1908 was a leap year—in more ways than one. The world seemed to be bounding ahead, ascending to new planes of possibility, and at unfathomable speed. In 1908 Henry Ford produced his first Model-T automobile (price tag: $836) in Detroit. The first around-the-world car race, from New York to Paris via Alaska and Siberia, was held to wild acclaim. Wilbur Wright flew an aeroplane in France, demonstrating powered flight in Europe for the first time. Not to be outdone on home soil, French aviator Léon Delagrange made the world’s first flight with a female passenger, his girlfriend Thérèse Peltier. A long-distance radio message was transmitted for the first time from the Eiffel Tower, and, as if humanity recognised its terrifying hubris, the SOS distress signal became the international standard for calling for help.
Technological progress was shattering perspectives—one could see the ground from the sky, the centre from the outmost periphery—and so was human advancement. Elizabeth Garrett Anderson became the first woman in England to be elected as a municipal mayor. Edith Morley was made professor of English at University College, Reading—the first woman appointed to a chair at an English university. At Fort Myer, Virginia, Thomas Selfridge became the first person to die in a plane crash. (His pilot, Orville Wright, was injured but escaped from the wreckage.) Cincinnati Mayor Mark Breith stood before city council and told his constituents that women are not physically fit to operate automobiles, while New York City by-laws made it illegal for women to smoke in public. And demonstrating that tectonic shifts always have their casualties, an earthquake struck Messina, Italy, killing nearly eighty thousand people.
The world turned—crazing, cracking, racing forwards, crawling back. Welcome to the Belle Époque, what one historian has called ‘the long summer garden party of the Edwardian afternoon’.1 Or a Mad Hatter’s picnic, depending on your point of view.
Dora Meeson Coates was pleased with her entry to the NUWSS poster competition. She had seized the political and cultural moment, finding a way to express—in terms that made complete sense to her—the place of women in the home, the community, the state and the empire. Her entry illustrated both her broadbrush analysis of the British political landscape in which she was now a player, and also her own fine-point experience of measured independence, beginning to break free of the roles of dutiful daughter and loyal helpmeet she had always (willingly) played. Paradoxically, the central figure in her poster was a mother: the one female responsibility she had never undertaken. Dora wove into her image all the ‘repressions, anxieties, projections and desires’ of her life as a woman and her position as a pseudo-citizen. Her poster was a ‘political argument in a visual form’, as the art historians might one day put it, the aesthetic embodiment of ‘social and psychic needs’.2
Her entry was called ‘Political Help’. A woman, plainly dressed in blouse and apron, her hair swept up in a simple bun, stands upright. Commanding, almost disdainful. She stares down at six little boys, if not her own children, then certainly her charges. She is dishing out the dinner from a huge bowl, on which is written Political help. The boys are holding out their bowls to her, pleading, please ma’am, can we have some? On their little white bibs are the names of those groups beseeching the woman—all women—for more political assistance: the Primrose League, the Independent Labour Party, the Women’s Liberal Association, the Social Democratic Federation, and the Trade Unions. The Liberal Federation is closest to the woman, with his hand on her arm. She stares him down. Along the top of the poster in large lettering, the caption: Mrs John Bull. ‘Now you greedy boys. I shall not give you any more until I have helped myself’. The woman holds her own bowl against her hip. On the side is etched Votes for women.
It was one of the first times that a political woman had been depicted in realist terms: neither allegorical—a goddess, a nymph, a fairy: tropes favoured by the suffragists—nor a parody—the misogynist ‘humour’ long pursued by the Antis, where women demanding their rights were represented as fat (or skinny), gossiping, ugly and aggressive.3 In simple, elegant, straightforward black and white lines, Dora had reproduced a real woman’s opinion of her compromised situation from a real woman’s perspective.
