Friday Video: Self-Defense for Women

Loretta reports:

In the course of researching some 19th century self-defense materials, I learned that, even before Victorian times, women could learn self-defense techniques. It wasn’t easy, and it wasn’t exactly respectable, but it could be done. However, by the Edwardian era, women are beginning to get formal instruction in martial arts, like ju jitsu (you can learn a great deal more about this at the Bartitsu Society website).

 Some women, trained in these arts, provided protection for suffragists.

This film is a bit later—1933—but the moves employ the same principles.


Self-Defence Tutorial from 1933 | British Pathé

Image is a still from the video.

Readers who receive our blog via email might see a rectangle, square, or nothing where the video ought to be. To watch the video, please click on the title to this post (which will take you to our blog) or the video title (which will take you to YouTube).

Votes for Women: The 19th Amendment

The Awakening 1915

 Loretta reports:

In a few days, we mark a milestone in women’s rights.  On 18 August 1920, the state of Tennessee ratified the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. constitution, providing the three-quarters majority needed for adoption.

Here’s what it says:
  

"The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.

 "Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation."

It Doesn't Unsex Her

Senator Aaron A. Sargent of California, whose wife, Ellen Clark Sargent, was a suffragist, first introduced the amendment to Congress in 1878. Yes, it took only forty-two years. And the women’s fight for the right to vote had begun decades earlier. But long, long fights have been the case with a great many other milestones in legislation, like abolishing slavery.

We all know the suffragists were ridiculed and abused all the way to the ballot box, but you might want to look at samples of what some people found hilarious, here (let's also ridicule women's fashion while we're at it), here, here, here, here, and here. Note that suffragists are always unattractive, sometimes monstrous. Elderly spinsters appear frequently. Wearing eyeglasses.

Yet a few years later we find images mocking the anti-suffrage side, here, here, here, here, here, and this powerful (and surprising, given the date) image of native American women.

You'll notice that Puck, which had published some of the more infuriating images in this collection, either couldn't make up its mind or finally changed its tune.

I Did Not Raise My Girl To Be a Voter

Images: Hy Mayer, The Awakening, 20 February 1915, courtesy Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA; Milhouse, Katherine, It Doesn't Unsex Her, 1915, via Wikipedia;  "I did not raise my girl to be a voter." Soprano solo with vociferous supporting chorus of male voices, 1915, courtesy Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA .
Clicking on the image will enlarge it.  Clicking on the caption will take you to the source, where you can learn more and enlarge images as needed.

Fanny Bullock Workman Climbs the Himalayas

Loretta reports:

[Note: Due to my brain's temporary—I hope— malfunction, this post accidentally ran in Monday's email. I do beg your pardon for the seeming repeat, but I did mean it for today.]

During my Halloween visit to Worcester’s Rural Cemetery, I happened upon this unusual gravestone. And so of course I took a closer look, and boy, was I surprised.

As you might expect, the gravestone was only the tip of the iceberg (sorry). A search took me to an extensive Wikipedia biography of Fanny Workman Bullock.
She turns out to be the famous one, appearing in at least a dozen books, along with having written several of her own, with her husband. He, by the way, doesn’t even get a Wikipedia page.

I am not going to attempt to condense the extensive story because I wouldn’t know what to leave out.  In a nutshell, along with being a mountaineer who climbed the Himalayas in the early 1900s, she was a Suffragist and a New Woman.

