Suffragettes and Iconic Mini Series’

Suffragettes throwing flour at Asquith’s auto.. from Pankhurst’s bio.

I watched almost all of series two of the old Masterpiece Theatre series Upstairs Downstairs yesterday, it being a very rainy day (although I got my dahlias in, don’t I sound like Mrs. Dalloway who lived in Belgravia, am I right?) Anyway, yes, it does appear that that iconic series got to the Tighsolas era before I did…

The last episode I watched was about the daughter Elizabeth and the Suffragettes. Now, I likely didn’t see this episode in 72 (although I may have.) I was in CEGEP then, and not likely watching much tv. And, remember, in those days, families tended to have only one tv and the dad commandeered it at night.

My husband remembers the series, however. His Mom watched it and he took it in on some level.

Anyway, it’s interesting for me to see that episode. Upstairs Downstairs did not have a huge budget .. that is obvious. So the producers and other artists had to be creative. The scenes with the suffragettes were stylized… Only a handful of women gather at Eaton Place and head out to break windows and vandalize a politician’s home.

Rose tries to stop Elizabeth but can’t, then follows her and gets put in prison.
And force fed..

There’s a prostitute among the women, a noblewoman, a woman of the educated middle class etc and they are not particularly nice to each other in jail.

So the suffragettes are not portrayed too sympathetically here… although as per usual excellent research was done. (But had I seen these series I would have learned that the term suffragette refers to the militant brand.)

I did post, earlier on, an article about the British Suffragettes (Margaret Nicholson mentions them in a letter and I find the event she is talking about). The article does say the woman arrested represent all stratas of society.

…I got an email from someone commenting negatively on a post about a Maclean’s article from 1910 about the negro. The person said I shouldn’t quote things out of context. Hmm. This entire blog is about the context of 1910, and contains an awful lot about immigration policy, the eugenics and purity movement. My goal is to get into the head of Marion Nicolson, a prim and proper Presbyterian, who happens to get a job in a school that has black students. Her letters reflect little of her feelings about her students. I have to research the ideas of the time. The fact that so many of these ideas have been censored, or at least not repeated in history books for the masses, is important. Indeed, a commentator in the New York Times wrote a similar article but a few months ago.. he perused 1911 articles from the New York Times about immigration to explore era attitudes about race and ethnicity. He remarked on how the Powers that Be liked to stereotype different ethnic groups with respect to personality and character. In his mind, they did this is similar fashion to the way the American Kennel Club describes different dog breeds.

Upstairs Downstairs touches upon the racism in the era, but only lightly. Their purview is class prejudice.

Lady Bellamy is a nice enough woman and a clothes horse, but she is not much into social reform…as some wives of MPS were. Indeed, Mrs. Snowden, a suffragist Edith heard speak in 1913, was the wife of an MP, a Philip Snowden who went on to get a very key position . I can’t recall, now, which one.. I read it in the book The Thirties: An intimate history..

King’s Speeches and Sex Comedies

Santa and My art nouveau vases.

Yesterday I watched a 1963 “sex comedy” with Jane Fonda called Afternoon in New York, on the HD which accentuated its sixties flavour, orange and electric green in the women’s clothes, neat and clean bachelor ‘pad’ for a setting.

The film was stagey, but the acting good, and although it was ‘outdated’ How could it not be? I enjoyed it. Especially since I was just in New York.

Of course, what passed for a sex comedy back then, isn’t what passes today. Get Him To the Greek it hardly was. Fonda plays a smart and sophisticated young woman of 22 who is confused by the concept that “Good Girls Don’t.” A woman of her time.
A good piece to consider with respect to Flo in the City, my novel in progress about a girl in the 1910 era.

The sixties set design and hair and makeup styles made me nostalgic. (My husband thought Fonda looked ‘old’ to play a 22 year old (she was 26) and that was because her heavy eye-liner reminded him of his mother. I thought she looked very very young.)

So I took a tour of Time Magazine articles of the era to futher immerse myself in the 60′s. My family subscribed to Time, so that magazine evokes memories for me, the covers especially.

I used to read the articles too, although, re-reading some articles, I realize I hardly could have understood all the vocabulary. (Time had that hybrid style, using big words when small would do, contrasting with an easy-breezy by-the-numbers journalist technique, quasi-academic sounding, to give the content ‘weight’ I guess, but essentially diversion mind-candy.My father read the magazines back to front, over months.)

I entered ‘sex’ or something into the search engine and the first article I got was this cover story from 1964 on the sexual revolution. “Everything you want to know about the history of sex and society in 11 short pages.” Lot’s of mention of Kinsey. And the article made passing reference to the “new woman” of the Edwardian era, who, they said, “wanted pleasure.” Sure, (that’s a theme of my Flo in the City book) but not sexual pleasure….so they skirted the issue.

I don’t recall reading this article as a kid (I would have been in 4th grade) but the article is interesting to read from this era’s perspective. The author opened by talking about Reich’s Orgasmatron (or whatever) which reminded me of college film class where Dusan Makaveyev was a guest and we had to sit through his porny art-house documentary. My boyfriend, who came to the showing, was grossed out, I pretended to be cool.

