A Game of Pank-A-Squith: Remembering Women’s Social and Political Union in Sally Heathcote: Suffragette

by: , March 30, 2023

Introduction

Mary Talbot, Kate Charlesworth and Bryan Talbot’s Sally Heathcote: Suffragette (2014) is a work of historical fiction, which places a fictional character, its eponymous protagonist, within the feminist struggle for women’s right to vote in Edwardian Britain. The work celebrates the movement’s achievements and pays tribute to the participants’ heroism and sacrifice. It also reflects contemporary concerns about the suffragists’ relationships to other political movements, and their participation in the national and imperial politics of the period. Based on extensive research, and representing historical events with great accuracy, the work delves into and shows the complexity of that history. As a work of fiction, it does not aim simply to provide information about the past; rather, by making readers privy to the main character Sally’s contingent perspective and innermost thoughts and feelings, it facilitates what Richard Slotkin (2005) has described as intense affective engagement with the struggle in which she takes part. Identification with Sally places the reader in terms of the conflicts around political affiliation, class, and national belonging within the movement.

The book was published at the centenary of the peak of the British suffrage movement, and four years before the hundredth anniversary of the movement’s success: 1918 saw the passing of the Representation of the People Act, which enfranchised women in Britain for the first time. [1] As Julie Gottlieb observes, anniversaries, especially centenaries, are moments of reflection and projection, offering opportunities to revisit historical landmarks and ‘to establish the narrative and/or change the conversation, to safeguard memories and to further define public memory, and to valorise and legitimise. Anniversaries can also inspire, motivate and mobilise’ (2019: 160). In the UK, celebrations of centenaries of key moments in the campaign for the vote have taken place throughout the first two decades of the 21st century, starting with the celebrations for the hundred years from the funding of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) in 2003, reaching a crescendo in 2018, and continuing into the third decade of the century, as the country prepares for the centenary of the Equal Franchise Act of 1928. Next to public commemorations, such as lectures, erections of monuments, exhibitions, and radio shows, organised by state bodies, memorial organisations and cultural organisations, these decades saw many works of art and popular culture that thematised the campaign for the vote, such as theatre performances, novels, and films. [2]

The memory of the campaign for the vote in Britain has been contested from the moment its main aim was achieved and throughout the 20th century, always revisited in conversation with the political concerns and sensibilities of the different eras. Issues of contestation have included: which organisations and practices have contributed more towards the vote; which values and ideologies have motivated the movement and how do we relate to them from the distance of time; and, most importantly, who has the movement been for? The contemporary, centenary-induced, preoccupation with the suffrage campaign has raised these questions anew, in conversation, this time, with concerns about the role of feminism in the early 21st century. The commemorations and cultural products have prompted debates among historians and the general public not only about their historical accuracy, but also about their ethics and politics of representation (Crozier-De Rosa 2019: 9) [3], showing the role the arts play not only in mediating the memory of the feminist past but also in negotiating the meaning of feminism today, in a context where feminist aims and ideals intersect with those of other social justice movements (van den Elzen & Waaldijk 2021: 70).

This article examines how Sally Heathcote reproduces or challenges common tropes in cultural remembrances of the campaign for the vote. It starts from the premise that historical fiction has the power to affect changes in collective memory, as it creates a simulacrum of the historical world that ‘imaginatively recovers the indeterminacy of a past time,’ enabling the restoration of alternative or overlooked aspects of the past to produce counter-memories to the prevailing collective ones (Slotkin 2005: 226–231). From this basis, this article focuses on the work as an example of graphic historical fiction, that is, historical fiction in the medium of comics [4], with an eye on the role the affordances of the medium play in the way it remembers that social movement. For this, the analysis draws on a narratological framework in comics studies. It focuses on the role of space in the narrative for three reasons. The first owes to the centrality of space in the collective memory of the campaign for the vote. The second is owing to the importance of space as a narrative element in graphic narratives in general. Finally, the third reason lies in the emphasis placed on setting in Sally Heathcote itself, both as the representation of real-world places and in its symbolic function.

Narratologists and comics studies scholars alike observe that the concept of space has been generally undertheorised in the study of narrative (Bal 2009 [1985]: 134; Baetens & Frey 2015: 167, Ryan 2012; Ryan et al. 2016: 16). Notable exceptions are Mieke Bal (2009 [1985]) and Marie-Laure Ryan et al. (2016), who agree in emphasising the double importance of space in narrative as the setting of the action—which may be thematised, that is, acquire emotional or symbolic meaning—and as a structure that allows the development of plot through the movement—literal or metaphorical—of the characters. In the study of the graphic narrative, however, space has gained much attention, both as the representation of the story space and as the arrangements of space on the page (Baetens & Frey 2015; D’Arcy 2020; Kukkonen 2013; Mikkonen 2017).

Jan Baetens and Hugo Frey argue that ‘space (as a dimension of world making)’ is ‘perhaps the most visible medium-specific feature’ (2015: 167). The dramatic importance of space of comics for Baetens & Frye results from the fact that a drawn setting conveys more information than a verbal description [5] and its influence on the character’s behavior is more immediately visible, which can easily make space a main agent in a story (2015: 173). They also emphasise that the spatial arrangement of elements on a comics page has more functions than that of conveying information about the setting, such as visualising temporal relationships and creating mood via the dynamic interactions between the segmented structure of the page and the fictional space (Baetens & Frye 2015: 167–174). Adding to the above, Karin Kukkonen emphasises the medium’s ability to thematise space (2013: 63). Referring to Ryan, who argues that ‘[t]he lived experience of space offers a particularly rich source of thematisation’ (2012), Kukkonen explains how this happens in comics: the visual representation of characters’ bodies in space ‘transports’ readers, that is, it ‘evokes readers’ embodied simulations of being in the storyworld,’ makes them ‘experience the emotional involvement of the character’ and guides them across the page (2013: 55). Thus, space in comics can be experienced by the reader as carrying symbolic meaning: being, for example, closed and confining or closed and safe, open and freeing or open and dangerous, enabling belonging or inviting hostility, and so forth.

Although my analysis largely follows these narratological approaches, it is also informed by approaches comics scholars have borrowed from art history and theatre and film studies, specifically an iconographic approach (Gray & Horton 2021) when I trace connections between specific images in the book and other images from art or press media to give an interpretation of their meaning, and mise en scène (D’Arcy 2020) when my attention is focused on the relationship between objects, background and characters in a specific scene.

