Introduction: Lena Connell, British Suffrage Photographer: Creating a Cult of Great Women

There are two ways of understanding portraiture—either as history or as fiction.—Charles Baudelaire, “Salon of 1846”

Lena Connell—née Adelin(e) Beatrice Connell; later Mrs. Beatrice Cundy (1875–1949)—established herself in her north London studio at 50, Grove End Road in St. John’s Wood by 1902, where she worked as a portrait photographer. In fact, by as early as the 1880s there were nearly 300 such photographic studios in London, many of them situated in the neighborhood of Connell’s fashionable north London address.¹ Women ran several of those studios. We find a fictional reflection of the burgeoning popularity of photography in London’s center in Amy Levy’s novel, The Romance of a Shop (1888), which centers on the four Lorimer sisters who, upon their father’s death, must make their own way financially. They transform their studio hobby into a productive business, setting up a “Photographic Studio” in bustling London, at a convenient address of 20B Upper Baker Street.² While photography supplied a domestic pastime for some women, for others it became their lifeblood, which was the case for Levy’s fictional characters just as it was for Connell. In the novel, Levy addresses the issues that are also prevalent for Connell’s experience as a visible, public woman who has to promote herself. I will return to Levy’s novel later in this introduction, but first it is necessary to ground Connell’s artistic practice and commercial business within the history of the British suffrage movement. Following that section, I will set the stage for Connell’s appearance on the London scene as a ­sought-after photographer by exploring the call for a cult of great women. I demonstrate the theoretical framework of the study through an examination of how the “separate spheres imaginary”—the argument that the neat binary of public male space versus the private female one can be put to rest—is embodied in the role of the gaze in the modern city. To do so I will return to the late Victorian world of Levy’s fictional Lorimer sisters, whose forays into the public world of trade foreshadowed the professional loosening of gender codes of the 1890s ­fin-de-siècle which itself further disrupted gender norms and created space for the more radical voices of suffrage women.³ I then move forward to the role of the gaze in Connell’s time and the dangers and pleasures it offered the suffrage women. I will finish the introduction by exploring the overarching themes that the study explores, as well as grounding Connell’s representation of professional women in art historical portrait traditions and in the rhetoric of visual culture propaganda, ending with an outline of the book’s organization.

Background on the Edwardian Suffrage Movement

The women whom Connell pictures in her ­soft-toned, engaging portraits were the very women who marched in London’s streets, waving elaborate colorful banners to show the British government that women in numbers desired the vote. They paraded with big smiles on their faces, caught up in a cause that they envisioned as improving their lives by giving them citizenship and a voice. While Connell has left us representations of forthright, compelling, strong women in serious studio sittings, such portraits work in concert with their myriad activities which, apart from the elaborate marches, included: speaking on soapboxes; traveling the country in caravans to rally supporters; lecturing at home and abroad; chaining themselves to government fences; and advertising the cause through pamphlets and their various newspapers that they sold on Britain’s streets.

This fight for the enfranchisement of British women was the work of several organizations. Connell’s suffrage portraiture was impacted by the dialogue, battles and rhetoric between the three main suffrage groups, members of whom sat for Connell: The National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (hereafter NUWSS, 1897–1919), led by Millicent Garrett Fawcett; the Women’s Social and Political Union (hereafter WSPU, 1903–1914), led by Emmeline Pankhurst and her eldest daughter Christabel; and the Women’s Freedom League (hereafter WFL, 1907–1961), led by Charlotte Despard as a splinter group from the WSPU after Emmeline Pankhurst’s autocratic takeover of the WSPU.⁴ In turn, there was a fourth group which Sylvia Pankhurst, one of two younger daughters of Mrs. Pankhurst, formed in 1912 as a splinter group of the WSPU. Titled the East London Federation of Suffragettes (hereafter ELFS, 1912–1924), they focused on political representation for women workers. By 1914 they had become a separate organization from the WSPU due to class conflicts over representation with Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst.

Women also organized local branches of these larger organizations both around London and in over seventy cities in Great Britain. Each branch had its own banner and, often, its own shop, its windows filled with glamorous portraits of key women in the movement for purchase as post cards or matted pictures. But we should not imagine that membership in individual groups embodied any kind of divide between the suffrage activists themselves. Apart from the local chapters just mentioned, there were numerous unaffiliated groups that represented the interests of that particular group, such as the Actresses’ Franchise League (hereafter AFL, 1908–1958), who formed to promote women’s enfranchisement through educational methods such as plays, literature and lectures. I will return to this group in chapter three.

In addition, many of the suffrage women wrote confessional accounts—in letters, diaries, memoirs, and speeches. Further, they wrote autobiographical pieces that were published in the journals and newspapers of the cause.

Suffrage literature, portraits and other paraphernalia were in high demand, a fact reflected in the volume of trade that these many suffrage shops experienced. The center of this consumer activity was the Woman’s Press shop which opened at No. 156 Charing Cross Road in May 1910 (fig. 1).

Fig. 1: Woman’s Press shop, 156 Charing Cross Road, London, May 1910 (photograph Museum of London).

In the WSPU mouthpiece, Votes for Women, an unnamed author observed:

The shop itself is a blaze of purple, white and green…. Just now the Woman’s Press is showing some beautiful motor and other scarves in various shades of purple as well as white muslin summer blouses and among the almost unending variety of bags, belts, etc. are the noticeable ‘The Emmeline’ and ‘The Christabel’ bags…. In addition to books, pamphlets and leaflets, stationery, games, blotters, playing cards and indeed almost everything that can be produced in purple, white or green or a combination of all three is to be found here.⁵

Purple, white and green were the colors of the WSPU. The Emmeline and Christabel items mentioned above honored the two Pankhurst leaders of the WSPU. In this photograph of the shop interior from 1911 (fig. 2), we see sample portraits displayed on a board which include some of Connell’s portraits in dark mats.

Fig. 2: Interior View of Woman’s Press shop, 156 Charing Cross Road, London, 1911 (photograph Museum of London).

The WSPU and the WFL produced postcards from such portraits of their leaders, employing Connell and other photographers for this purpose; the postcards often cited the sitters’ affiliations.⁶

The WSPU advertised in its mouthpiece Votes for Women how and where to buy portraits of its leaders, being particularly devoted to the Woman’s Press since it ran in cooperation with the WSPU. According to suffrage historians Liz Stanley and Ann Morley at some point between 1909–1910 the Woman’s Press took over the publication of Votes for Women and, although editorial control remained with WSPU members Emmeline ­Pethick-Lawrence and Evelyn Sharp, the store organized distribution. This was no small shop. Instead, it “consisted of eleven rooms on a number of floors previously occupied by the bookseller George Allen. The shop front attracted buyers and offered scope for publicity—a WSPU ‘Votes for Women’ clock on the building was a very visible symbol of feminist presence in the area.”⁷

However, by 1912 it had been absorbed back into the WSPU at its headquarters in Lincoln’s Inn House, Kingsway, at a time when we witness both the split of the suffrage couple, Emmeline and Frederick ­Pethick-Lawrence, with the leadership, and Christabel’s ­self-imposed exile to Paris. While Votes for Women remained with the ­Pethick-Lawrences until 1914 when they handed it over to the United Suffragists, the WSPU launched a new organ, The Suffragette (1912–15). Before these changes, however, the Woman’s Press housed not only portraits and portrait postcards but also key publications, including ones by two of Connell’s sitters, Constance, Lady Lytton and Sylvia Pankhurst.⁸

The existence of all of these groups as well as their efforts at propagandistic dissemination is to verify that theirs was no ­fly-by-night endeavor, but rather a huge undertaking for which many women fought their whole adult lives. It took considerable managerial, organizational and leadership skills, as well as the volunteer services of many women. That so many gave their time suggests what an incredibly passionate and spiritual quest they were on. But when I look at Connell’s portraits of these brave women, what unites them for me is their beaming, proud expressions which reflect their joy of purpose. If sacrifice were necessary, they would not shirk from it.