I’ll excerpt one little bit:

 ~~~

 Fanny led them across the Sia La pass (18,700 feet or 5,700 metres) near the head of the Siachen Glacier and through a previously unexplored region to the Kaberi Glacier. This exploration and the resulting book were among her greatest accomplishments. As she wrote in her book about the trip, Two Summers in the Ice-Wilds of Eastern Karakoram, she organized and led this expedition: "Dr. Hunter Workman accompanied me, this time, in charge with me of commissariat and as photographer and glacialist, but I was the responsible leader of this expedition, and on my efforts, in a large measure, must depend the success or failure of it". At one 21,000-foot (6,400 m) plateau, Fanny unfurled a "Votes for Women" newspaper and her husband snapped an iconic picture.

Fanny Workman & Tent

Fanny at 21,000 feet

Fanny & William Workman

Photos of Workman gravestone by Walter M. Henritze III.

Fanny & Tent and Fanny & William, both from The Call of the Snowy Hispar 1911.  On Silver Throne plateau at nearly 21,000 feet, courtesy Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA.

Clicking on the image will enlarge it.  Clicking on the caption will take you to the source, where you can learn more and enlarge images as needed.

Friday video: Bad Romance-Women's Suffrage

Suffragists

Loretta reports:

Isabella’s Friday video, Too Late to Apologize, was so much fun, I had to investigate the source.  It turned out that the next video created on this same principle—history brought to life via contemporary music—was about women’s suffrage, a topic dear to our hearts.  As was the artist whose work gave modern intensity to the topic.






Photograph:  Mrs. Pethick-Lawrence, British suffrage leader, and Miss Alice Paul of the National Woman's Party, ca 1910- 1920.  Image courtesy Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA

Clicking on the image will enlarge it.  Clicking on the caption will allow you to read at the source, where you can learn more and enlarge images as needed.

Readers who receive our blog via email might see a rectangle, square, or nothing where the video ought to be.  To watch the video, please click on the title to this post.

A View of Women in 1912—E.F. Benson

E.F. Benson

Loretta reports:

Most people familiar with E.F. Benson know the Mapp & Lucia series. That was my experience, too—from so long ago that I remember almost nothing about the stories.  But this spring, I happened to read Mrs Ames.  Published in 1912, the story, like those of Mapp & Lucia, is social satire, dealing with with women jockeying for power in their little social circle.  But the characterizations are not caricatures, and Benson’s insights kept surprising me.  Here's my favorite:

“...that strange fascination and excitement at the thought of shouting and interrupting at a public meeting, of becoming for the first time of some consequence, began to seethe and ferment  Most of the members were women whose lives had been passed in continuous self-repression, who had been frozen over by the narcotic ice of a completely conventional and humdrum existence  Many of them were unmarried and already of middle-age; their natural human instincts had never known the blossoming which the natural fulfilment of their natures would have brought.  To the eagerness and sincerity with which they welcomed a work that demanded justice for their sex there was added this excitement of doing something at last... They would be doing something, instead of suffering the tedium of passivity, acting instead of being acted on.  For it is only through centuries of custom that the woman, physically weak and liable to be knocked down, has become the servant of the other sex.  She is fiercer at heart, more courageous, more scornful of consequences than he; it is only muscular inferiority of strength that has subdued her into the place that she occupies; that, and the periods when, for the continuance of the race, she must submit to months of tender and strong inaction.”

Mrs Ames

You can read the book online here or here.

E.F. Benson photograph from Harper's Weekly, collection of the New York Public Library, courtesy Wikipedia.

Independence Day 1894

Independence Day of the Future

Loretta reports:

Independence Day, more usually known these days as the Fourth of July, has often been an occasion in this country for passing significant legislation or calling attention to inequalities.

According to the Library of Congress website:

"In 1859, the Banneker Institute of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, urged African Americans to celebrate Independence Day while bearing witness to the inconsistencies between the ideals espoused in the Declaration of Independence and the practice of slavery."

You can read more about that here.


Unlike many Puck illustrations, whose historical/political references don't ring bells with modern readers, this 1894 Independence Day print is pretty easy to read.  When you don't know the specific political context or recognize the names, it's impossible to get the joke.  But this one, like the Valentine's Day illustration I posted on my own blog, doesn't require historical scholarship.  I'll leave you to draw your own conclusions about what provoked it and what it says about attitudes of the time and whether or not we've come a long way since then.

Illustration courtesy Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA.

"Wild Women" Suffragists Commit Arson for the Vote, 1913

Isabella reporting,

It's been a long time since women were finally given the vote in America and Britain, so long that many people (and sadly, many younger women) have forgotten the heroic efforts of the early 20th c. suffragists. These women risked their reputations, their bodies, and their lives for the sake of the cause. Desperation made them daring, and in Britain, the damage the caused and the threats they made were very real and unsettling.

The piled tables and chairs and charred ruins, above, are all that remained of the Tea House at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew, (the landmark pagoda can be seen like a ghost to the left), London, after suffragists burned it to the ground, one hundred years ago in February, 1913. The postcard, below, shows the Tea House two years before the attack. Lilian Lenton and Olive Wharry, suffragists linked to the Women's Social & Political Union, were arrested at the night of the fire, and found guilty of arson. Both were sentenced to eighteen months imprisonment in Holloway Prison, though neither woman served their full sentences; both staged hunger-strikes in protest, and became so ill that they were released early.

How much of a real terrorist threat were the militant suffragists? The story below is from The Times, April 5, 1913.

                                   'WILD WOMEN' BURN AND SMASH FOR VOTE
                                                      PANIC IN THE PROVINCES
Great Country Houses Closely Watched – London Season Menaced by Restrictions on Visitors.

    "Wild women," as the suffragettes are being styled, have been busy in the provinces today, following up the campaign of revenge for the imprisonment of Mrs. Pankhurst.
     The grandstand of the Ayr race course in Scotland was burned and an attempt was made to destroy the grandstand of the Kelso race course, two men being caught just after they had started a fire.
    Flower beds in Armstrong Park in Newcastle were devastated.

    As a result of the continued activity of the militants, special precautions are being taken to protect the famous country houses of England. Chatsworth and Haddon Hall are guarded night and day, and a strict watch is being kept over the Shakespeare memorials at Stratford.
   Londoners are beginning to be afraid that fear of the suffragettes will have a bad effect on the social season. 

    American women visiting here who wish to see the sights are complaining of their inability to do so, owing to the strict orders given to exclude women from the Tower and other places where suffragette raids are apprehended. As an instance of the precautions taken the jewel room at the Tower is entirely closed to the public.

Above: Tea House, Kew Gardens, destroyed by suffragettes. Bain News Service, c 1910-1915. George Grantham Bain Collection, Library of Congress.
Below: Refreshment Pavilion and Pagoda, Kew Gardens, postcard, c. 1910. From Whatsthatpicture's flickr photostream.