The fact that Dora had used an idealised mother as her central motif was of its time: the concept of motherhood was absolutely germane to the suffrage cause. Socialist Ethel Snowden wrote that the point of the struggle was not to cast off maternal duties but to incorporate the glorious responsibilities and deep suffering of motherhood into the idea of citizenship.4 Motherhood was a political concept, a radical, life-affirming, transformative concept that would improve and enrich humanity, rather than hold back half the population. The suffragist claim was not simply for equality along conventional liberal lines, the inherent right of the individual in a democratic state to a share in governance. They believed their vote would make the world a better place.5 It was precisely the ‘mother-heartedness’ of women—their spiritual purity, their righteous regard for the value of life—that made them fit to be citizens.
Suffragists were quick to point out that ‘mother’ was defined in its broadest sense: the term was a signifier, not an embodied proof of reproductive function. Mrs Bramwell Booth, in charge of the Salvation Army’s evangelical work in England from 1904, explained the notion in a speech entitled ‘Mothers of the Empire’:
[Any woman] whose heart yearns to protect the weak, to instruct the ignorant…to rear noble characters amongst the youth of our nation…though she may not, herself, have brought children into the world…is a mother.6
There was a defining difference between men and women, argued the feminists, and that was women’s ability to create, nurture and express love. Love was key to the advancement of humanity, the solution to the needs and sins and sorrows which cry aloud for relief and remedy, as Mrs Bramwell Booth put it. This was the public motherhood, the civic motherhood, that would purify and redeem the world. Through their innate sex superiority, mother-citizens would create love where there was hate, peace where there was war. They would also cleanse the world in a racial sense, enlightening the ‘ignorant’, turning that which was black pearly white.7
That was the politics. There may also have been a psychological dimension to the cult of the ideal mother. Olive Banks, an early feminist sociologist, observed that women drawn to the suffrage movement often had emotionally precarious relationships with their own mothers, feeling them to be cold, distant and discouraging of their daughters’ ambitions. ‘Rejection or perceived rejection’ of the mother, concluded Banks, played some part in their identification as suffragists.8 Banks found that the psychic impetus towards political activism was more likely to be a rebellion against a forbidding mother than an autocratic father. Except in the case where feminist mothers raised feminist daughters, it was the disapproving mother that created a ‘drive for independence’. It may have been patriarchal social, political and legal structures that confined women as second-class citizens, but it was often women themselves who policed the boundaries of acceptable female behaviour.
Dora Meeson Coates’ depiction of the groundbreaking moment when England’s women put their own need for political sustenance above the nourishment, happiness and expectations of those who had traditionally relied on their steadfast assistance was a hit. She took out first place in the poster competition. The artwork was reproduced in the NUWSS journal, WOMEN’S FRANCHISE, on 30 January 1908. Shortly afterwards, Dora would be invited to co-illustrate a book to be published by the ASL. BEWARE! A WARNING TO SUFFRAGISTS was written by Cecily Hamilton and illustrated by Mary Lowndes, Hedley Charleston and the woman signing her work as DMC. The book was told in rhyme, with a striking moral coda: winding up in Holloway for the crime of suffrage activism was no worse a fate than being sentenced to Sit at home from morn to night / and cook and cook with all your might.9
But it was to the WFL, not the NUWSS or the WSPU, that Dora had pledged her allegiance. She set up the Kensington branch of the WFL and lent her studio to Charlotte Despard for meetings, while visiting the studios of other artists she now met through the movement, recruiting them for the ASL. In particular, she made friends with Emily Ford, a Quaker-raised woman almost twenty years her senior. Ford had been campaigning for women’s suffrage since the mid 1880s, and her home had long been a meeting ground, as Dora realised with delight, for artists, suffragists, people who did things.10 ‘Trousers’ was fascinated by the older woman’s huge canvasses…Michelangelesque in conception. Ford combined her large, soaring images of Pre-Raphaelite heroines with smaller-scale works, drawings that could be used for suffrage propaganda. Ford’s work demonstrated that Dora didn’t have to make a choice between her oil painting and her graphic design: both could be put to good use.