No feminist art historians to date have examined the visual dialogue between these main groups with regards to their employment of Connell to promote their individual and group image. Connell worked to represent a unified front of respectful identities for women in each group who, while united on the battle for suffrage, held different ideals, the NUWSS being the constitutional group who fought for the vote through continuing appeals to sympathetic Parliamentarians; while the WSPU and WFL sought militant and, in the former case, increasingly violent measures to pressure for the vote. While these groups worked together and were largely sympathetic to each other in joint efforts of massive marches, for example, once the WSPU turned violent with its ­window-smashing campaign in 1912, the NUWSS distanced itself from them, as did the WFL. Such acts resulted in women’s imprisonment but it was a type of action that had been ongoing since as early as 1905 when WSPU ­co-leader Christabel Pankhurst, along with Annie Kenney, her ­working-class associate, interrupted a Manchester election meeting to ask if they would sponsor votes for women. Stewards forcibly ejected the women from the hall, but Christabel committed a technical incursion on a police officer by spitting in his face which resulted in her arrest for assault and Kenney’s arrest for obstruction. Refusing to pay the fine, they went to jail instead. This event set a pattern for WSPU agitation. Whenever suffragettes⁹ refused to pay their fines for such actions, they went to prison, but this escalation of events was still not enough to turn the heads of the government, nor were their remarkable marches, some being seven miles long! More serious tactics were necessary, the WSPU decided; hence, we see suffragettes engaged in the ­window-smashing campaign, arson, and other acts of destruction to property, perhaps the most symbolically placed being their literal attacks on works of art of the female nude, itself a symbol of man’s domination and control. While these activities landed the women in prison and led to further factions among the suffrage groups, it also kept them in the limelight, at the center of debate. As Martha Vicinus summarizes:

Militancy had not gained the vote or its ­long-range goal of a spiritually regenerated society. Yet it did not fail its participants. They had successfully brought before the eyes of the general public a new vision of what society could be—and how women could behave. Women had sacrificed themselves in order to gain access to new spaces, public and spiritual, within themselves and the wider world.¹⁰

That all changed, however, with the advent of the First World War. The WSPU disbanded in 1914 and dedicated its time to the war effort, while the NUWSS and WFL continued through the war years. The NUWSS focused on obtaining the vote while the WFL suspended militant activities in order to focus on significant social reforms that would aid women. The NUWSS’s continued suffrage effort resulted in The Representation of the People Act which granted suffrage to women householders over thirty by the close of the war in 1918.¹¹ But it was a partial victory only; full suffrage for all women eighteen and over came only in 1928.

The Cult of Great Women and the “Separate Spheres Imaginary”

This study examines how Connell creates a cult of great women in her suffrage portraits, which reflects the shift to equality that the suffrage women envision by fighting for the vote and citizenship. In a desire for visibility for a cause, they leave behind the angel of the house of the Victorian womanhood construction who sought only to exist within the domestic space, leaving the larger public world of commerce and business to her husband. Busting the myth of the strict dichotomy of the public versus private spheres, which I call the “separate spheres imaginary,” they cross over that safe threshold to create a great surge forward that mirrors the progressive strides toward modernism of the larger Edwardian period (1901–1910).

Connell’s portraits of suffrage women are both a product of and contribute to the economic, social and urban shifts we witness during the Edwardian period. By 1912, on the heels of the Edwardian era, Connell was a ­well-known, ­award-winning photographer of suffrage women, professional musicians, politicians and literary greats, and unique amongst women photographers of her time in her successful portraits of prominent men. She had shown her portrait photographs between 1901–1905 and 1910–1911 at the Royal Photographic Society (see appendix). She exhibited some of her suffrage portraits there in 1910–11, including two portraits from Edith Craig (1869–1947) and Cicely Hamilton’s (1872–1952) published play, A Pageant of Great Women (1910). Each photograph showed a suffrage woman “in character” as one of the great women from history who appeared in the play. Many of the women involved (the cast of characters changed throughout the pageant’s staged history) were actresses themselves. One example is Edith Craig as Rosa Bonheur (fig. 3), with actress Craig taking on the ­real-life character of the famous ­19th-century animal painter who was the first woman artist to be awarded the French establishment’s highest art prize, the Legion of Honour in 1865.

Fig. 3: Lena Connell (1875–1949), Edith Craig as Rosa Bonheur for A Pageant of Great Women, 1910. Photograph with Edith Craig signature in Suffrage Shop mat (Women’s Library, London School of Economics and Political Science).

Another example was a professional image of Ellen Terry, Craig’s famous actress mother, as the ­18th-century actress Nance Oldfield (fig. 4).¹²

Fig. 4: Lena Connell (1875–1949), Ellen Terry as Nance Oldfield, photograph with Ellen Terry signature from A Pageant of Great Women, c. 1910 (photograph from catalog of A Pageant of Great Women, courtesy British Library, London. Shelfmark 11779.g.47).

As members of the AFL, and as actresses in their own right, Craig and Hamilton formed a partnership to deliver feminist plays that protested women’s exclusion from enfranchisement. The fact that Craig and Hamilton envision the pageant as a collection of great women both reflects their desire to offer up dauntless women from history as support for the cause and to position the suffrage women themselves as belonging to that cult of greatness. The very fact that they literally embody the great women from history, both as actresses and suffragists themselves, is a direct instance of their cognizance of their new existence within the realm of great women. Linda Nochlin’s classic essay, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” has been the feminist, art historical starting point for unpacking that very idea of what constitutes “greatness.” She argues that traditionally only men could be great artists. She challenges that notion by finding great, talented women, including a case study of Rosa Bonheur herself, and issuing a call for art historians to seek out other great women artists.¹³ I realize that I am appropriating her use of “greatness” for activist women rather than artists, but we must acknowledge, nonetheless, that Connell’s portraits offer up a permanent record of the suffrage activists as great women, a form of representation that stems directly from their ability to carve out a new space for themselves in the urban environment.¹⁴

Yet, while Connell belongs to this modern, ­ocular-focused world socially, politically and economically, artistically she stands out from other photographers of the Edwardian period in her ability to establish powerful images of British suffrage women for the press and an admiring public through her formal (and ­not-so-formal) photographic studio portraits. Two sides of her representation of women can be seen in these two images: One a glamorous presentation of Ethel Snowden—née Annakin (1880–1951)—a radical in politics who was a lecturer for the Independent Labour Party as early as 1904 and who soon joined the NUWSS (fig. 5).

Fig. 5: Lena Connell (1875–1949), Mrs. Philip Snowden (Ethel [née Annakin] Snowden), c. 1910 (photograph © National Portrait Gallery, London).

It is a key example among many portraits Connell created of strong, fighting suffrage women who wished to present a formidable example of womanliness to the public. The other one, Muriel Matters Speaking (fig. 6) shows the slippage of such representations; suffrage women had to do their work in public, crossing that safe threshold of home and entering a man’s world.

Fig. 6: Lena Connell (1875–1949), Muriel Matters Speaking, c. 1909. WFL postcard based on a photograph by Connell (Museum of London).

While many reports exist of suffrage women’s trepidation over this aspect of their work, Connell skillfully created a public image of Miss Muriel Matters—later Muriel ­Matters-Porter (1877–1969)—hard at work for the WFL. She was an Australian from Adelaide, South Australia, where women had had dual suffrage since 1894 (both the vote and the right to sit in Parliament).¹⁵ When she went to England to further her acting skills, she attended a meeting of the WSPU, from which moment she was fueled with outrage by her mother country’s refusal to give its women the rights of citizenship. As a trained elocutionist and actress, she lent her considerable speaking skills to the movement through her work for the WFL. Connell represents her as if she is on stage, suffused in soft light, the photograph giving her a beatific quality, as if she were an angel of mercy delivering women from oppression.

These portraits convey a new way of seeing women who had crossed over the brink of the domestic realm to embrace a public one, giving direct evidence of the “separate spheres imaginary.” But Connell’s representation of activist suffrage women is much more complex than its evidential role in breaking down the traditional binary. Indeed, as Deborah Cherry and Jane Beckett characterize such representation:

Much is still to be discovered about how suffrage visibilities were orchestrated by different societies and media groups, how newspaper photographers engaged with diverse suffrage politics, or the intersections between suffrage and the new professions of journalism and photojournalism. A huge variety of photographs survive, with a wide range of photographic strategies encompassing staged photographs of campaigners out and about, in and outside suffrage shops and offices, studio and less formal portraits of prominent figures, press photographs which could be aligned with pro- or ­anti-suffrage sentiment, documentary shots, promotional images … taken on the street…. There are intriguing exchanges between surviving photographs and grainy images in the illustrated press. Photographs offer tantalizing details on locations and the use of space, on public performance, on the everyday creativity in the art of suffrage dress and accessories, and intergenerational relations between campaigners, as well as between campaigners, opponents, the police and the public.¹⁶

Partly filling in the gaps in the above observations, my 2018 book on the visual culture of women’s activism from 1860 to the present, addresses the use of visual propaganda by three main groups of British suffragists: the NUWSS, the WSPU and the WFL, in order to examine such “suffrage visibilities” and how the groups all used the same imagery of Joan of Arc, Boudica, Britannia, Justice, and Liberty, in press imagery and on the street, as well as in theatre performances. Its epilogue then traces the history of activism on women’s bodies in documentary photographic imagery up to the present.¹⁷ In this way, it foregrounds what I wish to do here on Connell, bringing her oeuvre back from the brink of invisibility, to center stage, so that she can begin to receive the historical recognition that she deserves within the rise of modernism that the Edwardian suffrage movement itself embodies. While this study will focus on such “studio and less formal portraits of prominent figures,” it will analyze them in relation to “staged photographs of campaigners out and about, in and outside suffrage shops and offices” in an attempt to establish the dialogic intersections of the studio representations with the activities themselves. Further, Connell’s portraits appeared in the suffrage newspapers, offering one set of examples of “intriguing exchanges between surviving photographs and grainy images in the illustrated press.” In addition, her suffrage portraits are evidence “on public performance [and] on the everyday creativity in the art of suffrage dress and accessories.” In the Ethel Snowden portrait (fig. 5), for example, Connell creates a dazzling image of her subject in an Edwardian ­off-the-shoulder white gown with carefully coiffed hair, in order to position her both as a feminine modern woman and as a member of the activist cause. This factor is reflected in such portraits’ availability at suffrage shops and their appearance in suffrage newspapers. Connell’s suffrage portraits also reflect the “intergenerational relations between campaigners, as well as between campaigners, opponents, the police and the public” since, as the reader will see in the chapters to come, several generations of women are among Connell’s sitters, including Mrs. Emmeline Pankhurst and her artist daughter Sylvia, as well as the noble, senior leader Charlotte Despard and the young, vibrant Muriel Matters, all of whom went to prison as a result of interactions with the police and the general public.