To explain the role of space in Sally Heathcote, it is useful to first understand the board game Pank-A-Squith. In a moment of respite from militant suffragist action and the horrors of the subsequent imprisonment, Sally is shown playing the game in a country house with friends and comrades (see Figure 1). Designed in the early 1900s by the WSPU, Pank-A-Squith was sold to help raise funds for their campaign. It is named after two people of central importance in the story of the struggle for women’s suffrage in Britain: Emmeline Pankhurst, the leader of the WSPU, and Herbert Asquith, British Prime Minister between 1908 and 1916. The board game bears the form of a spiral, on which players (represented by tokens in the form of suffragettes) are expected to move from the outermost square, which in this game represents home, toward the centre, a square representing the Houses of Parliament (Stewart 2011). The squares between represent a series of events in which suffragettes are involved, such as rock throwing, speaking to crowds of people, being arrested, and refusing to eat while in prison, as well as show the spaces where these actions take place (mostly parts of London).

The board game functions as a metaphor for the graphic narrative itself, which follows the suffragettes as they move toward political representation. The connection is supported by the similarity in the drawing styles of the narrative and the game, as the former makes visual reference to the latter: the drawing of both the novel and the board game creates realistic representations of real-life places to render them easily recognisable and draws from widely circulated photographs of the events that take place, all the while maintaining a light-heartedness that makes for an easy read/play. There is, however, a more structural similarity as well: as the women gathered around the board game in the drawing room play with tokens that represent themselves—the real-life suffragettes—the board shows the storyworld where their lives and activism take place. The game thereby shows the double function of space in the narrative: it is the backdrop for the suffragettes’ actions, but it is also what motivates and structures these actions, what makes them desirable and possible.

This article is structured around these two aspects of space. A first section sets the context by locating the graphic narrative within a tradition of cultural remembrances of the suffrage campaign that centres on the WSPU and their prioritisation of visibility through militancy. This is followed by the two main analytical sections. The first discusses the predominance of images showing suffragettes claiming public space. It addresses space as the setting for action, mainly, looking at how the representation of real-life spaces and their referential and symbolic function builds a storyworld that includes national and imperial politics that remain implicit in the text. The second section looks at space as that which enables the characters’ movement, literally and metaphorically. Sally’s story is structured around movement from relative confinement, poverty, neglect and abuse toward relative comfort, freedom of movement, solidarity, and equality. The space that frames this movement plays an important role in centring other struggles of women at the time, most importantly the socialist struggle for work for all and for decent work conditions, which are otherwise more marginal in the suffrage campaign narrative.

Figure 1. A game of Pank-A-Squith, 98

 

Remembering the Women’s Social & Political Union

To explore the ways Sally Heathcote reproduces or challenges mainstream memories of the women’s suffrage movement in Britain and how this relates to contemporary concerns about the state and aims of feminism, it is first necessary to understand the WSPU. In the beginning of the book Sally works as a maid in service to Emmeline Pankhurst, that union’s leader. The story follows Sally as her education next to Pankhurst and other suffragists—together with her experience of injustice in the form of sexual harassment, poor work conditions (when she works under other employers) and poverty—radicalises her and motivates her to join the WSPU as an employee and member.

The WSPU became the most notorious suffrage organisation when, with the slogan ‘Deeds not Words,’ they started engaging in militant tactics, from forms of civil disobedience to illegal actions including arson and vandalism. In this way, the WSPU was driven by an ideology more radical than that of other organisations. Working together, though never formally affiliated with the Independent Labour Party (ILP), it supported trade unionism and fought for equal rights for women at work and at home (Purvis 2013: 576–577).

By following the WSPU, the book reproduces a common image of the suffrage movement and its members, whose collective memory has been dominated by that union. The WSPU, however, only comprised a small fraction of the wider movement. As Red Chidgey explains, while the term suffragette was originally used for ‘the women-only politics of the WSPU’ as a way ‘to differentiate their brand of confrontational, daring action from the constitutional suffragists, male and female, who were part of the established National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS),’ it now ‘operates as the common-sense signifier to invoke the whole Votes for Women campaign, and very little is publicly remembered about the constitutional suffragist campaigner’ (2018: 66). Furthermore, as Chidgey has also observed, ‘while historians continue to debate the strategic importance of the WSPU’s militant tactics in finally securing women’s parliamentary enfranchisement, the suffragettes have nonetheless become established in collective memory as those directly responsible for winning votes for women’ (2018: 66).

This dominance has happened for a number of complex reasons. The first is the suffragettes’ own involvement in the documentation and curation of their heritage. Specifically, the memorial group the Suffragette Fellowship, founded in 1926 and active until the 1970s, created an archive of documents and memorabilia, which have been recovered and used by second-wave feminists to create historiographies and cultural representations of the first wave, but also by the media and the government in more recent memorialisations of the movement (Mayhall 1995; Chidgey 2018). The group, moreover, successfully campaigned for several public commemorations, including the erection of the Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst Memorial by Victoria Tower in 1930 (Crozier-De Rosa 2021: 7). Their power to control the memory of the suffragists can be exemplified by their involvement with the BBC as consultants on content related to the movement. In this capacity, they were able to influence ‘one of the largest purveyors of cultural heritage in the UK,’ making sure that the suffragettes’ importance was remembered (Chidgey 2018: 71).

A second reason for the centrality of the suffragettes in the memory of the movement is the relationship between so-called ‘first-wave’ and ‘second-wave’ feminism, not only in the UK, but also in the US, which also had a strong influence on UK politics. Feminists of the 1960s and 1970s, who used the wave metaphor to position themselves in relation to the feminists who fought for the vote, had a contradictory relationship with the suffragists. Due to the strong influence that the New Left and the civil rights movements of that time had on feminism, some second-wave feminists emphasised the misguidedness of the first wave’s focus on political equality and what they saw as meek reformism, as well as the prioritisation by some US suffragists of women’s rights over abolition. Wishing to establish a continuity with a heroic past despite the first wave’s limitations, some radical feminists turned their attention and appreciation toward the suffragettes, who ‘were revolutionary in their approach, long before the civil rights movement or the New Left had articulated a radical politics of their own’ (Henry 2004: 62). Furthermore, as Laura Mayhall has noted, in Britain and the US, second-wave feminists took former WSPU members’ narrated experiences as ‘the origin of knowledge about the women’s suffrage movement,’ so that ‘alternative narratives were simply subsumed by a meta-narrative in which authentic suffrage militancy became the precursor of radical feminism’ (1995: 320–321).

