c1908

• Part of a series of comic postcards depicting the women’s suffrage movement

• Series based around key trope: ‘The House that man built’

• Mostly mocking, but some are ambiguous…

‘This House’ series

• Appears to be telling two sides of one story

• Series divided by layouts, typeface and depictions of women

• Yet neither are polemical. Adopt a broadly wry, distanced perspective on contemporary events and debates

• Likely that ‘pro’ images, although perhaps mockingly idealised, would be read as supportive of female suffrage

The text

The text

• Posted evening of 27 April 1909

• Sent to crew or workmen attached to HMS Hindustan, a pre-dreadnought battleship

• HMS Hindustan was in dry dock at Portsmouth 1909-10 undergoing a major refit

The text

'Gentleman. A meeting will be held in the Dome, at Bton on Wednesday next by Mrs Crissy Pankhurst. We hope to see a big audience of men to make things a bit livly. Please bring a weapon to defend yourselves with as the ladies use Dog whips. I am yours truly the secretary to the suffragetts [sic]. Doors open at 7.30'.

Crude coding

• Message written upside down, possibly to evade detection from post workers

• Use of euphemism: ‘make things a bit livly’

• Choice of image

• Ironic repositioning of writer as ‘secretary to the suffragetts’

Layers of violence

1. Threat of physical violence

‘please bring a weapon’

Layers of violence

2. Defaced postcard

Layers of violence

3. Use of diminutive

‘Mrs Crissy Pankhurst’

‘the ladies’

Irony as textual violence?

• Writer seeks to adapt and subvert the object in order to re-describe and therefore weaken his opponents

• Yet he needs ‘a big audience of men… as the ladies use Dog whips’

• Evidence of fear?

The coda• Christabel Pankhurst never appeared at the

Dome. No evidence any such event planned.

• Probably confused rumour from performance of pro-suffrage play performed in Banqueting Room of Royal Pavilion, ‘Man and Woman’, 5 May 1909

• Performance organised by more moderate Brighton and Hove Women’s Franchise Society

• Brighton Herald: ‘suffragists as opposed to suffragettes’

• No reports of any violence at event

Final ironies• Writer has attempted to subvert or distort the

‘meaning’ of the event and the postcard…

• … yet attempts to do this by organising a protest against an event without ‘meaning’

• This postcard is valuable material evidence of political male violence against women…

• …but also indicates much of this violence was by men who were oprganised yet ignorant of the spectrum of pro-suffrage organisations