Such portraits act as part of an ongoing counterargument and resistance narrative to the tired, stereotypical imagery of the ugly harridan of the patriarchal popular press which much of our suffrage scholarship has been able to put to rest through the promotion of this very kind of alternative representation. As Miranda Garrett and Zoë Thomas reveal, “Visual culture did not simply complement verbal and textual feminist analysis of society and women’s place within it, but fundamentally challenged prevalent stereotypes.”¹⁸ Thus, the images here speak back to John Tenniel’s “An Ugly Rush” cartoon from 1870 on women’s suffrage (fig. 7) which shows a blatant counterattack to women’s increasing visibility in the political realm.

Fig. 7: John Tenniel (1820–1914), “An Ugly Rush.” Wood engraving. Punch, 1870 (Punch Cartoon Library/TopFoto).

It depicts women who enter the public field as aged, “ugly,” and angry. Tenniel’s point is that such women need the vote, or at least an education, since they do not possess the requisite beauty to lure a husband, an ­oft-repeated kind of censure in such caricatures. By contrast, he represents the typical Victorian beauty as a married woman (standing at the right), who instructs her daughter that these “ugly” women represent an adverse example. They want an answer from “John Bull,” the symbol of English government, who has just rejected the Women’s Vote Bill. This cartoon was one of many that addressed the issue of women in public who wanted the same rights as men, refusing to take them seriously and deflecting their purpose by keeping the focus on superficial issues of appearance, as well as on their transgression of proper womanly behavior, the “ugly” of the title referring both to their physical selves and how their behavior existed outside of the proper codes of conduct. Connell and her suffrage women subjects were thus up against considerable ambivalence from a culture which viewed them as a threat to the status quo.

While these portraits contribute to this unconventional narrative that both acknowledges and creates a dialogue with the popular, conservative press, they also break free from the ­often-argued stance that only ­self-interested, ­middle-class and wealthy women were involved in the movement.¹⁹ On the contrary, this collection of suffrage portraits reflects the diversity of the women involved in the cause more generally, coming as they do from the ranks of the aristocracy as well as from the middle- and ­lower-classes.

I will interpret Connell’s body of portraits within the context of the Edwardian and Georgian women’s suffrage movement in London, concentrating mostly on the years 1908–1914 (the years of Connell’s surviving production of suffrage portraits). I focus on the portraits themselves within a dialogue about photographic portraiture in the Edwardian period, but, further, what is more important is how and where such portraits appeared and for what purpose. To that end, I examine their production through the lens of women’s lived experiences and their motivations. I explore letters, diaries, memoirs and auto/biographies to lend evidence to how these women chose to present themselves in public, and how they themselves literally embodied that professional presentation of self in their activist endeavors. The investigation thus analyses women’s movements and their visual propaganda to determine how protest, a desire for change, and resistance to the status quo can be propelled through the persuasive impact of visual imagery.

The Gaze and the Modern City

In her novel, Levy masterfully constructs the controversies surrounding the New Woman who begins to appear in the 1880s and who is most often characterized as a ­once-attractive, ­middle-class, ­middle-aged, single woman who chooses an independent path and often opposes marriage. An avid reader and serious individual, she devotes herself to her work, but is happy in her freedom to roam the city, with her ­latch-key in hand; yet she ends up with a poor posture and eyesight. Representations of her often show her bent over, balancing a ­pince-nez, and being somewhat manly in appearance. Such images of her are sometimes conflated with, or give birth to, the hysterical suffragette stereotype we saw in Tenniel’s cartoon (fig. 7). But the New Woman’s presence represents the powerful shift toward greater agency for women in the late Victorian period in education and the professions, offering her a more solid economic opportunity than existed previously. This change was in some part due to new laws: by the 1880s she could own property and keep her own earnings. A woman’s greater economic power further coincided with the loosening of sexual mores associated with the ­fin-de-siècle writers, such as Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw. As Richard Altick has argued, the late Victorian period began to break down Victorian morals in an attempt to move forward toward the modern age.²⁰ The slackening of the gender binds in the 1890s is evident in Oscar Wilde’s 1895 London production of An Ideal Husband which characterizes the intricacies and ambiguities of sexual identity in the 1890s, ones represented, in part, by such suffrage women as we will meet later in the introduction, Millicent Garrett Fawcett and Madame Sarah Grand. It became more difficult to pronounce masculinity and femininity in the 1890s, or to pin down someone’s sexual identity; it proved slippery.

In a larger context, as with the Lorimer sisters taking on the mantle of the New Woman, the 1890s plays in general were rife with challenges to traditional marriage as well as to sexual relations. Women were gaining power and voice. Wilde knew this to be true, since he was promoting women and employing them within the pages of the Woman’s World under his editorship in the late 1880s. Hence, the impetus for the thrust forward in the 1900s suffrage campaign has its roots partly in the works of such ­envelope-pushing playwrights. The trick of maintaining a feminist identity in a culture that only praised a woman’s femininity is an issue Wilde addresses repeatedly in his plays and such a stance, too, sets the tone for the challenges as well as the openings and fissures that the suffrage advocates faced.²¹

Levy’s novel title, The Romance of a Shop, suggests the excitement of the four sisters who are ready to face the bold world of London’s urban bustle, but “shop” is a loaded class word, even for the late Victorians. It implies commerce, indeed that hated word “trade”; respectable ­middle-class women like the Lorimer sisters should not be in trade, but, like so many women without a benefactor and not much capital, they must support themselves. As modern urban women, they act as predecessors to Connell and other women photographers of the Edwardian period. Susan David Bernstein, in fact, argues that Levy’s writing itself “reflects a shifting consciousness, a mode of representation hovering between romance and realism, between idealized visions of remodeled lives for women and men, and the mundane hazards of such social change.”²² This commentary and Levy’s novel itself both capture the essence of what I call the “separate spheres imaginary.” Our traditional binary structure of public and private realms, so sacred to the Victorians, was becoming harder to pronounce in light of how such pioneering women challenge it through their independent existence. Their experiences in the modern city displace those rigid boundaries. Such a bifurcated world was untenable by the 1880s, if not as far back as the 1860s, when Victorian women first began to agitate for women’s rights to education, the professions, and the vote.

The Lorimer sisters’ metropolitan, business experiences reflect the transformation of the modern city as it starts to embrace women in the professions. In this regard, they act as prototypes for Connell, as young, single professional women since, as Bernstein argues, they are “caught between the new and old, between opportunities and social disabilities, between privileged and outsider status.” Their ambiguous position, as formerly pampered ­middle-class women who were expected to marry well, yet who are now thrown on their own devices, is echoed on a larger scale, Bernstein argues, in “Levy’s depictions of London public spaces [which] capture … the fluctuating edge between tradition and modernity.”²³ Women’s ­19th-century presence in the city and their control of the gaze, both as photographers and as businesswomen traversing the urban domain, is in defiance of French poet Charles Baudelaire’s flâneur construct. His male wanderer in the streets of Paris enjoyed ocular spectacles as a wayward stroller with no other purpose than his own pleasure in looking. This role, Baudelaire asserts, was not available to respectable women.

Janet Wolff, as a late ­20th-century sociologist, was the first to question Baudelaire’s creation of this figure among contemporary scholars. She asks why scholars have not sought out women in such public spaces; that is, the corresponding flâneuse. This discourse is grounded in the separate spheres ideology which later scholars have unraveled by examining the actual experiences of women in the city to determine their very real presence and activity there.²⁴ Attached to that deconstruction of the separate spheres in coexistence with the analysis of the male gaze of the flâneur is the presence and active work of the female gaze, a notion that is itself a challenge to Laura Mulvey’s essay on the dominance of the male gaze in narrative cinema. In a 2006 volume Wolff revised her initial call, determining that women in the city are never the flâneuse since they always walk the city with a purpose.²⁵ But that is not to deny the continuing presence of the male caught in the act of surveillance. In Mulvey’s acknowledgment of the male gaze, the woman exists only for her “­looked-at-ness.” Mulvey later responded to her own critique as perhaps being too rigid a dichotomy. Nonetheless, I argue here, as Bernstein does in her analysis of Levy’s novel, that female spectatorship and presence is still problematic and femininity is always going to be aligned with certain visual pleasures.

In Levy’s 1888 article for Oscar Wilde’s The Woman’s World, called “Women and Club Life,” she challenges Baudelaire by giving direct evidence of the public alteration to women’s presence in the city between the 1870s and 1880s. She does so by citing a George du Maurier Punch illustration, “Female Clubs v. Matrimony” (fig. 8) from 1877.