Another context in which the WSPU has dominated the memorialisation of the suffrage campaign is British state politics. From the 1930s onwards, representatives of the state ‘hijacked’ the figure of Emmeline Pankhurst and transformed her from a revolutionary to someone representing a distinctly English way of making political change through gradual reform. This resulted partly from Pankhurst’s own stance during World War I, which was to cease all feminist action to redirect women’s efforts into supporting Britain during the war. Her conservative turn around that time, moreover, reconciled her with her former political opponents, while the fact that, by 1930, the Russian Revolution served as ‘the barometer by which political radicalism would be measured,’ led to Pankhurst’s political agitation being redefined as acceptable in comparison (Mayhall 1999: 6). Since then, suffragette activism has been framed as direct action and a step toward progress, and its memorialisation is used to celebrate parliamentary democracy in the UK (Chidgey 2018: 67–84).

In the past decade, the memory of the suffrage movement and of the role of the WSPU in it have acquired new relevance, due to the political context and recent historical research. The public commemorations of the suffrage centenary have shown ‘a concerted effort … to turn attention away from the divisions inherent within feminism—past and present—and towards the issue of women voting and standing for parliament more generally’ (Crozier-De Rosa 2021: 28), and public celebrations often paid attention to constitutional and militant suffragists together. This resulted from the need to motivate women and minorities, who were underrepresented in politics and showed a higher level of apathy towards elections, to participate more in British political life (Crozier-De Rosa 2021) and to fight back and present a united front in the context of a transnational backlash against feminism (Gottlieb 2019). However, in art and popular culture much more attention has been paid to the suffragettes, perhaps due to their stories’ amenability to sensationalism. At the same time, political activists again have turned to the memory of suffragettes’ protest actions as ‘an ethical reminder of protest within a time of austerity and increased inequities’ (Chidgey 2018: 4).

An important additional perspective on the suffrage movement at the time has been brought forth by feminist historians who, at the turn of the century, produced non-heroic histories of that movement (van den Elzen & Waaldijk 2021). As Sophie van den Elzen and Berteke Waaldijk argue, these contemporary historians have challenged previous historiographical work that imagined a universal first wave feminism leaning on narratives centring white middle-class perspectives at the expense of the perspectives of other women, such as working-class women, women of colour, and women in the British colonies (2021). They have, moreover, proposed interventions for ameliorating these histories, such as foregrounding the complicity of suffrage activists with nationalist and imperialist agendas, restoring the stories of the women hitherto excluded and, more importantly, questioning the very image ‘of the autonomous enlightened Western feminist’ as predicated on these exclusions (van den Elzen & Waaldijk 2021: 72). Although these inclusive histories do not constitute the norm, argue van den Elzen & Waaldijk, they reflect a greater societal and political change: the aims and ideals of feminists from the late 20th century until today have become more diverse because they have been formulated at the intersections with other social movements, such as postcolonial, decolonial and anti-globalisation movements, civil rights movements, movements for sexual liberation, and environmental justice movements (2021: 70). This knowledge, moreover, has gone beyond the confines of academic research, and today it is part of popular knowledge about feminism, partly due to historians’ interventions in the realm of collective memory (see also Gottlieb 2019: 159) and partly because they have been picked up in public debates about what it means to be a feminist (van den Elzen & Waaldijk 2021: 73–74).

In this context, there are two, difficult to reconcile, desires at play when revisiting the suffrage movement: the desire to imagine a unified feminist past in order to be inspired for collective action in the present, and the desire to be aware of the limitations of the past in order not to reproduce its failings. A focus on the WSPU, I argue, enables the satisfaction of both these desires, precisely thanks to the aforementioned contradictory ways the memory of the organisation has been framed in the 20th century, which allow it to simultaneously stand for the single-issue feminist struggle for parliamentary representation, and for a more inclusive feminism due to its mediation by second-wave feminism and the role working-class women played in the organisation (on which I will elaborate further below). Sally Heathcote, especially, strikes a delicate balance between foregrounding the WSPU’s heroism and just cause, but also bringing in the experience of at least one category or women hitherto marginalised in the mainstream histories of feminism. In the next two sections I will show how the graphic novel does this by combining a focus on images of suffragettes as dissenting women, claiming and disrupting public space, arrested or abused by police officers and prison guards, with the representation of Sally as a working-class woman affiliated with socialist political groups and distancing herself from British nationalism.

Space Invaders: Suffragettes in Public Space

The leadership of the WSPU, from the organisation’s early days, and increasingly after it moved from Manchester to London in 1906, used visibility as a tool in their struggle to occupy a central place in public affairs. To ensure this visibility, they not only adopted militant strategies—which was bound to invite press coverage and interference by the police—but also ‘linked the rhetoric and physical manifestation of their campaign to political landmarks,’ which ‘offered them a stage, while government buildings closed their doors’ (Kelly 2004: 330–331). To this were added the marches organised by the WSPU, by NUWSS (which competed with the WSPU for public attention), or by many suffrage organisations collectively—marches which were mostly peaceful, well organised and which presented a so-called feminine kind of military form (Kelly 2004: 344). The suffragettes’ occupation of public space ensured that their actions, often mediated by the press, turned into a spectacle or a pictorial narrative for the city’s consumption (Kelly 2004: 349–350). Even though spectacle ‘could not alone motivate political change … the persistence of reports and images, their ubiquity and eventually their predictability, paved the way to imagining marching women as citizens of the nation’ (Kelly, 2004: 329).

Sally Heathcote recreates these images, which were widely documented and reproduced through print media at the time, and remembered in subsequent invocations of the movement: women protesting, holding banners, being taken away by the police, or giving speeches inciting masses of people to rebellion. In some cases, the suffragettes appear en masse, to show the extent of the movement’s membership and popularity. In others, the focus is on individual women—sometimes Sally herself—to emphasise their rebelliousness, fierceness, and courage.

In these images, much emphasis is put on the claiming of public space. The book is teeming with representations of suffragettes protesting or giving speeches in public squares, parks and halls (such as Trafalgar Square and Hyde Park, Caxton Hall and the Royal Albert Hall in London, Woodhouse Moor in Leeds, and Haymarket in Newcastle), up on monuments (Nelson’s Column in London and the South African War Memorial in Newcastle), in front of public buildings (such as Buckingham Palace, Westminster Abbey and Downing Street), marching in the streets of London (during the Women’s Coronation Procession of 1911 and the march for Emily Wilding Davison’s funeral in 1913, for example), and ‘intruding’ in public buildings or meetings (for example, in the House of Commons, London, and the Free Trade Hall, Manchester). The representation of these spaces is realistic, giving ample information about the buildings, monuments, and the objects and people in and around them, including detailed drawings of people’s clothes and facial expressions, showing their class, mood, and attitude toward the activists. This detail invites the reader to relate to these images as accurate representations of historical reality.

