Scholarlink

Cicely Hamilton and Christopher St John’s 1909 comic suffrage play How The Vote Was Won imagines an general strike of working suffragist women, in which the organised removal of their labour forces anti-suffrage detractors to acknowledge the vital contribution of women to public, economic, and cultural life, and recognise their claim to enfranchisement as valid and urgent. Using the play as a framework, this chapter explores the presence and absence of activist women in suffrage theatre and performance on stage, on the streets and in public space—through innovative performative interventions including site-specific campaigning in the New York subway, smuggled militant suffragettes on the London music hall stage, and protest in the Ladies Gallery in the House of Commons. Drawing from examples of suffrage theatre that openly engaged with ideas of spectacle, hierarchies of social and financial privilege, and the direct and indirect political agency of women in domestic and family life. this chapter looks at how suffrage theatre makers experimented with narratives of activist women provoking men to positive action, and how these narratives intersected with the tensions and contradictions surrounding the presence of women’s bodies and voices in public space.

错误：搜索内容不能为空，请输入英文关键词
错误：关键词超出字数限制，请精简
高级检索

‘When you want a thing done, get a man to do it!’ Necessary Strategies of Presence and Absence in Suffrage Theatre and Performance

  • 章节

  • 发表日期：

    2025年

查看全文
  • Naomi Paxton

摘要

Cicely Hamilton and Christopher St John’s 1909 comic suffrage play How The Vote Was Won imagines an general strike of working suffragist women, in which the organised removal of their labour forces anti-suffrage detractors to acknowledge the vital contribution of women to public, economic, and cultural life, and recognise their claim to enfranchisement as valid and urgent. Using the play as a framework, this chapter explores the presence and absence of activist women in suffrage theatre and performance on stage, on the streets and in public space—through innovative performative interventions including site-specific campaigning in the New York subway, smuggled militant suffragettes on the London music hall stage, and protest in the Ladies Gallery in the House of Commons. Drawing from examples of suffrage theatre that openly engaged with ideas of spectacle, hierarchies of social and financial privilege, and the direct and indirect political agency of women in domestic and family life. this chapter looks at how suffrage theatre makers experimented with narratives of activist women provoking men to positive action, and how these narratives intersected with the tensions and contradictions surrounding the presence of women’s bodies and voices in public space.