Fig. 8: George du Maurier (1834–1896), “Female Clubs v. Matrimony.” Wood engraving. Punch Almanack of 1878 (Punch Cartoon Library/TopFoto).

She remarks that ten years separate her article from the cartoon and the world, in her estimation, now has a “stolid acceptance of the fact of feminine club life”²⁶ aided as it had been by advances in women’s education that allowed more women into professional careers. By contrast, du Maurier presents the representation as preposterous; he invites his audience to laugh with him because women at clubs and hence not at home was not the norm.²⁷ Yet, significant for how we place Connell and her suffrage sisters, Levy states that

[t]he female ­club-lounger, the flâneuse of St. James’s Street, ­latch-key in pocket and ­eye-glasses on nose, remains a creature of the imagination. The clubs … are sober, ­business-like haunts enough, to which no dutiful wife or ­serious-minded maiden need feel ashamed of belonging…. [I]t is to the professional woman … that the club offers the most substantial advantages.²⁸

She argues here for women with purpose in the city; our discourse on the flâneuse, as enumerated above, shows her to be ­non-existent. If we examine ­19th-century imagery of the woman in the home, we find that even she is not the satisfied helpmate, but rather a restless captive of the separate sphere ideology.²⁹ The fact that Levy, in 1888, both identifies and dismisses the flâneuse as a figment of the imagination, while cleverly conflating her with the stereotype of the New Woman with her ­latch-key and eyeglasses, is perhaps the most telling evidence we have that women both existed in the public spaces of modern London and had no time for flâneuresque idleness. They were no “club loungers” or ­latch-key women with time on their hands. Neither was Connell. Levy is calling here for women to belong to a new professional group in order to alleviate the possibility of isolation which could often befall urban women. A club allowed for friends and recommendations, as well as a place to network, conduct meetings, and socialize away from the competition of men. Tied to such a change is the realization that women embraced the gaze: young women photographers with male clients would continually be subjecting men to their discerning observations. This fact sits opposite to the supposed career of the flâneuse in the modern metropolis. These women are engaged in looking. In this regard, Madame Philonie Yevonde, who apprenticed with Connell in 1910, shares Connell’s encounter with one of her male sitters who was quite nervous to be subjected to a woman’s look:

Miss Connell was photographing a very stiff, nervous man, who proved himself a most touchy and fractious sitter. After trying in vain to put him at his ease by conversation … she at last lost patience with him, and said to him: “Why do you not go and get photographed by a man, as you appear so ill at ease, and foolish before a woman?” He became still more confused, of course, at that, and said: “Well, you see, it’s like this, Miss Connell, I should look a silly ass any way in a studio being photographed, and I would much rather look a silly ass before a woman than before one of my own sex.”

Madame Yevonde used this anecdote as one argument for the successes of the woman photographer.³⁰ Part of Connell’s career was devoted to portraits of men, many of whom were also involved in the suffrage campaign.³¹ But this anecdote suggests that the man in question still does not value the woman’s gaze as being equivalent to that of a man!

Despite Levy’s dismissal of the flâneuse, she is, however, cognizant of a woman’s dilemma in the city and how she is indeed on the cusp of moving into a modern state of being. She claims:

It is not without regret that one sees the old order changing and giving place to new…. The woman who owns no interests beyond the circle of home, who takes no thought for herself, who is content to follow where love and superior wisdom are leading—this ideal of feminine excellence is not, indeed, to be relinquished without a sigh.

But she is, alas! too expensive a luxury for our civilization; we cannot afford her.³²

Levy encapsulates here both the myth of the angel of the house of the separate spheres ideology and the reason she is a myth: economics cannot support her continuance. Urban dwellers such as women of club fame have to work against her, as du Maurier indicates in the title to his cartoon, pitting “Female Clubs” against “Matrimony.”

Yet, as Bernstein declares, Levy’s novel addresses the “ambiguous status” the Lorimer sisters experience as such formerly cosseted women who must take on this public world through economic necessity. While their studio is inside their home, they do traverse across London to work with people in trade for the purchase of their equipment and supplies, to visit artists’ studios, and to attend art openings to promote their business and to meet potential clients. Bernstein asserts that they thus inhabit “a frontier space between firmly entrenched notions of position based on occupation, wealth, and family.”³³ Such ­well-established, traditional values are best represented in the character of the formidable Aunt Caroline (Mrs. Septimus Pratt) who constantly seeks to guide the sisters into propriety, an effort which Levy debunks through the sisters’ own moves forward into the public realm, but not unproblematically. While Gertrude and Lucy run the business, and the youngest sister, Phyllis, the beauty of the family, assists, their older ­half-sister Fanny also represents this old guard, keeping house for them while they work.

By examining one scene between Gertrude and Lucy with Phyllis, I wish to offer up the argument that Levy, despite her stance in the club essay, presents a nuanced view of a woman’s presence in the city that corresponds with the world into which Connell would be stepping. After one evening meal, “Phyllis went over to the window, drew up the blind, and amused herself, as was her frequent custom, by looking into the street.” Her sister Lucy remarks, “I wish you wouldn’t do that, anyone can see right into the room” (105). Bernstein remarks of this scene that a woman’s gazing could be “dangerously reciprocal.”³⁴ But that is the point of the scene. I think, based on Levy’s club essay, that she is giving us a protest moment. For women who are making their living through direct observation, she is presenting the scene ironically here, aware of the debate. Bern-stein insists, however, that “[t]his fear that Phyllis’s watchfulness from a ­sitting-room window makes the sisters vulnerably visible inside their home … reveals the complexities of gendered gazing in the novel.”³⁵ That Levy is truly creating that complexity and resisting it is evident in Phyllis’s subsequent noting of the limitations of her interior perch: “Wearying suddenly of the sport, Phyllis dropped the blind, and, coming over to Gertrude, knelt on the floor at her feet.” She then says: “It is a little dull, ain’t it Gerty, to look at life from a ­top-floor window?” (106). While Gerty feels a “curious pang” for her sister, she herself has a secret ocular pleasure about that view that asserts her own female gaze. She confesses to the reader “a childish love for the ­gas-lit street, for the sight of the hurrying people, the lamps, the hansom cabs, flickering in and out of the yellow haze, like so many ­fire-flies, …” (105). Phyllis’s position at the window presages that of the woman in Sir William Orpen’s 1901 painting of A Window in London Street (fig. 9).

Fig. 9: Sir William Orpen (1878–1931), A Window in London Street, 1901. Oil on canvas (photograph © National Gallery of Ireland, NGI.1978).

Her consciousness of the world outside (mirroring that of Phyllis and her sisters) is evident in how she presses on the windowsill, anticipatory of a world beyond the interior space. Such imagery suggests a huge leap forward; the woman is not bored, not “dull” like Phyllis, but rather expectant, as in Gertrude’s own reverie of the promise of that city sight. Orpen’s woman has moved from a state of inertia that Phyllis represents to one of longing for action. As the title suggests, the focus has transferred from the interior to the street itself; that is, beyond the window in question. The commanding presence of the window and vast space it occupies in Orpen’s painting suggest the myriad possibilities now open to this woman of the Edwardian age, ones for which Gertrude and her sisters were fighting so hard.³⁶ Nonetheless, Phyllis’s momentary boredom echoes that of French writer Gustave Flaubert’s equally flawed Madame Bovary. In Levy’s critique of the bored woman in Phyllis, she is commenting perhaps on Bovary’s fall due to her need for excitement in her provincial French town. In this regard, Phyllis almost fails entirely, brought up short in an ­ill-conceived elopement with an ­already-married man only by Gertrude’s ­last-minute rescue (122–123). Gertrude brings Phyllis home, only to watch her die. Phyllis had hoped that her new beau, Mr. Darrell, would sweep her away to Italy where she would get well. This moment is foreshadowed in the window scene when Gertrude scolds Phyllis, insisting that she come away from the window and its draftiness. This window scene, then, predicts both the dangers that are there for Phyllis and the independent forthrightness and collectedness of her modern, independent sister.

