Suffrage and Poetry: Radical Women's Voices by Deborah Tyler-Bennett - Suffragette Design - Research-led Brief

I began reading poetry section of 'The Women's Suffrage Movement: New feminist perspectives' to find more details about the poems, their effect and what they represented.

'Links between the fights for enfranchisement and women's poetry concentrating on themes of disenfranchisement are still overlooked by many current anthologists and critics.' - p117

They are considered 'visual artifacts (such as those produced by the suffrage atelier)' but people discuss less the actual impact of both poets who were both pro and anti-suffrage. - p117 This will be the purpose of the exhibition, to tell these unspoken stories and their impact.

'Poetry was read avidly by women for it's 'subversive' challenging qualities.' -p117 - are the ways to make comparable subversive design.

In 'A Woman's Answer' Adelaide Anne Procter creates a female voice who responds to her lovers complaint that her love is not exclusive. Her reply 'proves' her love, but also exposes that romantic affection is just a construct. A lot of poetry was written like this in the 19th century - where an outwardly conventional plot reveals thinly disguised subversion. I could begin to think about ways that this could be visually represented p118

'Traditional educationalists often regarded poetry as a dangerous form' p119 and that it would jeopardise domestic duties.p120

'For middle-class readers the pleasures of poetry dealing with violent emotion (when conduct books and parental authority advocated a repression of 'self') is obvious' - it has subversive appeal and 'pleasurable wickedness' p120

'Beyond the bars I see her move,

A mystery in blue and green,

As though across the prison yard

The spirit of spring had been.' 

- Laura Grey 'To D.R. in Holloway, Holloway Jingles (1912)

'Poems provided a means of demonstrating solidarity, and also of communicating and responding to emotions created by incarceration.' p121 They depicted women being trapped - 'either in prison or within the confines of their gender.' 

Eva Gore-Booth was the most recognised poet involved in the suffrage movement. She used experience of suffrage campaigns and her personal pacifism (as a member of the Women's Peace Crusade). She also advocated rights for working class women (which was often ignored previously by the suffrage movement) and founded the Manchester's Women Textile Workers' Union. She also had a lesbian relationship with Esther Roper which heavily influenced her work.

Taken from Wikepdia:

'Her widely discussed sexuality in later years is never declared but her poetry reflects it quite overtly. In her Triumph of Maeve she makes a minor scene between Maeve and a wise woman almost erotic. While in her legend of Deirdre she subverts the masculine nationalist identity of Ireland's heroic tales. In her early work she uses the same poetic devises that her male counterparts do such as writing a love poem to the goddess of Nature. In these she does not take a male voice though. She is writing love verse from one woman to another. Eva Gore-Booth was also one of a group of editors of the magazine Urania that published issues three times a year from 1916 to 1940. It was a feminist magazine that reprinted stories and poems from all over the world with editorial comment. A lot of prominent New Woman authors including Mona Caird were involved with the project. Each issue declared that sex was an accident and there were no intrinsic characteristics of the male or the female. Many New Woman issues were discussed such as gender equality, suffrage and marriage but Eva Gore-Booth went further than that to write poetry about women loving women. Even the title of the magazine Urania can refer to heavenly or Uranian another term for homosexual. Eva and Esther allowed their names to be used in connection with the periodical and Eva was considered to be an inspiration for Urania. - Research Urania

Having looked through the book, it shows illustrations that accompanying the poems - drawn at the time. This gave me the idea that I could potentially modernise these illustrations for the exhibition guides, thinking about ways these traditional drawings could be retold.