The tale of an anti-sufragette postcard in the collections of the Royal Pavilion and Museums, Brighton & Hove. Delivered at the Picture This: Postcards and Letters Beyond Text conference at Sussex University, 25 March 2011

1. Histories of Violence
Kevin Bacon
Curator of Photographs
Royal Pavilion and Museums

2. What is it?
• Anti-suffragette postcard from 1909
• Rare local history purchase for RPM
• Material evidence of anti-suffragette
violence

3. Material culture and telling stories
• Museums attract big audiences and play a
big role in writing history…
• …but the stories they tell are shaped by
their collections
• Struggle for women’s suffrage difficult to tell
through material culture. Photographs, film
and spoken word are effective, but emerge
from narrow circumstances of creation.

4. Material culture and telling stories
• This postcard is more than its image
and / or text
• Few other artefacts of political male
violence against women
• What story does it tell?

5. The image
This is ‘The House’ that man built,
And these are the Suffragettes of note
Determined to fight for their right to vote
For they mean to be, each one an MP
And they’ll keep their vow some fine day you’ll see
For the Suffragette is determined to get
Into ‘The House’ that man built.

6. The image
• Made by Birn Brothers. Ltd,
c1908
• Part of a series of comic
postcards depicting the women’s
suffrage movement
• Series based around key trope:
‘The House that man built’
• Mostly mocking, but some are
ambiguous…

11. ‘This House’ series
• Appears to be telling two sides of one story
• Series divided by layouts, typeface and depictions of
women
• Yet neither are polemical. Adopt a broadly wry,
distanced perspective on contemporary events and
debates
• Likely that ‘pro’ images, although perhaps mockingly
idealised, would be read as supportive of female
suffrage

12. The text

13. The text
• Posted evening of 27 April 1909
• Sent to crew or workmen attached to
HMS Hindustan, a pre-dreadnought
battleship
• HMS Hindustan was in dry dock at
Portsmouth 1909-10 undergoing a
major refit

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

15. Crude coding
• Message written upside down, possibly to
evade detection from post workers
• Use of euphemism: ‘make things a bit livly’
• Choice of image
• Ironic repositioning of writer as ‘secretary to
the suffragetts’

16. Layers of violence
1. Threat of physical violence
‘please bring a weapon’

17. Layers of violence
2. Defaced postcard

18. Layers of violence
3. Use of diminutive
‘Mrs Crissy Pankhurst’
‘the ladies’

19. Irony as textual violence?
• Writer seeks to adapt and subvert the
object in order to re-describe and
therefore weaken his opponents
• Yet he needs ‘a big audience of men…
as the ladies use Dog whips’
• Evidence of fear?

20. The coda
• Christabel Pankhurst never appeared at the
Dome. No evidence any such event planned.
• Probably confused rumour from performance of
pro-suffrage play performed in Banqueting Room
of Royal Pavilion, ‘Man and Woman’, 5 May 1909
• Performance organised by more moderate
Brighton and Hove Women’s Franchise Society
• Brighton Herald: ‘suffragists as opposed to
suffragettes’
• No reports of any violence at event

21. Final ironies
• Writer has attempted to subvert or distort the
‘meaning’ of the event and the postcard…
• … yet attempts to do this by organising a protest
against an event without ‘meaning’
• This postcard is valuable material evidence of
political male violence against women…
• …but also indicates much of this violence was by
men who were oprganised yet ignorant of the
spectrum of pro-suffrage organisations