They are, however, also thick with symbolism. Making use of the referential function of the real-world locations, as well as their previous representations in the media and material culture (as in Pank-A-Squith), they emphasise the significance of the suffrage campaign and the heroism of the women who were part of it. Such images show the spaces as the backdrop to the action, centring women as actors, marking the latter as ‘space invaders’ (Puwar 2004): trespassers in spaces where their bodies have not been demarcated as properly belonging. At the same time, they show the spaces as bearers of symbolic meaning with the power to affect the women’s actions.

 

Figure 2. Suffragettes in St Stephen’s Hall, 26.

 

This double role of space is evident in a scene that takes place in the Houses of Parliament, in which a group of suffragettes enters St Stephen’s Hall, the entrance to the House of Commons, to shout slogans for the cause until policemen drag them away. The page (see Figure 2) starts with a tier-sized panel with no border, which functions as a frame for the two tiers of smaller panels below, in which the action takes place. The framing panel is an overview of the Houses of Parliament and Westminster Bridge from afar without an indication of date, foregrounding the monument and what it represents as timeless, existing outside narrative time. The panels that follow, on the other hand, show the suffragettes entering St Stephen’s Hall on a specific date: October 23, 1906. This marks a shift from scene-setting to action and from timelessness to historical time and historical change. The panel structure on the page thus stands as a metaphor for narrative as a primarily temporal art that involves a sequence of actions taking place in a setting and leading to change.

This page also condenses the narrative of the suffragettes’ actions, which transformed a political landscape that had existed for centuries. The third panel, specifically, shows the women entering from the perspective of the people inside the Hall: they appear powerful and determined, and are led by one woman, whose brown hair marks her as Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence (one of the few characters marked with colour). In their forcefulness and structure, they resemble military ranks in dresses, invading the monumental space.

However, that space is not a passive receptacle: it affects the meaning of their action. In the next panel, Pethick-Lawrence shouts ‘THE WOMEN OF ENGLAND WANT THE VOTE!’ while standing on a seat in front of a painting by Vivian Forbes that depicts Thomas More defending the liberty of the House of Commons from Cardinal Wolsey. The painting, which was in reality created and placed in St Stephen’s Hall more than two decades after the events depicted in the book, changes the relation of the suffragettes to the space. Rather than being invaders, they are shown to belong there, as the proximity of Pethick-Lawrence to More positions her within the long tradition of British defenders of civil liberties and parliamentary democracy.

Something similar can be observed in another part of the book, which depicts a public protest. A group of suffragettes have gathered to protest David Lloyd George’s visit to Newcastle in 1909, after he failed to secure his government’s support for women’s suffrage. Sally is shown at the protest standing on the pedestal of a monument at the centre of a page-size panel that forms the background to three smaller frames, lower down (see Figure 3). This way of marking a moment in the action as significant recurs throughout the book and is often used for depicting demonstrations. The larger image of suffragettes in a public space seems to be lifted outside the narrative to be perused like a newspaper image, showing what a press photographer may have singled out as a moment that encapsulated a greater event. Standing above a happy crowd waiting to cheer the chancellor, Sally is not alone but surrounded by young men praising Lloyd George for proposing the People’s Budget, a bill aiming to tax the rich to fund a social welfare scheme. Like them, she smiles as she shouts: ‘NOW LET’S HAVE SUFFRAGE FOR ALL,’ suggesting this is the natural next step in the chancellor’s agenda.

The monument Sally stands on is the South African War Memorial, unveiled the year before. Opposition to that war a decade earlier had helped radicalise the movement for women’s suffrage. The war, the ostensible cause of which was the refusal of the Boer Republics to give suffrage to British men, marked a shift in public debates about political participation and citizenship from the discourse of service, which required citizens to earn representation through the importance of their service to their country, to the discourse of consent, according to which every governed person’s right to participation in political life was the basis of a legitimate government. The shift enabled many suffrage activists and lobbyists to disconnect their request for the vote from a responsibility to perform a politics of respectability and unswerving devotion to the nation and empire, and it justified a far more militant campaign (Mayhall 2000).

 

Figure 3. Sally on the South African War Memorial, 73.

 

Sally’s presence on the memorial disrupts this monumental space: she is defiant as she stands strong, with a staunch stance, feet planted on the monument and fists raised to the sky. These actions are marked as improper by the disapproving side-glances of two men standing at the far right and left, and by the contrast between her ‘unfeminine’ posture and that of the women in the crowd. More importantly, however, she stands in contrast to the statue of a woman next to her: a personification of Northumbria (North-East England), a figure in a ‘feminine’ posture dressed in Grecian clothes, holding her drapery with one hand, and reaching with an olive branch toward the statue of victory at the top of the column (not visible in the image) with the other. While female figures are common in monuments commemorating wars, or in cenotaphs to the Unknown Soldier, they are allegorical figures representing the homeland, or symbols of the nation’s virtues: they rarely stand for the nation’s citizens, who are imagined to be men (Puwar, 2004: 5-6).

Turning to the site’s role as a war memorial, Benedict Anderson’s (1991) analysis is useful, as he notes that monuments commemorating soldiers lost to war sustain the idea of the nation by enabling its members to identify with the heroes. In turn, as Henri Lefebvre points out, the repressive element that sees war and nation-building converted into exultation, suppresses negativity and traces of violence, as well as dissent between different classes and groups (1991: 224–226). We can then say that Sally is marking dissent with her body in two ways: by making a claim to the space that has excluded her as a citizen entitled to political representation, and by diverging from acceptable feminine behavior. Her presence on the monument performs the shift from the service model to the consent model of citizenship and the different roles women citizens can play in these models.

Moreover, Sally’s presence as a woman dressed in working-class attire, brings to the fore what has been left out of the constitutive boundaries of the universal human, the citizen and the leader (Puwar 2004: 8). The image, recalling photographs and cartoons that memorialised the suffragettes’ struggle and emphasised their heroism, creates a new monument that incorporates the old one but instead centres the dissenting figure of Sally. Importantly, Sally’s invasion of the monument can be seen as marking a distance from the pro-war side, including from the pro-African War feminists, such as Victorian suffragists Josephine Butler and Millicent Garrett Fawcett, who relied on an identification with suffering ‘others’ in order to make claims for political representation (Burton 2000). Thus, her presence can be seen as implying an anti-imperial critique.