But this scene is also poignant for the modernism it reflects. Bernstein’s observation on the “dangerously reciprocal” gazing is apparent in modern city structures, as in Baron Hausmann’s project of modernizing Paris which, by the 1870s, as Temma Balducci argues, resulted in windows and balconies becoming “common elements in the … apartments that lined the boulevards, determining the size and layout of rooms and affecting the dynamics of viewing and ­people-watching.”³⁷ Thus, notions of privacy disappear in the modern city, where people are living on top of each other and opposite each other across the close streets of London, or the large Parisian boulevards. Orpen’s painting echoes this leaving behind of the private realm, as do the provocative works of the American ­20th-century painter Edward Hopper. His voyeuristic views both within and outside of the ­sun-searingly oppressive apartments of New York City, peopled with silent, lonely, bent over, ­worn-out folks, themselves looking out, speak to both the isolation of the modern city for its city dwellers and the disruption of it. Levy’s sisters, like Orpen’s woman and Hopper’s subjects, participate in this ocular event of modernity: the reciprocal nature of urban life and its many visual stimulants shows that these women are participants, not mere recipients, in the gaze. As Balducci asserts as a challenge to the binary assumptions of public and private spaces, “everyone was looking.”³⁸ Similarly, Suzanne Moore opens her essay, “Here’s Looking at You, Kid!” with a plea from Debbie Harry for a “room with a view” as opposed to Virginia Woolf’s earlier feminist plea for “a room of one’s own” to encapsulate women’s desire to be in charge of the gaze.³⁹ Likewise, key to suffrage agitation is the fact that these suffrage women, while in the street, are not of it: They are not sexually available to men. Their goal in being in the street is political. It is not about the sexualized female gaze at men,⁴⁰ but rather about being focused on their own advancement. They do not want men, in this context, but rather want a share in what men have: power and citizenship. Levy’s photographer sisters, as with Connell, encapsulate the power of that female gaze in their business of looking.

This system of ambiguity in which women are breaking the rules and reinventing themselves in the public domain is as uncertain as modernity itself, hence why we see such innovative representations of women coincide with the advent of the 20th century. As Kirby Farrell reminds us:

[M]odernism is ­self-conscious and experimental. It recognizes that we construct and interpret the world, improvising identity and goals as we develop. Modernism constructs identity as roles, systems of pragmatic symbolic interactions rather than directly ordained prescriptions. Although it foregrounds human agency it takes for granted that contingency and multiplicity always exceed our grasp, and hence it cultivates irony and emphasizes the provisional, experimental nature of experience.⁴¹

From this position of modernity, what makes a woman’s place as a successful photographer possible? As evidence of its “experimental” nature, modernity’s transformation of everyday life and its notions of speed, ease, and comfort, are all brought about by the birth of the mechanization of cultures which readily included the camera for its miraculous ability to create exact likenesses. Hence, Connell’s portraits are caught up in the struggle to express such “human agency” in an environment that is focused on the rapid communications offered up by shopfronts and newspapers, ones that necessitate a redefining of space and time.⁴² In terms of Connell’s own involvement with the suffrage movement and her representation of its key players, we can also offer up the characterization of modernism as a framing device in terms of its focus on social change in both the political and intellectual fields in which Connell operated.⁴³

This visibility extended from the portraits themselves as ­stand-ins for the women, to the act of women putting themselves at public peril as spectacle. They were at constant risk in the city, yet they embraced the spectacle as part of the cause. For example, Barbara Ayrton stands on the back steps of a ­suffrage-commandeered omnibus advertising the WSPU organ, Votes for Women, while her driver is her fellow member Miss Douglas Smith (fig. 10).

Fig. 10: Barbara Ayrton on the Votes for Women Omnibus, 1908 (photograph Museum of London).

Traveling through the West End of London, ­passers-by were alerted to their presence by the trumpeter on the top deck. Such fanfare alerted their paper sellers, who pulled copies of the papers to sell on the street, while other members distributed copies of the newspaper to stationers.⁴⁴

Even though the activists in Suffrage Women Selling The Suffragette and Advertising Meetings (fig. 11) have taken charge of the spectacle, literally embodying it as protest through conveying posters and signboards, the male viewers are still trying to exert their gaze over the women’s bodies.

Fig. 11: Suffrage Women Selling the Suffragette and Advertising Meetings, June 1908 (photograph Museum of London).

This situation of surveillance is further evident in the WSPU/AFL member Kitty Marion’s observation:

What a lesson in ­self-denial, ­self-abnegation, ­self-discipline. The first time I took my place on the “Island” in Piccadilly Circus, near the flower sellers, I felt as if every eye that looked at me was a dagger piercing me through and I wished the ground would open and swallow me.⁴⁵

This statement reflects her cognizance of the voyeur and his potential danger to her. This circumstance is represented in Jules ­Bastien-Lepage’s painting, A Flower Seller in London, 1882 (Paul G. Allen Family Collection). The young woman flower seller has large, dark eyes and carefully arranged hair; she holds a basket of flowers and is protected from the weather by the podium behind her. Yet, she is also subjected to the gaze of a typical flâneur in top hat and long coat who lurks behind the plinth over her right shoulder. Although he seems to be accompanying a woman in a rather gauche, ­blue-feathered bonnet who is following a little behind him, his attention is focused on the younger flower seller. The expression on the young flower seller’s face is one that belongs to the wizened world; she is not defiant so much as she is resigned. Her shawl protects her from the cold, but not from men’s glances and probable advances. Yet, she looks out at us and engages us. Are we her customers or mere ­passers-by? She exchanges a look with us in the same way Marion would have done as she sold her newspapers.

Thematic Framework: Public Display and Gendered Power

A Paradigm Shift

Focusing on a separate spheres imaginary by exploring Connell’s cult of great women within the Edwardian world represents a decisive turn to modernism; in that regard, we are looking at a paradigmatic shift. Thomas Kuhn’s paradigmatic theory argues that such changes are constantly in play but, at the same time, we have to be aware that the power dynamics in place privilege certain players as more representative of such shifts than others in determining dominant trends.⁴⁶ In this context, we can view Connell’s practice as paradigmatic both in her ability to create an unprecedented representation of working women, ones who are involved in public life as agitators; and in her own move onto center stage as an important Edwardian photographer. Linda Nochlin’s famed essay, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” mentioned earlier in the discussion of the cult of great women, tries to define what constitutes “great” and “genius” and how those concepts have both been gendered in favor of men. We continually revisit Nochlin’s original critique to expand the canon and we can place Connell within it. While her career resides within the modernist era, if we use Nochlin’s 2006 critique of her original essay as our talisman,⁴⁷ Connell fits more specifically in current dialogue about exemplary shifts in terms of our understanding of women artists’ presence. Nochlin says of this alteration that “[t]hings certainly began to change, if at a slow pace, in the 20th century, with the advent of the ‘New Woman’: the working woman and the suffrage movement, as well as the entry of women—in limited numbers to be sure—into the public world of business and the professions.” But then she asserts that we see such change more frequently reflected in the literature than in the visual arts.⁴⁸ Connell, on the contrary, represents one of several important examples of women photographers who are not only working in the professions, but also promoting the suffrage movement as a movement of workers (unlike Nochlin who curiously separates the suffrage women out from women workers).

The Cult of Celebrity

Within this paradigm shift in terms of creating a cult of great women in her suffrage portraits, Connell participates in how Clive James and Elizabeth Hurley characterize celebrities as “civilians.” In this context, Connell’s suffrage women belong to a discourse in which they “offer us service; they suffer and expose themselves for us.”⁴⁹ We can sometimes think of this cult of great women as part of the dialogue on the invention of celebrity if we use the Oxford English Dictionary definition of it as “a public character,” which, in itself, upholds the separate spheres imaginary concept.⁵⁰ Hester Lynch Piozzi wrote that fame conveys “names of more importance to future ages, and regions far remote,” whereas the newer concept of celebrity “is of a weaker degree, in strength, and narrower in extent” which “commands—and justly—the admiration of … [a] small circle.”⁵¹ While she wrote this statement in 1794, the number of memoirs and biographies we have of these suffrage women would suggest that they cross the line from celebrity to fame; certainly, from our own 21st-century vantage point, we see ourselves as connected to them and, not only honor their example, but seek to emulate it.⁵²

Connell’s cult of great women both matches and challenges other instances of fame within portrait traditions. Jeffery Kahan argues, for example, that William Hogarth and Joshua Reynolds’ portraits of the great 18th-century actor David Garrick show him lost in thought, hence lacking any attempt at intimacy with his audience.⁵³ Many of Connell’s portraits, on the other hand, such as her portrait of Ethel Snowden (fig. 5) show her sitters to be engaged with their viewers, looking directly out at us, or, as in the case of Muriel Matters Speaking (fig. 6), appealing directly to an audience. Further, her images of actresses “in character” offer us the same directness (figs. 3 and 4). These women are not typical celebrities; rather, they are real heroines who inspire their followers. Nonetheless, as Jessica Evans and David Hesmondhalgh argue:

[M]ass media images and representations of famous people, stars and celebrities are vehicles for the creation of social meanings. A celebrity always represents something more than him or herself. So celebrity conveys, directly or indirectly, particular social values, such as the meaning of work and achievement; and definitions of sexual and gendered identity.⁵⁴

Public display and gendered power come together in such situations, acting as another example of the ways that these women were readily visible in the urban environment, and not only visible, but also empowering to other women by setting a different example of new “social values.”