But it wasn’t enough, Dora came to realise, for an artwork to be hung in a drawing room and admired by a coterie of dilettantes. It had to move people, mobilise people, enrage and inspire people. And to do that it must be seen. But, at a time when the chief media—the mainstream press—was largely controlled by the vested interests of property and privilege, how to broadcast the message?
An army of volunteers was deployed to advertise the various meetings and demonstrations of the WSPU and WFL. They stood on street corners and at tube stations and distributed handbills. They chalked announcements on pavements. They posted bills on walls and public infrastructure. They hired boats and rowed down the Thames, holding up posters and placards.
Dora was up for this activity, but avoided doing anything really militant because Coates would have been so upset had I landed myself in prison.11 Coates was only risk-averse, however, not tyrannical. He supported his wife’s involvement with the movement, so his compromise was to accompany her on nocturnal missions rather than either forbid them or sit at home worrying. The most risky thing we did together, confessed Dora with perhaps a hint of regret, was pasting notices on public hoardings and pillar boxes in Chelsea under the cover of night, he holding the paste and keeping watch, I rapidly doing the pasting. It was a dark deed done at midnight, and quite futile. The posters were invariably taken down by morning.
Dora recognised that she was fortunate. She was aware that the other Chelsea men artists were always conservative and therefore not partisans of the suffrage movement. In this, she lamented, they did not differ from the average male. And her husband—usually too dreamy and wrapped up in his art to be much of a practical person—even managed to surprise her. Joining her in support of Mrs Despard at one of her regional speaking gigs, he responded to hecklers with an uncharacteristic desire to punch the interrupters who jeered while we were speaking. (When Mrs Despard was stoned by hooligans, even Dora’s father was converted to the woman suffrage cause. How could he deny a fine type of woman like Mrs Despard a vote while giving it to stone-throwing hooligans, he wanted to know?)
Summer. Every occasion of note in England happened in summer. The Ashes started at the end of May. The Derby was held at Epsom on the first Saturday in June, and then there was Wimbledon. This year the Olympic Games—still in 1908 a fairly new institution—would be held in London in July. The many Australians living in London knew why. For all but a few months of the year, the weather was nothing but dreary grey skies or short days of peasoup fog. (The literal and figurative fog of pessimism under which the British existed—their general readiness to be gloomy—inspired Lady Eugenia Doughty, a Melbourne journalist living in London in 1907, to write a self-help book entitled THE CHEERFUL WAY.12 It was her attempt to imbue her English neighbours with the optimistic temperament that days, months and years of unbroken sunshine, she believed, had instilled in the Australians.)
This summer the NUWSS was off the bit. The Mud March had merely been a prelude. The next event would be a public relations triumph. An event that Londoners could enjoy; not simply a curiosity, but a performance, a grand entertainment. The English loved pageantry. State rituals were always well attended; the labour movement put on parades, with their marvellous trade union banners and marching bands. It was the government that the suffragists were contesting, not the people. If the people wanted cake, why not give them lashings of lovely rich, moist, colourful cake?
A date was set: after the spring rains; before Wimbledon and the Olympics. (The Ashes were being played in Australia in 1908, so there would be no competition for spectators there.) The Great Procession of the NUWSS would be held on Saturday 13 June. Not to be outdone by Mrs Garrett’s old stagers, Emmeline Pankhurst announced that the WSPU would hold its own ‘monster meeting’ the following week, on Sunday 21 June. The Olympics would not be the only games in town.
In April 1908, a passing of the political baton made the need for action all the more pressing. On 3 April, Henry Campbell-Bannerman retired from parliament due to ill health. He had recently become the longest continuously serving member of the House of Commons, earning him the title Father of the House. Three weeks later, the political patriarch died. He was succeeded as prime minister by Herbert Asquith, with David Lloyd George taking over as chancellor of the exchequer. Thirty-four-year-old Winston Churchill was promoted to the cabinet.