In a similar way to the scene at the Houses of Parliament described above, however, the monumental space that Sally occupies here determines the meaning of her action, too. The base of the monument that holds this heroic figure can be read as positioning her firmly in the empire, showing her as a representative of its citizens and as having the empire’s support. While her defiance and dress would still mark a shift of focus toward the fate of working-class women, in this reading, her presence would not go so far as to include an anti-imperial critique.

To take this reading further, by evoking the familiar iconography of Eugène Delacroix’s painting Liberty Leading the People (1830), this scene places the suffragette at the centre of a long history of struggles for civil liberties. The young woman and the allegorical statue are positioned close to one another, breaking apart elements that are combined in Delacroix’s Liberty, who is both an allegorical figure and a woman taking part in an uprising. The statue’s dress, as well as the two figures’ posture and centre-right position in the image—and in relation to the men that surround them—are some of these elements. Similarly, the men who climb the monument and the crowd that surrounds it, representing the different classes of society like the men in the painting, work together with the monument, dedicated to the Englishmen who died in a war ostensibly fought for the right of Englishmen to vote in the Boer Republics. They evoke the men that Liberty guides in Delacroix’s painting, as well as the corpses of men that function as a pedestal for Liberty. Sally’s presence and posture in relation to the monument and the people around her thus elevate her to the status of an allegorical figure. In this way she stands not only for women’s right to vote, but as the guiding figure in a longer tradition of English people fighting for participation in public life, both at home and in colonial settings.

In both examples analyzed here, there is a double reading of space as that which is invaded by the suffragettes (therefore, whose meaning is altered by the suffragettes) and that which engulfs the suffragettes (therefore, which defines the meaning of the suffragette’s actions). This shift between two different perceptions and interpretations that coexist, also called multi-stability, or ‘duck-rabbitry,’ is something that the medium of comics is apt to (Kukkonen 2017: 355; D’Arcy 2020: 25-26). In this case multi-stability is enabled by different perspectives between panels (in the case of St Stephen’s Hall) or the combination of different elements on the page (on the South African War Memorial), and it allows the concurrence of the two main framings of the WSPU in collective memory: the suffragettes as radicals and as reformers. This way, the representation of space helps the narrative maintain a balance between the two strong desires driving the contemporary preoccupation with the feminist movement for the vote: the desire to draw inspiration from the suffrage movement’s focus on parliamentary representation and the desire to address its position within wider national and imperial politics.

Outward Mobility: Sally’s Movement toward Freedom

Having established how the representation of real-world places in the setting enables the narrative’s double move of celebrating and showing the limitations of the WSPU, the focus now turns to space as an element that enables the characters’ movement, literally and metaphorically. This section therefore looks at how the representation of space in the narrative facilitates Sally’s personal and political development. To do so, it focuses on the capacity of space to facilitate her movement, as well as to symbolise, through certain qualities—like open or closed, private or public, safe or dangerous, squalid or comfortable—Sally’s position in relation to suffragette values and ideas, and to other feminist ideals of her time.

Turning first to the narrative, we can see that it uses Sally’s personal story to thematise the WSPU’s origin in the North, its stronghold in the women’s workers’ unions and its original socialist associations. Through her story, one can also see the importance of the values, feelings, and attributes that WSPU members saw, in their memoirs and interviews in later years, as comprising the ‘suffragette spirit:’ courage, self-sacrifice, solidarity among members and obedience to leadership (Mayhall 1995). However, as the story progresses, the organisation digresses from some of the values and ideologies that drove their work in the early days, and Sally diverges from the union through her individuation and complex political belonging.

Early in the narrative, Sally moves to Emmeline Pankhurst’s middle-class household in Manchester as a child fresh out of the workhouse, a philanthropic gesture on Pankhurst’s part. The family treats Sally with kindness, teaches her useful skills, and gives her presents. They keep Sally in their employment even when they go through difficult times financially, and only let her go when they move to London, where they have no need for servants because they live in hotels. In other employment, Sally experiences bullying and sexual harassment, which forces her to leave Manchester for London. There, after some time working as an independent seamstress from her squalid lodgings, she finds a job at the offices of the WSPU, run by the Pankhurst family but funded by the upper-class Emmeline and Fred Pethick-Lawrence. There, she finds herself in the midst of WSPU action, which is increasingly militant as the government refuses to listen, and she partakes in activities ranging from voicing requests for women’s suffrage in political meetings, to organising protests, engaging in civil disobedience and acts of vandalism and arson, all of which culminates in Sally’s participation in the extremely militant group Young Hot Bloods (YHB) and the bombing of Lloyd George’s house. Sally experiences imprisonment and is force-fed when she goes on hunger strike to demand she be considered a political prisoner. When out of prison, she is taken care of by the Pethick-Lawrences and other comrades in the wealthy couple’s country home.

As the union breaks into factions, Sally finds herself sympathising with and eventually joining those that the leadership has excluded from the WSPU. When Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst force the Pethick-Lawrences out of the WSPU because they cannot condone the leadership’s increasingly militant strategies, Sally expresses her shock and disapproval and maintains her social connection with the Pethick-Lawrences. When Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst cut Sylvia Pankhurst off because she officially affiliates her East End WSPU branch with the Independent Labour Party, in spite of the leadership’s order to maintain political independence, Sally, sympathising with Sylvia’s socialist politics—which centres on the interests of poor women and workers—eventually joins her side. Thus, the outbreak of WWI finds Sally in comradeship with the pacifist Pethick-Lawrences and Sylvia Pankhurst. Sally’s digression from Mrs. Pankhurst’s political values coincides with the slow development of a romantic relationship with a young man who is also a suffrage activist. He works with Sylvia Pankhurst and the Pethick-Lawrences, and at times expresses his concern about the WSPU’s militant tactics and the danger they pose to Sally’s safety. Toward the end of the book, there is a direct confrontation regarding military conscription between Sally and Emmeline Pankhurst, who calls Sally a ‘dirty traitor’ and tells her she should have left her at the workhouse.

Through this narrative, Sally is used to typify the working-class women who originally made up the majority of the WSPU in Manchester, despite its middle-class leadership. Although, in reality, the WSPU originally relied on the presence of working-class women, its leadership soon realised that middle-class protesters had a greater effect on how seriously the press and the public took the campaign (Kelly 2004). In the graphic novel, Sally’s presence and perspective moderates the organisation’s class politics, but also shows its limitations when she sides with those excluded from it.