In this regard, the study takes a ­post-structuralist approach which, in Evans and Hesmondhalgh’s view, “emphasizes how celebrities—because they have special properties of visibility—are uniquely placed to embody the fantasies of the population as a whole and, in particular, represent the kinds of individuals we should be.”⁵⁵ Such figures act as a conduit for the subjective experience (but also the collective experience) to give women hope for brave moves forward. Such representation is part of the shift we see with the advent of democratization, a journey we follow from reform bill to reform bill through the Victorian period that belies the former monarchical hierarchy. We are used to seeing ­life-sized portraits of royalty as visible examples of its power. Yet, such visible representations are carefully staged. With the advent of photography as a democratized art, alongside the birth and development of the individual within Victorian society, such as the ­self-made industrialist or, in our case, women fighting for justice, we see a shift in representations of the powerful that is part and parcel of modernism. For example, already by the 1880s, the timeframe of Levy’s novel about the Lorimer sisters, Henry James showed his own traditional stance, complaining about his culture as an “age of advertisement and newspaperism, this age of interviewing,” as if he were disgusted by its public manifestation as something vulgar and unworthy instead of viewing it as a move into the modern age of the mediated image.⁵⁶ As Antoine Lilti argues in The Invention of Celebrity, 1750–1850, “the existence of public figures who drew public attention like a magnet was viewed not as intriguing or shocking but as a characteristic trait of modern society.”⁵⁷ Hence, this move to representation across the classes characterizes the modern age, giving Connell a foot both in establishing a cult of celebrity and in positioning it within a modernist shift.

Within the cult of celebrity, Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital is also readily at work in these suffrage portraits. Modern cultures strive to exhibit their knowledge and appreciation of their own cultural heritage through a continued devotion to the arts. In this context, suffrage women and their followers possessed these portraits and not only exchanged them, but also kept them in their beloved and ­dog-eared scrapbooks. The most famous of these is Maud ­Arncliffe-Sennett’s ­thirty-seven volume collection now housed at the British Library. She was one of Connell’s subjects, but she also kept pages in her scrapbook devoted to Connell’s portraits, along with extensive commentary. In these endeavors, such suffrage women were creating their own cultural capital. It was a new kind of documentation of women’s celebrity status that sat largely outside of the accepted modes of cultural capital that Bourdieu proposes,⁵⁸ yet which were equally valid, our English libraries and galleries now filled with archives devoted to such collections.

Richard Brilliant’s assessment of having one’s portrait done addresses some key factors for our suffrage sitters in terms of societal and cultural perceptions of such celebrity:

Good reputation is more a given than a gain. Its suggestion in a favourable portrait is achieved by the use of representational conventions—e.g., the standing, somberly dressed figure—developed by artists and consistent with the expectations of the viewing audience. Thus, the formality and evident seriousness displayed by so many portraits as a significant mode of ­self-fashioning would seem to be not so much typical of the subjects as individuals as designed to conform to the expectations of society whenever its respectable members appear in public. In this sense, to be portrayed by an artist is to appear in public.⁵⁹

The Connell suffrage portraits were exhibited in the sitters’ lifetimes; Connell widely distributed them which, as Brilliant indicates, placed them before the public. As Joanna Woodall explains in her survey of the history of portraiture, it “was increasingly recognized as cultural practice…. Sitting to a fashionable portraitist entered into literary discourse as a ­self-conscious, socially prestigious interaction and the exhibition of portraits invited public discussion.”⁶⁰ Granted, she is talking about painted portraits rather than photographic portraits, but the same principles apply. Each woman sitter is bound, once portrayed, to an audience that forces on her the necessity of projecting a formal public self.

Contributing to this cult of celebrity, and reflecting the desire for it, the National Portrait Gallery in London was founded in 1865 to house “images of the agents deemed responsible for the formation and advance of a rich, distinctive national identity” for which “the right to representation remained exclusive in that responsibility for change was attributed to the inspired ideas of exceptional individuals….”⁶¹ As we will see in later chapters, many of Connell’s portraits are in this collection, attesting to the women’s roles in a world devoted to change and advancement.

But the impact of this new Gallery was a result of the desire for popular dissemination of portraits during the 19th century. Paul Barlow explains that “portraiture was … being used to bridge the gap between the complexity of modern society and the experience of individual identity,” and to this end such portraits appeared in newspapers and periodicals, alongside biographies, as well as in published texts of engraved portraits.⁶² Publishers included photographic portraits of suffrage leader Millicent Garrett Fawcett, for example, in such volumes later in the 19th century (including one I will discuss in depth later in this chapter). In this context, each suffrage woman’s portrait mirrored the public’s relentless inspection of her person, standing in for her individual body and marking her place in a cult of celebrity.

Celebrity and Masquerade as Performance

Connell contributed to a cult of celebrity for many of the major figures of the leading suffrage groups. As photographic historian Val Williams characterizes Connell’s suffrage work, she “created an image of the leading members of the Suffrage movement which served to present them as heroic and glamorous, all in the service of the women’s cause.”⁶³ But the celebrity portrait can “embody the shallowness and pervasiveness of the ­mass-media-personality, who is universally recognizable but also unknowable beneath the mask of celebrity.”⁶⁴ Going back to the opening quote from Baudelaire, can a [photographed] portrait act as both a historical document and a fiction, with the “mask of celebrity” at its center? As Alicia Foster asserts, it is in the gap between the representation of femininity and the historical individual woman that we find the woman of agency.⁶⁵ And it is her own empowerment that separates the modern woman from her Victorian counterpart. Her ­new-found activism reflects the continually shifting focus of masquerade discourse, working to destabilize the male gaze, particularly since these portraits and this movement they embodied were for women, that is, for the female gaze inward at itself. In terms of masquerade theory, we go back to Joan Rivière’s case study of a woman who became a professional public speaker, a decidedly male positioning. Yet, she created a ruse/mask that would not challenge male colleagues, rather it flattered them through her use of a frivolous ­self-presentation. In this regard, Rivière argues “women who wish for masculinity may put on a mask of womanliness to avert the anxiety and the retribution” they fear from men.⁶⁶ We will see how the women in leadership positions amongst the suffrage groups play both sides of this issue within a masquerade theory framework. In this sense, they follow what Kathleen Woodward offers as two skeins of thought on masquerade: the female disguise “as submission to dominant social codes,” and another that sees masquerade as “disruptive and as resistance to patriarchal norms.”⁶⁷

Previous Representations of Professional Women

Connell’s portraits embrace both tenets of Baudelaire’s 1846 Salon observation which opened this introduction since her works exist both as history and as fiction. Baudelaire explains in his review that historical portraiture sets forth “the contours and the modeling of the subject faithfully,” but it does not “exclude idealization which … will consist in choosing the sitter’s most characteristic attitude—the attitude which best expresses his habits of mind.” Whereas a fictional portrait “is to transform the portrait into a picture—a poem with all its accessories … [t]he artist has to be able to immerse a head in the soft haze of a warm atmosphere….”⁶⁸ Connell’s portrait of Muriel Matters Speaking, for example (fig. 6), conflates the two sides, giving us not only the likeness of the speaker, but also the talents of the actress who can put them to use for the suffrage cause as a speaker on the circuit. The poetic approach that Connell takes in this ­most-reproduced and loved image of this suffrage heroine, indeed is due to Connell’s ability to “immerse a head in the soft haze of a warm atmosphere.”⁶⁹

Laura Herford’s Portrait of Elizabeth Garrett, 1866 (fig. 12), which she completed during Garrett’s medical studies, conflates Baudelaire’s categories.

Fig. 12: Laura Herford (1831–1870), Portrait of Elizabeth Garrett, 1866. Oil on canvas. Collection of the Misses Anderson (courtesy of Women’s Library, London School of Economics and Political Science).

She provides the viewer both with Dr. Garrett’s ­new-born professional seriousness, reflected in her somber dress, and a kind of transformative representation, bathing her face in a soft glow of light that itself replicates her satisfaction with her accomplishments, albeit within an atmosphere of demureness and restraint.

This portrait of the new Dr. Garrett (1836–1917) positioned a woman who was the first of her sex in England to take on the medical profession. In this sense, Deborah Cherry argues that the Herford portrait was very careful to present Garrett conventionally, according to visual codes “developed for professional masculinity to produce an image of gravity, decorum and authority and to factor an appearance which evidently drew on the sitter’s own views on the dress and deportment of professional women.”⁷⁰ It also spoke to the kind of portraits that John Everett Millais was creating of great men; ones dressed soberly and set against a neutral background, in order to concentrate on the visage and deportment of the figure in question. Herford presents a woman whom we should take seriously, a woman who takes no risks with her appearance. But Cherry’s observations and the artist’s careful attention to male traditions suggest that Garrett had no visual cultural tradition of her own. Conformity to male codes of somber dress and comportment seemed to be wholly in order in the portrait. Nonetheless, Cherry asserts that the Herford portrait is one work which tries to counter the only prevailing ­19th-century imagery of knowledgeable, learned women, in which they are presented as mere witches and sorceresses; giving them access to knowledge only results in men’s subjection to them. In this sense, Cherry argues that the Herford portrait belongs to a set of alternative images of women that were emerging in Victorian England within women’s communities.⁷¹

An equally compelling portrait of the same sitter that stands as precedent for the dignified portraits of professional women that Connell created in her London studio is Elizabeth Garrett Anderson by John Singer Sargent (fig. 13).

Fig. 13: John Singer Sargent (1856–1925), Portrait of Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, 1900. Oil on canvas, on loan from a private collection (National Portrait Gallery, London).