The reshuffle did not bode well for the suffrage movement. Asquith, as the suffragists knew only too well, was a lifelong opponent of our cause.13 American suffragist Alice Ives predicted that with Asquith at the helm, Britain was about to endure one of the firmest, rock-bottomed, steelriveted governments on earth.14 Dora Montefiore dubbed the new prime minister Balsquith, for it mattered not whether he figures at the head of a Liberal or Tory Government.15
But Asquith’s ascendancy was a catalyst as well as a curse. Will the Liberal Party give votes to women? was the question on all radical lips that summer. From an impotent moan, observed Ives across the Atlantic, it became a battlecry. If Asquith was deaf to the demands of disenfranchised women, then those women would just have to shout louder.
It may have been Mary Lowndes who first proposed the idea of fusing the mediaeval pageantry the English public adored with the women’s political demonstrations to which they were becoming accustomed.16 As much of a washout as the Mud March had been, it had made clear the value of the procession as political tool: a PR double-whammy. Huge numbers could witness the spectacle of women marching for their rights, but even more would read about it in the days that followed, as the press was spellbound by the event.
The new technology of press photography synched perfectly with the new tactic of visual display, so it was a win–win: the dailies sold sensational copy and the women sold their message to a larger audience than could ever be reached by placards and handbills. Even more potently, photography meant that the suffragists could be seen for who they were—young, old, modest, flamboyant, professional, respectable—not as the press had conventionally caricatured them.
Perhaps most importantly, the procession could be outright fun. If suffrage meetings were prone to be dull and worthy—long speeches followed by the earnest passing of resolutions—the procession would be joyful, exuberant, light-hearted and thrilling. The chance for women to ‘experience their collectivity in the process of presenting it to the public gaze’.17 As English novelist Rachel Ferguson wrote, the Suffrage Campaign was our Eton and Oxford, our regiment, our ship, our cricket match.18 In their activism the women found mateship. In mateship they found their collective voice.
The government had issued the challenge: show us a general demand for suffrage among ordinary women. Even Asquith had promised to withdraw his opposition if it could be shown that large numbers of women wanted the vote. The procession, then, would be like a walking petition that took hours to deliver (and for the NUWSS it went without saying that the method of delivery was designed to be peaceful). If all went to plan, a procession could both reflect and influence public opinion.
For the 13 June march, the skills of female artists would be utilised as never before. The women of the ASL set to creating a magnificent war chest of embroidered banners, drawing on traditional feminine handicrafts but putting them to devastating political effect. Mary Lowndes spurred the members of her league to use their dignified womanly skills while making unwomanly demands.19
Political craft was not new to women, of course: they had designed and made the trade union banners that were a feature of late-nineteenth-century public demonstrations. But in that case, male union representatives were using women’s creative labour to produce male narratives of power and dominance. Political help. And now, rallied Lowndes, into public life comes trooping the feminine. If the union banners had demonstrated unity, the suffrage banners would showcase diversity. The five hundred banners stitched and sewn by the ASL members that spring displayed the full miscellany of women’s regional, occupational and historical identities. On silk backgrounds appliquéd with fine thread were the names of urban, provincial and rural suffrage organisations (Manchester, Cardiff, Newport), professional affiliations (Writers’ League, Potters’ Guild, Midwives’ Association) and historical role models (Joan of Arc, Jenny Lind, Lucy Stone). In their magnitude and multiplicity, the banners would demonstrate both the broad base of the support for the suffrage, and give every woman her place.
Some time in that spring of 1908, Dora Meeson Coates decided she would not only assist in the ASL’s group work of cutting and cross-hatching—she would also contribute her own banner to the procession. But how to reflect her place in the parade of female endeavour and aspiration? As an Australian woman, she had the vote that her English sisters coveted. Could this be her way of fitting in and standing out? Could she make a heroine banner, but one that reflected her place as an outlander in the land of outlanders?
In the end, Dora realised that everything she needed was already in her professional, emotional and national tool kit. She would design and paint a very large banner for the Commonwealth. She would stretch the motif of political help in a different direction from her previous depiction of the maternal provider. One element of her winning poster would remain the same: the figure of a ‘mother’ would be central to the composition and the message. But this time there would not be greedy ‘sons’ but an uppity ‘daughter’. For this work, she would not use a realist black-and-white illustrative style, but adopt the allegorical motif that was so popular in contemporary painting.