In this way, Sally combines the aspects that have made the WSPU so popular in the collective memory of the suffrage campaign: its militant politics, its cult of courage and sacrifice, and its working-class origins. This is facilitated through her access to and movement through certain spaces. The narrative largely shows Sally’s development alongside the WSPU’s aims (and the Pank-A-Squith game): developing a political consciousness through the relationship with already enlightened women, and moving toward the freedom of political action and eventually political representation through the intermediary step of imprisonment, hunger strike and force feeding, a common trope in the memory of suffragette activism, standing as a rite of passage (Mayhall 1995). However, it differs from common suffragette narratives in two main ways.

The first is that Sally stands apart from the women in her organisation through the central role her class experience plays in her suffrage politics and through her eventual digression from Mrs. Pankhurst’s lead. As mentioned above, Sally’s political awakening and radicalisation coincide with her experience of poverty, dependence, and harassment. The representation of space in the novel thematises this, by creating a contrast between inside and outside spaces. In the house where she is employed, Sally is shown to work and to be sexually harassed by a male colleague and her employer. In her run-down London lodgings, she is shown to do her sewing work while struggling to stay warm and get enough light. These scenes create a sense of claustrophobia and danger via the tight grid of the panels, which are small, even and clearly demarcated, and by their framing: they focus on small parts of the space, separate objects, body parts, or show two people in unwelcome proximity or violent interaction (for example, see Figure 4). This visually resembles the layout of the pages that show her imprisonment and force feeding (see Figure 5). The presentation of both spaces as sites of confinement and abuse creates an association between state violence and gender and class violence, and between the conditions of working-class life and the sacrifices endured by the suffragettes.

By contrast, the representation of outside spaces, even before she joins the WSPU, shows Sally in political rallies, walking and talking with friends or looking for work. These scenes include larger panels without clear edges and show her whole body moving in large settings, creating a sense of openness and freedom. Later, when Sally joins the WSPU, she is not only shown outdoors more frequently—often appearing as a central figure in protests—but the representation of indoor spaces changes as well, with more variation in the grids, including smaller and bigger panels, as well as panels without edges. The framing, moreover, includes larger parts of the rooms and more people. In these scenes, the comradeship between Sally and other activists, which creates a sense of safety and comfort, is shown in the arrangements of the bodies in space and the presence of material objects associated with the WSPU. This can be seen, for example, in Figure 1, where Sally is sitting in an armchair, surrounded by friends, and engaging in easy conversation and play. These scenes, moreover, show Sally transcending her class background thanks to the solidarity and the financial support of her middle- and upper-class comrades.

Sally Heathcote, thus, revisits what van den Elzen & Waaldijk (2021) have identified as the overarching ‘origin story’ of European first-wave feminism, which centres the role of middle-class women as the vanguard of the movement and as mentors and philanthropists that helped educate and lift working-class women. Although Sally is introduced and guided in feminist politics, and materially supported by such women, her central role in the story ensures that she is not the ‘passive background’ (van den Elzen & Waaldijk 2021: 67) against which middle- and upper-class women are foregrounded as feminist heroines, but she is a feminist heroine in her own right. Especially in the scenes where Sally is at the centre of the page, protesting, or when she delivers an public speech against conscription, she embodies what Joan W. Scott calls the female orator, one of the most prevalent ‘fantasies’ of feminist history, which ‘projects women into masculine public space where they experience the pleasures and dangers of transgressing social and sexual boundaries’ (2001: 293). Sally, moreover, is not afraid to confront her mentor Mrs. Pankhurst when disagreeing politically, in a moment that exposes the limitations of Pankhurst’s charity. Complexifying the narratives that centre middle- and upper-class women seems to have been a trend in the centenary commemorations and cultural remembrances: the film Suffragette (1915) also centres a working-class heroine, while 2018 saw the erection of two statues of working-class suffragists, Alice Hawkins in Leicester and Annie Kenney in Oldham, both portrayed as giving a public speech. By contrast, the tensions around pacifism and nationalism in the movement were largely left out of the centennial commemorations (Crozier-De Rosa 2021, 3).

The second way in which Sally’s movement toward freedom differs from usual suffragette narratives is through an equal romantic partnership. Through her relationship with Arthur, an activist for women’s votes himself, Sally can experience the city of London differently, as a space not only for work and political action but also for pleasure. Her dates with Arthur, for example, bring her to the cinema, theatre and strolls along the river. Moreover, her partnership with him transforms her working-class home into a comfortable space. This is visually represented by the two of them sitting around the table enjoying their rapport, which resembles panels where Sally is in conversation or works together with her comrades from the movement. Her London lodgings then—though details like the fireplace show them to be the same as the ones earlier, when she worked on her sewing—are shown in a different light: as the frame shows the scene from a greater distance, the space looks bigger, the claustrophobic feeling of the earlier scene gone. The narrative’s departure from a tradition that leaves out the personal life of the suffragettes so that they may embody independence (Mayhall 1995) eases readers’ identification with Sally. It shows, moreover, that through her activist work, Sally developed an understanding of freedom that extended beyond civil liberty and included sexual freedom, implicitly referring to one of the struggles of women activists of the time that is not explicitly addressed in the narrative about her political work.

The centrality of Sally’s working-class status in the narrative, therefore, allows it to both celebrate the WSPU and to show its limitations. The WSPU leadership’s support and mentorship and the solidarity among its members enable not only the development of Sally’s political consciousness but also her upward mobility. This is largely achieved through the thematisation of space, as we follow Sally’s movement from confinement and abuse to openness, freedom and comfort. The use of space, moreover, creates associations between state violence against WSPU members and the gender- and class-based oppression faced by working class women. Thus, the WSPU is shown as an organisation with working-class members and driven partly by concern for working-class women’s fate, yet led by middle-class women, whose feminist work originates in charity work and who relate to working-class women as their rescuers. At the same time, there are two elements that point at the limitations of the organisation and contrast it with other, less remembered, parts of the feminist movement at that time. Sally’s differentiation from the WSPU and her romantic relationship with Arthur, enable the narrative to address the relationship of the feminist movement with socialist, pacifist and nationalist movements, and to foreground issues that concerned feminism besides civil liberties, such as sexual freedom and workers’ rights.

 

Figure 4. Sally suffers sexual abuse at work, 39.
Figure 4. Sally suffers sexual abuse at work, 39.