Painted in 1900, it shows Garrett Anderson at the opposite end of her career, now long married and a mother, and about to retire from her position as Dean of the London School of Medicine for Women which she had founded, freeing her up to do suffrage work herself. Wearing her M.D. robes by her own request, she presents us with a furrowed brow, reflective of her immense industry, along with a determined set expression on her lips, but those more serious features are set against a loosely arranged bun of hair that softens the representation. She and Sargent were at odds about the portrait, Sargent characteristically desiring a more elegant presentation; Garrett Anderson’s concession was a cheap string of pearls. They also argued over his presentation of her strong surgeon’s hands which were to her perhaps the most important part of the portrait as it was through her hands that she made her living. Yet, Sargent fought to give her more elongated hands, showing that the portraitist was sometimes not in sync with the sitter. Sargent had his own reputation to keep up, but it seems he had met his match in this successful and determined professional woman.⁷² Here their dispute mirrors the two facets of Baudelaire’s analysis: while Garrett Anderson was aware that she was making history and sitting for a historical portrait, the first woman surgeon to sit for the infamous Sargent, the artist himself wanted to create a stylish fiction.

Equally compelling as an example of representing a professional woman is Stanislaw Walery’s photograph of Elizabeth Garrett Anderson’s younger sister, Millicent Garrett Fawcett, 1889 (fig. 14), which was widely circulated, due to her leadership role in campaigning for women’s rights.

Fig. 14: Stanislas Walery (active 1884–1898), Millicent Garrett Fawcett, 1889 (photograph © National Portrait Gallery, London).

She became President of the NUWSS in 1907, which probably accounts for the photograph’s inclusion in WFL member Maud ­Arncliffe-Sennett’s 1907–8 scrapbook, revealing its longevity. It was first published in Walery’s monthly Our Celebrities in 1889, one of many such publications of important Victorian figures that featured writers, artists, and actors.⁷³ It is perhaps the most sophisticated portrait that has come down to us of Garrett Fawcett (1847–1929); an example of feminine beauty to counter the stereotypical harridan imagery of the women’s rights activist we have already seen in Tenniel’s Punch cartoon (fig. 7). Known for her incredible beauty, one enhanced by her luxurious, shiny, auburn hair and impeccable dress sense, the Walery photograph does not disappoint. Like Herford’s portrait of her sister, it conflates attention to her earnest, serious purpose with attention to her glamorous appearance. Like the Herford portrait, then, it manages to convey her professional purpose with respectful intent at the same time that it honors her pleasing appearance. It further reflects her character. She was known for her kind, reasoned approach to debates which reflected her ­even-temperedness, one evident in the photograph which pictures her with a calm, composed expression.⁷⁴

Similarly, Alfred Praga’s painted portrait of Madame Sarah Grand, 1896 (fig. 15) is a key example of the proper presentation of a professional suffragist and literary giant to counter the stereotypical image of suffrage women as unattractive and, hence, not marriage worthy.

Fig. 15: Alfred Praga (1867–1949), Madame Sarah Grand, 1896. Oil on canvas. Victoria Art Gallery, Bath & North East Somerset Council/Bridgeman Images.

Madame Sarah Grand (1854–1943) was a sensational novelist, arriving in London after a broken marriage to both public acclaim and condemnation for her novel, The Heavenly Twins (1895) under a new, ­self-styled identity as “Madame.” She had also coined the term “New Woman” to designate the modern woman who was embracing the new laws that gave women freedoms, ones which allowed her to strike out on her own as an independent woman. Madame Grand put forth a very conscious presentation of self. She acknowledged the necessity of public presentation in a ­serious-minded, calm, rational way that would inspire others. But she spoke both to a feminist audience and to a more conventional one such that, like Garrett Fawcett, she had to create a compromised image. They were part of the ­in-between generation, on its way to being modern, but still having to acknowledge and play out a stance of orthodox wisdom. To this end, according to Ann Heilmann, Grand “feminized the feminist, impressing on her readers that, however ‘modern’ her views might be, the New Woman felt at home with the latest fashion and was, in fact, the ­standard-bearer of stylishness.”⁷⁵ Here Madame Grand wears her clothes and accoutrements as if they were armor, a defense against outside forces that certainly must have inspired her younger, Edwardian, sister suffragists who emulated such impeccable dress sense in their processions and formal studio portraits. In creating a respectable public persona in suffrage portraits, Connell’s sitters had to assume some sort of camouflage of femininity, like Garrett Fawcett and Grand, but they were more easily able to also elide such camouflage since they came a generation later.

Within the recent book Suffrage and the Arts, Rosie Broadley pens a chapter devoted to the 1909 painted portrait of Christabel Pankhurst by Ethel Wright which did not enter London’s National Portrait Gallery until 2011.⁷⁶ While Garrett and Thomas argue that “[e]xhibitions continued to uphold in visual form the hegemonic dominance of elite males in British national life—both through the tendency to prioritize displaying the work of male painters and in the idealized manner in which women were frequently depicted”⁷⁷ the portraits I have just examined offer up examples of a complementary tradition that existed nonetheless. Broadley’s essay also details women’s attempts to create collections devoted to portraits of great women, beginning with Helen Blackburn who sent 190 prints and engravings that represented important women professionals to the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. This same kind of historical representation of prominent women was used in the NUWSS Procession of June 1908 in a section devoted to banners imaging “Great Women of the Past.” But, there were still battles to be waged to bring significant portraits of these pioneering women into public institutions.⁷⁸

Thomas and Garrett sum up this representational ­push-pull, stating that Broadley’s essay on painted portraits

introduces readers to the role of portraiture in raising the status and profiles of prominent militant campaigners, and in carving a new space for the commemoration of women in the history of the nation. Portraiture gave respectability and cultural authority to campaigners, as they were drawing from a ­long-established model of elite culture, which customarily depicted prominent male figures in ­large-scale portraits.⁷⁹

Connell’s portraits can be placed both within the ­well-established tradition of elite depictions of professional men and within this alternative dialogue.

Visual Culture and Propaganda in Edwardian England

The burgeoning popular print culture of Edwardian England shapes our understanding of the impact of the work of the suffrage women who used the print culture to promote their lives, homes and bodies in public spaces. They were located within expanding networks of visual and textual representation that led to a kind of cult worship amongst their own ranks, members and followers. But their goals were not ­self-serving; rather, they were for the purpose of raising funds for their cause, their celebrity and fame directly fueling their political agenda. This visual culture sits at the center of a swing to modern sensibilities since the suffrage women practiced ­self-promotion, through interviews in the suffrage journals, the running of their own theatre companies, and various leagues associated with the cause. Avoiding (or simply ignoring) the Victorian trifecta of sex, money and dirt, the suffrage women created their own cult of greatness through a dedication to a propagandistic visual culture, whereas their Victorian predecessors had to tread lightly to avoid the taint of scandal should they become infamous rather than famous.⁸⁰

Connell’s portraits of leaders and organizers exist within the framework of prop-aganda insofar as they help to spread a message about women’s courage and heroism for the cause. In the context of modernist improvisation and experiment, it is important to stress that such propaganda can be a substitute for one’s own presence, hence the portraits that line the windows and grace the display boards at the Woman’s Press, at the International Suffrage Shop, and at other such shops around Britain, stand in for these women’s actual bodies, creating a “cult of personality” that is typical of rulers and which, according to David Welch, “has become … a major feature of political leadership in the modern era.”⁸¹ Schoolgirls at the time of suffrage agitation like Winifred Starbuck remembered that she, along with her suffragette schoolfriends, were able to keep track of their heroines’ activities in the local press, creating a kind of altar to their leaders by “standing framed photographs of Mrs. Pankhurst, Charlotte Despard, Cicely Hamilton and other leading suffragettes on their desks, decorated with purple, white and green.”⁸²

As a result of the extensive dissemination of such imagery and of the important presence of these suffrage women, we have the example of Christabel Pankhurst Sitting for Her Wax Portrait for Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum (fig. 16).

Fig. 16: Christabel Pankhurst Sitting for Her Wax Portrait for Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum, modeled by Jean Tussaud, 1908 (photograph Museum of London).

Emmeline Pankhurst and Annie Kenney, WSPU organizer, also posed for wax portraits at Madame Tussaud’s as a direct response to the propagation of their images which supported their visibility in the public, political arena.⁸³ Connell had been part of that instrument. As Diane Atkinson points out, even though the suffrage women’s demand for the vote did not draw support from the male electorate, by 1908 (which was early in the campaign) they already maintained a “high public profile” through “statuettes, photographic portraits, posters and badges of the leaders….”⁸⁴ As Charlotte Despard’s biographer explains of this profile, “bourgeois London was lionizing the Pankhursts. Their susceptibility to heroine worship and nice clothes did have some political value, because the movement’s image was ­all-important in attracting media interest and sympathy. They had a very modern instinct for what makes good copy and they made sure that they were always photogenic.”⁸⁵ Of course, we cannot expect such photogeneity to translate to wax so readily, many of their followers being disturbed by the wax versions!⁸⁶

Such propagandistic methods are a result of the evolution of how cultures have used such publicity. As David Welch explains, propaganda historically was applied to any organization set up for the purpose of spreading a doctrine. Then it became associated with the doctrine itself and finally with the methods used in undertaking its dissemination.⁸⁷ Connell’s portraits and their distribution for the cause meet all three criteria in this regard.