In Melbourne in 1895 she’d won a poster prize with her depiction of Minerva painted from a tall barmaid in a hired gown. But this new work would not be a fly-by-night poster, to be pasted on a hoarding and ripped down by dawn. It wouldn’t be reproduced on a postcard and sold for a penny. This artwork would be on a magnificent scale, like those she saw in Emily Ford’s studio. And it would also be practical, able to be put to use: a great warhorse of a painting. Dora rejected Mary Lowndes’ advice that the banners should be no more than four feet six by six feet six (1.4 x 2 metres), which was as large as Lowndes presumed a woman could carry should there be any wind.20 She also flouted Lowndes’ edict that the banners should be less of a painting and more of a flag. Dora’s banner would not be stitched and sewn: it would be magnificently, proudly painted. She would go one step further than the ASL banners that used traditional feminine skills to challenge the terms of femininity. She would appropriate a male artistic paradigm—oil painting—to make her argument about female desire.
If the scale would be grand, the materials would be necessarily frugal. She found a bolt of hessian, coated it in an olive green paint (green—symbolic of hope), lined it with red woollen twill and cut the bottom edge into three points, a mirror of the trident that would be held by the tallest of the two figures in the piece: Britannia, England, Mother. Beside Britannia, leaning forwards, her arm outstretched, open-palmed, towards the stony-faced, resolute woman, would be Minerva, Australia, Daughter. Take my hand, Mother, join me. I’ll show you the way.
Dora’s design rejected the ever-present assumption that she should recoil from her colonial background and accept the superiority complex of empire. It had taken her a while, but she saw now that she had something unique to offer. She need not follow Lowndes and Ford, Despard and Hamilton. She could lead them. She need not listen to Asquith. She could speak to him. Her banner would be beautiful, but challenging. A celebration of imperial affinity, and an uncomfortable reminder of the topsy-turvy affront of colonial pre-eminence. Distinctive, but appropriately so, given its message:
Commonwealth of Australia. Trust the Women Mother As I Have Done.
Dora might not have it in her nature or the limits of her marriage to stand on a balcony before a cheering crowd, or on a bench in the lobby of the Commons, and trumpet the achievements of her homeland, as Nellie Martel and Dora Montefiore had done. But she could, in one short line painted above the figures of two inextricably bound goddesses, tell the Liberal Party of Britain everything they needed to know.
Australia has done it—so should you. You hypocritical, arrogant bastards.
Women and the vote. Great march through London. Procession of 10,000 Women. Huge Albert Hall gathering.21
The headlines said it all. Saturday 13 June 1908 was a tremendous success for the NUWSS. In glorious sunshine, thousands upon thousands of women (one observer put the number at fifteen thousand) turned out to march shoulder to shoulder from the Thames Embankment to the Albert Hall, where with music and flying colours, a proud and victorious army swung into the hall, conquering and to conquer. Banners lined the walls (Dora’s among them) and bundles of summer flowers were deposited at the feet of Millicent Garrett Fawcett until I was almost buried in them.22 Mrs Garrett thanked Mary Lowndes for the stunning array of banners, whose design, correct heraldry and arrangement had been the centrepiece of the procession. Lowndes had also decorated the Albert Hall so that it was a fairy place of beauty. It was the mistake of the press, she said, to think that abuse and misrepresentation can kill a movement. The procession had been a triumph of management, artistry and ardour. We converted the scoffing, concluded another participant, we won over the half-hearted. We successfully appealed to those who must see the beauty in a principle before they accept its truth.23
It was true that the press was charmed. The MORNING POST allowed that the typical man on the street—fair-minded, even-tempered—would, if consulted, readily admit that the demonstration was one of the best organised, most orderly and most picturesque that has ever been seen in the Metropolis. The procession was a study in precision and planning, no rambling excursion of the ‘shrieking sisterhood’.24 Another paper declared it was:
unanimously voted a splendid success not only by the ten thousand women who participated in it, but also by the hundreds of thousands of men and women who witnessed the procession in the streets.25
All reports devoted columns of print to describing the banners that had been the centrepiece of the day’s proceedings. Leading the procession were Mrs Garrett, Lady Balfour (wife of the former Tory prime minister) and Mrs Ethel Snowden (author and wife of a prominent socialist MP), marching behind the NUWSS banner which bore the inscription: The franchise the keystone of our liberty. Behind them were the alphabetically arranged provincial branches of the NUWSS, followed by the professions and working women, arranged by occupation, including Ladies of Title, Doctors, School Teachers, Power Loom Weavers, Actresses, Barmaids, Typists, Clerks, Home Makers and Journalists. University graduates wore their academic regalia. The Women’s Freedom League walked en masse, led by Charlotte Despard, Edith How-Martyn and Teresa Billington-Greig. They marched behind a banner bearing the name of Holloway Prison and the sentence Stone walls do not a prison make. It was undeniably a unique procession, wrote the POST, noteworthy, in particular, for its sane and vigorous appeal to the intellect as well as feast for the eyes.
Almost every report made special note of one banner in particular. The representatives of the daughter colony of Australia, noted the MORNING POST, presented an appeal founded on practice. ‘Trust the Women, Mother, as I have done’. From the picture gallery on display at the Embankment, the PARINGDON ADVERTISER singled out The Commonwealth of Australia, with a most effective motto. The LANCASHIRE DAILY noted the striking banner depicting Australia appealing to Britannia to ‘Trust the Women, Mother, as I have done’.26 A number of outlets reported that a numerous body of women marched behind the Australian banner.27 One paper gave the Australian banner its own subheading within a full-page report: Commonwealth Advice. Noting that the procession was world-wide in its scope, the paper remarked on the Australian delegates who held aloft a flag with the legend: ‘Trust the Women, Mother, as I have done’. The Australian section was followed by the League of Self-Supporting Women of New York. (The only other foreign contingents to be named were the Indian ladies in their native costumes, the Irish Suffrage Society and the Edinburgh Society.28) The SUNDAY OBSERVER reproduced images of six of the banners: the WFL’s Holloway banner, four of the historical heroine banners—Florence Nightingale, Black Agnes of Dunbar, Elizabeth Fry and Sarah Siddons—and the Commonwealth of Australia banner. The application of this banner and its text, explained a caption, is that in Australia Women’s Suffrage is in vogue. The TELEGRAPH used another interesting wording: from the Commonwealth of Australia was sent a handsome banner depicting young Australia appealing to Britannia to ‘Trust the women, mother, as I have done’.29 Another paper put it this way: Australia, which gives votes to women, sent a banner expressing the hope that England will follow in her footsteps.30
Thus Dora Meeson Coates’ personal contribution to the pageantry was transformed into a diplomatic missive. Did she squirm in this limelight? Was the responsibility of representing her nation welcome? Had she, perhaps, been asked to craft a nationally representative banner by someone with one foot in government? Sir John Cockburn, who had been on the suffrage journey since the 1897 federal convention, had been living in London as a sort of unofficial ambassador since 1901.31 So…perhaps. Dora did later say she made the banner for the Commonwealth.
Whatever else we did or did not do on last week’s famous Saturday afternoon, wrote ‘One Who Marched’ in a report to the WOMAN WORKER journal, we women won the heart of a great city.32
In creating a distinctive and disruptive banner that spoke to and from her own experience, Trousers had not set out to win any prizes. But she did anyway. In a competition held after the procession, Dora’s work was selected as one of the six most popular banners. The banners named on the winning card, WOMEN’S FRANCHISE announced, were Cambridge Alumnae, Elizabeth Fry, Artists’ League, Australia, Holborn, Scriveners’.33 Australia: the People’s Choice. Dora Meeson Coates was now someone in London who counted.