 

Figure 5. Sally suffers force feeding in prison, 90–91.
Figure 5. Sally suffers force feeding in prison, 90–91.

 

Conclusion

This article has examined the way the graphic narrative Sally Heathcote: Suffragette remembers the feminist movement in early 20th century Britain from the point of view of today. The narrative follows the life and activism of a fictional young working-class woman and focuses mainly on the role of one suffragist organisation, the WSPU, with which Sally is affiliated. The WSPU has dominated the collective memory of the suffrage movement throughout the 20th century even though it comprised only a fraction of that movement. In the early 21st century, there is a revival of the fascination for that movement as attested to by the commemorations and cultural remembrances that have accompanied the various centennials of the movement’s landmarks. The memory of the WSPU plays, again, a central role in this fascination.

The article has studied Sally Heathcote with a double focus. First, Sally Heathcote is an example of a cultural remembrance of the suffrage movement that demonstrates this preoccupation with the WSPU. The article, draws on feminist historiography to explain how centring the role of the WSPU in the memory of the movement has enabled feminists to address concerns about the state and aims of the feminist movement of their time, and how remembering the WSPU anew today is a way to address contradictory desires: the desire to identify with past feminisms in order to be inspired by it into political action, as well as the desire to be critical of the limitations of past feminism in order to differentiate contemporary feminism from it. Second, as Sally Heathcote is a work of graphic historical fiction, the article studies the role the affordances of the medium of comics can play in the remembrance of the WSPU. Focusing on the role of space in the book, because of its centrality in the memory of suffragettes in action and its importance as a narrative element in graphic narratives, the article pays attention to space as the setting of action and as an overarching structural element.

Specifically, the first analytical section discusses the way the book recreates images showing suffragettes claiming public space. The detailed and realistic representation of these public spaces enables the reader’s immersion in the storyworld and invites them to relate to it as an accurate representation of the real world. The relationship between the suffragettes and that setting, however, invests it with heavy symbolic meaning. Reading two examples of moments when suffragettes demonstrate in public space, I show how the comics form enables a kind of multi-stability, that is, the coexistence of two different ways of reading that relationship: a reading in which suffragettes invade the space, a building or monument symbolising the nation, forcefully disrupting ideals about political representation and citizenship, and inserting the image of the gendered, classed and even racialised other on whose exclusion these ideals have been predicated; but, also, a reading in which the space supports the women in their claiming political representation, positioning them in a long line of British defenders of civil liberties and parliamentary democracy.

The second analytical section looks at how the representation of space in the narrative facilitates Sally’s personal and political development. To do so, it focuses on the ability of space to facilitate her movement, as well as to thematise qualities, such as freedom or restriction, safety or danger, comfort or discomfort, abuse or solidarity, that help position Sally in relation to the values and ideals that motivate the WSPU and other feminist organisations of her time. Sally’s movement toward acquiring greater freedom and developing a political consciousness enables her to occupy a complex position in relation to the WSPU and its leadership. On the one hand, she is shown to embody the ideal suffragette, showcasing ‘the suffragette spirit,’ that is, courage and self-sacrifice, solidarity with her comrades and obedience to leadership. Her working-class status positions her as owing her advancement to the mentorship and material support of the charitable, middle-class women who lead the organisation, seemingly confirming a common narrative in the memory of first wave feminism as driven by the work and values of middle-class women. On the other hand, she complexifies this narrative with her growing self-determination and eventual break from the organisation, a break motivated by the development of a political consciousness that is informed by socialism and pacifism. Her political consciousness, together with her romantic relationship, allows Sally to stand for values and goals that transcend the ones guiding the WSPU and reflect other parts of the feminist movement of her time.

To conclude, Sally Heathcote manages to address the two contradictory desires that largely motivate contemporary engagements with the history of the suffrage movement, and especially of the WSPU: the desire to inspire via identification and the desire to differentiate through critique. Drawing from a long tradition of rich and contradictory investments in the memory of the WSPU in the 20th century and making use of the expressive capacities of the medium of comics, it celebrates the WSPU while foregrounding its limitations. Thus, it shows appreciation for the importance of the single issue—the vote—that the suffrage movement prioritised, while locating the movement within the greater political landscape where it belonged, and showing how it has always been in conversation with other social and political movements.

Notes

[1] The Representation of the People Act of 1918 granted the vote to all men over the age of 21 and to property-owning women over 30. The remaining limitations to equal voting rights were lifted with the Equal Franchise Act of 1928, which gave all women over 21 the right to vote.

[2] For more information on the public commemorations and artworks that remember the campaign for the vote, see Liddington (2005) and Gottlieb (2019).

[3] Critics of the film Suffragette (2015), for example, ‘raised concerns about giving equal weight to intersecting issues such as class, gender, and racialised positioning,’ reminding one of ‘the pressures placed on those producing popular histories of feminist activism to perform the impossible task of representing all the multi-layered components of what were intricate, varied, and contested forms of protest and activism’ (Crozier-De Rosa & Mackie 2019: 9).

[4] For the purposes of this article, I use the term ‘comics’ to talk about the medium defined by the juxtaposition of images and text (McCloud 1993) and the term ‘graphic narrative’ for a book-length narrative in the medium of comics, which may include different genres, both fiction and nonfiction (Chute & DeKoven 2006). For more reading on the academic debate on the terminology, I recommend Baetens & Frye (2015), Chute & DeKoven (2006), Eisner (2004), La Cour (2016) and McCloud (1993).

[5] Baetens & Frey qualify this: there are comics that purposely skip any representation of setting (2015: 167), but this is not common, and it does not apply to Sally Heathcote.

 

This publication is part of the project Redrawing Feminism: Graphic Narrative Engagements with the Feminist Past financed by the Dutch Research Council (NWO).


REFERENCES

Anderson, Benedict (2006), Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London: Verso books.

Baetens, Jan & Hugo Frey (2015), The Graphic Novel: An Introduction, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Bal, Mieke (2009 [1985]), Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative, Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Burton, Antoinette (2000), ‘“States of Injury”: Josephine Butler on Slavery, Citizenship, and the Boer War’, in Ian Christopher Fletcher, Laura E. Nym Mayhall & Philippa Levine (eds), Women’s Suffrage in the British Empire: Citizenship, Nation and Race, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 18-32.

Chidgey, Red (2018), Feminist Afterlives: Assemblage Memory in Activist Times, London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Chute, Hillary L. & Marianne DeKoven (2006), ‘Introduction: Graphic Narrative,’ Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. 52, No. 4, pp. 767-782.

