The Suffrage Movement and the Politics of Memory

The Suffrage Movement and the Politics of Memory Sharon Crozier-De Rosa and Marc Calvini-Lefebvre (bio) ON APRIL 24, 2018, British suffragist leader Millicent Garrett Fawcett (1847–1929) became the first woman to be honoured with a permanent statue in Parliament Square, 186 years after George Canning, the first of her 11 male predecessors.1 The unveiling was the culmination of a two-year campaign initiated by activist Caroline Criado Perez. The choice of Fawcett sparked vigorous debate amongst activists and academics alike.2 Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, the centenary of the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment granting the female franchise inspired #Monumental Women, a grassroots organization, to mount a campaign for the commissioning of a statue honouring the White suffragist leaders Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902) and Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906). This campaign also triggered vigorous debates, not least around the accusation that the monument would “whitewash” the suffrage past, resulting in the decision to add the African American leader Sojourner Truth (1797–1883) to the sculpture.3 Unveiled on August 26, 2020, in Central Park, New York, it is, like Fawcett’s, the first statue of its kind in this most prestigious of public spaces.4 [End Page 245] A common framing for these unveilings, including by those who championed them, has been to present them as part of a broader contemporary movement aiming to “break the bronze ceiling.” Indeed, the Western world’s monumental public statuary can be described, in the words of Eric Hobsbawm, as “an open-air museum of national history as seen through great men.”5 In that museum, those female figures who are represented often perform a metaphorical function such as signifying liberty, justice, revolution, or charity. Under a system categorized as “bronze patriarchy,” it has been much less common to see public representations of actual women (except female monarchs who are memorialized for their status rather than their actions).6 Recent Anglo-American suffrage centenaries have thus provided activists with the opportunity to redress this imbalance through actively championing the inscribing of female campaigners into our material landscape. Another complementary way of understanding these spectacular enshrinements of leading suffrage campaigners, in such quintessential sites of national memory, is as a form of apotheosis for a process begun by the suffrage campaigners themselves. At the time, they were campaigning for the vote, and in the immediate aftermath of their activism, suffragists sought to inscribe the memory of their movement into our built environments via statues, but also through more modest means such as street names, commemorative plaques, or bench seats.7 As our special issue highlights, they also transcribed the history of their movements in printed and other materials. All of these constitute what Pierre Nora has coined “sites of memory” (les lieux de mémoire),8 that is to say, to borrow from Maria Grever, a loose and evolving collection of “leaders, historical events, monuments, rituals, symbols, images, founding texts and historiography” which become iconic and are drawn on by feminists to justify their struggles and identities to themselves, to each other, and to their enemies.9 [End Page 246] The London Parliament Square and New York Central Park statues are rare international examples of towering public sculptures dedicated to the memory of women’s suffragism. Memory activists globally, whether past or contemporary, have had to deal with an array of mindsets in their labours to memorialize feminist activists and movements, from the hindrance of official and public indifference to the bitter divisions wrought by final inclusions and exclusions. The result is that memorialization successes have often been haphazard and serendipitous. Still, and in the face of difficulties achieving, or opposition to, national memorials to suffrage (such as in France, Turkey or Spain), memory activists have continued the original suffragists’ practice of lobbying for local if more modest commemorative outcomes.10 Be it through small blue plaques on former homes, looming street murals or named drab inner-city squares, generations of feminists have attempted to shape the “Pantheon of Feminist Culture.”11 Feminist memory of the suffrage past is continuously being remade, strengthening in the process some feminist identities and futures over others, producing a plurality of historical understandings of

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