Anyway, this article assumed that they’d reached the outer limits of sexual expression in 1964- and that the future only held horrors, because you just couldn’t possibly show more T and A, could you? without it being porn. HA. (I just saw this OK mainstream movie with Anne Hathaway and Jake Gyllenhal, Love and Other Drugs, where they did nothing but boink.. But they are very talented and easy on the eyes, so hey.)

The author of the Time article claimed European movies were less confused about sex than American movies, and featured more beautiful actresses. (I’ve always thought so, because the actresses were chosen for their faces and ability and not their Playboy bunny bodies. Well, like Helena Bonham Carter.)

Anyway, then I entered ‘suffragette’ into the engine and a 1971 TV review page came up. That week a show about Lady Randolph Churchill (Lee Remick)was going to air as well as Shoulder to Shoulder, a mini series about the suffragettes, (which I’ve seen bits of on Youtube.) They cleverly segued from one review to another by describing how much Winston Churchill despised the suffragettes. (I’ve written about that on this blog). They suggest it is because his mom was such a free-spirit, “new woman” or upper class tramp, depending on the point of view.

I have to try to see this Shoulder to Shoulder mini series in full.
And, then, to end I looked up George VI, (as ads for the King’s Speech are playing everywhere: during my husband’s newscast,and on Salon.com before you enter.) I found his obituary in Time.

This obit made me realize (again) how unpopular (or boring) Bertie seemed to the public because of this dashing headline-grabbing older brother, a point only touched upon in the movie. Edward was described as a ‘brilliant’ heir to the throne, and his brother was sickly, and a stammerer (nor was he as good-looking as Colin Firth -who is an actor, after all). Both boys, according to the article, were ignored by Dad except when in need of discipline. (So The King’s Speech and Firth’s performance, seem to be true to history. Come to think of it, the King in his thin tie and grey overcoat reminds me of my father.. Oooohhh.)

Anyway, the short obit said King George VI proved himself a good and steady man to the people in the end, especially during the war, where he suffered through the blitz like everyone else and even changed into workman’s pants once a week and made munitions or something on the assembly lines -instead of running off to safer places to party, as his brother did.

There’s an anecdote about his stammer which didn’t make it into the screenplay. Apparently, starting a speech at Wembley, he said something like “This b b b bloody thing isn’t working!” referring to the microphone. (I think the swear word was bloody. Maybe d d d amn.) But the mike was on, so everyone in attendance heard him.

Summing up Suffrage: Nicholson style

Suffragette rally, Hyde Park 1910. International Contingent. Were there Canadians represented. Not sure, but I don’t think so.

In the preface to Pierre Berton’s Marching as to War, about Canada’s role in the Great War, he mentions the Canadian Suffrage Movement, but only in passing. It was temperance, he said, that pushed through woman suffrage. And he is right.

When I read that about 6 years ago, when I started researching the Tighsolas letters, I knew nothing about the suffrage movement, in Canada or elsewhere. I recall feeling disappointed about that statement.

“You mean, these early feminists were ‘stuffy’ old ladies?”

Boy, I didn’t know the half of it.

I soon got a hold of the two books that exist on Canadian Suffrage, one of them an American’s masters thesis written in 1940. However, these books did not enlighten me much.

There appears to be a real vacuum in this area of scholarship. Even the Canadian Social History Series doesn’t have a book on suffrage.

I guess that’s because it is commonly believed that there was no real suffrage movement in Canada except that Famous Four business – and that ‘history’ avoids the dark side of things.

That may explain why there is no bio of Carrie Derick, (except for another master’s thesis that is next to impossible to track down. McGill has a copy).

Anyway, I have to decide what to do with all this women’s rights info that I’ve uncovered, with respect to Flo in the City, a novel about a girl coming of age in 1910 Canada, based on the letters of http://www.tighsolas/.

Edith Nicholson is the one interested in suffrage. (She’s the one who likely clipped all the items in the Nicholson collection.) Flo mentions suffrage once in a joke in a letter from Macdonald. Marion never mentions it. And it is Marion Nicholson who would have made a terrific suffragette organizer, with her drive and determination. Indeed, if Marion had wanted to start a movement in Montreal, she would have done it, no question!

But she was kept too busy trying to find a place to live.

Edith was a bit of a dreamer, so her interest in suffrage wasn’t much of a threat.

So I think I will have Edith promote the positive side of the movement, and I’ll have Marion dismiss it, by pointing out the dark side, by pointing out that the suffagettes mightn’t have approved of her living in her own apartment with three other girls.

Still, I wonder if the militant suffragettes believed all they said: I wonder if they were saying whatever needed to be said to get women the vote. Did they believe that men were all whoring, drinking, money-grubbing degenerates, and that women would change the world and make it better with the vote or were they tapping into repressed female anger? They were politically savvy, after all.

Politicians today will say or do anything to win and regularly ‘pander to their base’ as it is called. Did the suffragettes do this too? I suspect so.

The liquor trade, the sex trade and the textile trade have been described in my research as anti-woman suffrage, for financial reasons; they joined forces with moralists and traditionalists, who didn’t want women to get the vote, as they believed women would turn their backs on family, contributing to what was called “race suicide.” (Politics makes strange bed-fellows.)

Anyway, I’m lucky I have Herb Nicholson for my story: he clearly did some gambling, whoring and drinking…not to mention stealing. And then I have Henry Watters for the other side. (I wonder if Henry was gay. He was so successful but didn’t marry.)