Crozier-De Rosa, Sharon (2021), ‘Vote 100/Votail 100. Women’s Suffrage Commemorations in Britain and Ireland/Vote100/Votail100. Die Erinnerung an das Frauenwahlrecht in Groftbritannien und Irland,’ L’Homme. European Journal of Feminist History, Vol. 32, No. 1, pp. 15-36.

Crozier-De Rosa, Sharon & Vera Mackie (2019), Remembering Women’s Activism, London and New York: Routledge.

D’Arcy, Geraint (2020), Mise en scène, Acting, and Space in Comics. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Eisner, Will (2004), ‘Keynote Address, Will Eisner Symposium,’ ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies, Vol. 1, No. 1. https://imagetextjournal.com/keynote-address-from-the-2002-will-eisner-symposium/ (last accessed 17 November 2022)

Gottlieb, Julie (2019), ‘Suffrage Statutes and Statues: Reflections on Commemorating Milestones in the History of Women’s Emancipation in Britain,’ Caliban, 62, http://journals.openedition.org/caliban/7090 (last accessed 8 November 2022)

Gray, Maggie & Ian Horton (2021), Art History for Comics: Past, Present and Potential Futures, London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Henry, Astrid (2004), Not My Mother’s Sister: Generational Conflict and Third-Wave Feminism, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Kelly, Katherine E. (2004), ‘Seeing Through Spectacles: The Woman Suffrage Movement and London Newspapers, 1906–13’, European Journal of Women’s Studies, Vol. 11, No. 3, pp. 327-353.

Kukkonen, Karin (2013), ‘Space, Time, and Causality in Graphic Narratives: An Embodied Approach’, in Daniel Stein & Jan-Noël Thon (eds), From Comic Strips to Graphic Novels: Contributions to the Theory and History of Graphic Narrative, Berlin: De Gruyter, pp. 49-66.

Kukkonen, Karin (2017), ‘Adventures in Duck-Rabbitry: Multistable Elements of Graphic Narrative,’ Narrative, Vol. 25, No. 3, pp. 342-358.

La Cour, Erin (2016), ‘Comics as a Minor Literature,’ Image & Narrative, Vol. 17, No. 4, pp. 79-90.

Lefebvre, Henri (1991 [1974]), The Production of Space, Oxford: Blackwell.

Liddington, Jill (2005), ‘Era of commemoration: Celebrating the suffrage centenary,’ History Workshop Journal, Vol. 59, No. 1, pp. 194-218.

Mayhall, Laura E. Nym (1995) ‘Creating the “Suffragette Spirit”: British Feminism and the Historical Imagination,’ Women’s History Review, Vol. 4, No. 3, pp. 319-344.

Mayhall, Laura E. Nym (1999), ‘Domesticating Emmeline: Representing the Suffragette, 1930–1993,’ NWSA Journal, Vol. 11, No. 2, pp. 1-24.

Mayhall, Laura E. Nym (2000) ‘The South African War and the Origins of Suffrage Militancy in Britain, 1899–1902,’ in Fletcher, Mayhall & Levine (eds), Women’s Suffrage, pp. 3-17.

McCloud, Scott (1993), Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, Northampton: Kitchen Sink Press.

Mikkonen, Kai (2017), The Narratology of Comic Art, New York and London: Routledge.

Purvis, June (2013), ‘Gendering the Historiography of the Suffragette Movement in Edwardian Britain: Some Reflections,’ Women’s History Review, Vol. 22, No. 4, pp. 576–590.

Puwar, Nirmal (2004), Space Invaders: Race, Gender and Bodies Out of Place, London: Bloombury.

Rigney, Ann (2012), The Afterlives of Walter Scott: Memory on the Move, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Ryan, Marie-Laure (2012), ‘Space,’ in Peter Hühn, Jan Christoph Meister, John Pier & Wolf Schmid (eds), The Living Handbook of Narratology, https://www-archiv.fdm.uni-hamburg.de/lhn/node/55.html (last accessed 10 November 2022)

Ryan, Marie-Laure, Kenneth Foote & Maoz Azaryahu (2016), Narrating Space/Spatializing Narrative: Where Narrative Theory and Geography Meet, Columbus: Ohio State University Press.

Slotkin, Richard (2005), ‘Fiction for the Purposes of History,’ Rethinking History, Vol. 9, Nos 2–3, pp. 221-236.

Suffragette (2015), dir. Sarah Gavron.

Stewart, Libby (2011), ‘The Pank-A-Squith Board Game,’ https://www.moadoph.gov.au/blog/the-pank-a-squith-board-game/# (last accessed 27 September 2022).

Talbot, Mary, Kate Charlesworth & Brian Talbot (2014), Sally Heathcote: Suffragette, London: Random House.

Van den Elzen, Sophie & Berteke Waaldijk (2021), ‘History as Strategy: Imagining Universal Feminism in the Women’s Movement, in Stefan Berger, Sean Scalmer, Christian Wicke (eds), Remembering Social Movements: Activism and Memory, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 60-82.

Download article

Newsletter

Feeling inspired by MAI? Dedicated to intersectional gender politics in visual culture? Want to keep your feminist imagination on fire? MAI newsletter will help refresh your zeal for feminism with first-hand news on our new content. 

Subscribe below to stay up-to-date.

* We'll never share your email address with any third parties.

WHO SUPPORTS US

The team of MAI supporters and contributors is always expanding. We’re honoured to have a specialist collective of editors, whose enthusiasm & talent gave birth to MAI.

However, to turn our MAI dream into reality, we also relied on assistance from high-quality experts in web design, development and photography. Here we’d like to acknowledge their hard work and commitment to the feminist cause. Our feminist ‘thank you’ goes to:


Dots+Circles – a digital agency determined to make a difference, who’ve designed and built our MAI website. Their continuous support became a digital catalyst to our idealistic project.
Guy Martin – an award-winning and widely published British photographer who’s kindly agreed to share his images with our readers

Chandler Jernigan – a talented young American photographer whose portraits hugely enriched the visuals of MAI website
Matt Gillespie – a gifted professional British photographer who with no hesitation gave us permission to use some of his work
Julia Carbonell – an emerging Spanish photographer whose sharp outlook at contemporary women grasped our feminist attention
Ana Pedreira – a self-taught Portuguese photographer whose imagery from women protests beams with feminist aura
And other photographers whose images have been reproduced here: Cezanne Ali, Les Anderson, Mike Wilson, Annie Spratt, Cristian Newman, Peter Hershey