The crux of the propagandistic work of Connell’s portraits of leaders and organizers is in its alignment with Welch’s observation that propaganda is most likely to appear during “periods of stress and turmoil, in which violent controversy about doctrine (political or otherwise) accompanied the use of force.”⁸⁸ In this context, Elizabeth Grosz argues in Volatile Bodies that women’s bodies have the ability to

extend the frameworks which attempt to contain them, to seep beyond their domains of control [in order to signal] the permeability of the question of sexual difference, its uncontainability within any particular sphere or domain, its refusal to respect the boundaries separating private and public, inside and outside, knowledge and pleasure, power and desire.⁸⁹

Hence, the portraits themselves speak back to such controversy but also propel it, women’s presence in visual form being mirrored in their actual presence on the streets and in the squares, spreading their doctrine.

Such is the case of Connell’s first suffrage portrait which depicts Miss Gladice Keevil (1884–1959) (fig. 17) in postcard form.

Fig. 17: Lena Connell (1875–1949), Miss Gladice Keevil, c. 1908. NWSPU postcard based on a photograph by Connell (Museum of London).

Visual culture in conjunction with propaganda engages in such contemporary debates about activism and its participants. Such deliberations include discussion of gender identities, as well as the role of institutions and cultural groupings and how they interact with and are represented by models of production and consumption. In this regard, there are three components to visual culture, all of which I explore here: the object itself, in this case a photographic portrait of a woman activist; the cultural institutions that create such a production, in this case feminist organizations; and the audience, which here consists of suffrage followers as well as the general public. What I hope to show is that there are not seamless, ­sealed-off differences between the sophisticated studio photographs and low art production but rather connections. The photographs work in an intertwined fashion with different media distribution techniques to create a comprehensive vision of the suffrage women’s physical presence and public fame. The Keevil portrait, for example, advertises not only her public self, but also her affiliation with the WSPU, along with acknowledgment of the photographer. In turn, the person who buys the postcard helps to support the organization and, either the postcard goes into the buyer’s own suffrage album or the buyer sends it to a friend. Thus, these Edwardian suffrage women contributed to progress forward through their propagandistic methods of disseminating visual information to an eager public, bored with and rebellious of the crusty Victorian age.

Organization of the Book

The book will address particular aspects of Connell’s oeuvre of suffrage portraits within a framework of leadership and performativity as transgressive acts. Chapter one addresses Connell’s business practices, her working methods, and the scope of her work, as well as her ­self-presentation as a professional photographer in order to set the scene for the examination of suffrage photographs. Chapter two explores her portraits of suffrage leaders under the broad umbrella of leadership propaganda in relation to the dissemination and dialogue surrounding such representations. Chapter three analyzes portraits of professional working women within the suffrage movements, including actresses and writers of the AFL and the Women Writers’ Suffrage League (WWSL), to determine their positioning in the propagandistic rhetoric and the role of performativity in persuading an audience. Further, it addresses one of the ­often-neglected aspects of suffrage representation: its intersection with communities of women that were specifically made up of lesbian circles. The fourth chapter looks more broadly at Connell’s suffrage portraits in terms of the messages they create about transgression, transformation, and resistance narratives to the norms. It looks more closely at the dissemination of the suffrage message through the various ways that Connell’s suffrage portraits came to public attention, by examining suffrage women both as subjects and audience for such imagery. The epilogue assesses Connell’s vision and its legacy for political representations of women both on the streets and in formal portraits.

1. See Michael Pritchard, A Directory of London Photographers 1841–1908 (Bushey: ALLM Books, 1986), 19.

2. Amy Levy, The Romance of a Shop, ed., Susan David Bernstein (Peterborough, Ontario, Canada/Plymouth, England/Sydney, Australia: Broadview, 2006).

3. See Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the ­Fin-de-Siècle (London: Penguin, 1990).

4. Nora Heiman, Joan of Arc in French Art and Culture, 1700–1855 (Aldershot, England/Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005). For an insider’s view from the WFL perspective on the split, see Margaret Wynne Nevinson, Life’s Fitful Fever (London: A&C Black, 1926), 196–197.

5. Votes for Women (July 1910): 651.

6. Elizabeth Crawford, The Women’s Suffrage Movement: A Reference Guide 1866–1928 (London, New York: Routledge, 2001), 562, observes, based on a 1909 notice in Votes for Women advertising portraits of leaders, that certain leaders had become absent from the list and from cards available at that time. She feels it reflects the shift in leadership to the autocratic consolidation of power of the Pankhursts. Kenneth Florey, Women’s Suffrage Memorabilia: An Illustrated Historical Study (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2013), 135–36, discusses her assessment as part of his survey of such postcards.

7. Liz Stanley and Ann Morley, “Will the First Woman’s Press Stand Up, Please,” The Life and Death of Emily Wilding Davison (London: Woman’s Press, 1988), 89.

8. Florey, Women’s Suffrage Memorabilia, 135, outlines the difficulty in both observing shifts within the suffrage organizations and how those shifts are reflected in the portraits they made available for public consumption.

9. Suffrage scholars use the term “suffragette” when discussing the militant WSPU members. They use the expressions “suffrage women” or “suffragists” not only for members of other groups, but also for the collective group of women activists of the Edwardian suffrage movement.

10. Martha Vicinus, “Male Space and Women’s Bodies,” Independent Women: Work and Community for Single Women, 1850–1920 (University of Chicago Press, 1985), 279–280.

11. The situation was more complex than I can unravel here since there were more factions based on each group’s stance as pro- or ­anti-war. Sandra Stanley Holton has shown that, however, it was the work of the NUWSS which eventually forced the hand of the government and ensured partial women’s suffrage in 1918 (Feminism and Democracy: Women’s Suffrage and Reform Politics in Britain 1900–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986)). For a detailed summary of the member campaigns, see Crawford, Women’s Suffrage Movement, 436–442; 720–724; and 726–755.

12. Connell also showed a portrait of Cicely Hamilton at the Royal Photographic Society (hereafter RPS) in 1910, but it is not clear which image this was, as she did many portraits of Hamilton over several different sittings. There is, however, a Connell portrait of Cicely Hamilton as “Woman” from the Pageant play and it may have been this one which Connell showed at the RPS in 1910. There is some confusion over whether or not this image served as frontispiece to the publications of the Pageant, of which there were several different editions. Katharine Cockin discusses a 1911 edition of the play for which Marie Leon did the frontispiece portrait of Cicely Hamilton in Women’s Suffrage Literature, Vol. III, eds., Katharine Cockin, Glenda Norquay and Sowon S. Park (London/NY: Routledge, 2007), 174; and see Elizabeth Crawford, Art and Suffrage: A Biographical Dictionary of Suffrage Artists (London: Francis Boutle, 2018), 61, who asserts that while Connell took the image of Hamilton as “Woman,” it was not reproduced in the published play. Crawford reproduces it in an International Suffrage Shop mat in the above source, 61. However, Hamilton as “Woman” by Connell was reproduced in a 1910 edition of the play housed in the Women’s Library, London School of Economics and Political Science (reproduced in chapter three).

13. Linda Nochlin, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” Women, Art and Power and Other Essays (New York: Harper and Row, 1988), 145–178.

14. See Colleen Denney, “Epilogue: From the Hammer to the Fist: March, Process, Progress, and Protest,” The Visual Culture of Women’s Activism from London to Paris and Beyond: An Analytical Art History, 1860 to the Present (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2018), 133–70.

15. On Matters’ place within the Australian and Edwardian suffrage history, see Clare Wright, You Daughters of Freedom: The Australians who Won the Vote and Inspired the World (Melbourne/London: The Text Publishing Co., 2018).

16. Jane Beckett and Deborah Cherry, “Foreword,” in Suffrage and the Arts: Visual Culture, Politics and Enterprise, eds., Miranda Garrett and Zoë Thomas (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), xxviii.

17. Denney, Visual Culture of Women’s Activism.

18. Miranda Garrett and Zoë Thomas, “Introduction,” Suffrage and the Arts, 4.

19. See Diane Atkinson, Rise Up Women! The Remarkable Lives of the Suffragettes (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), for example, in which she explores the large part that ­working-class women played in the movement, despite considerable personal and economic dangers.

20. Richard Altick, Victorian People and Ideas (New York: Norton, 1973).

21. For a feminist critique of An Ideal Husband in this context, see Colleen Denney, “The Scandal of the Feminist Woman at the ­Fin-de-Siècle: Cultural Critique in Oscar Wilde’s Play, An Ideal Husband (1895),” Women, Portraiture and the Crisis of Identity in Victorian England: My Lady Scandalous Reconsidered (Burlington, VT; Farnham, Surrey, England: Ashgate, 2009), 211–239.

22. Susan David Bernstein, “Introduction,” to Amy Levy, The Romance of a Shop, 11.

23. Bernstein, “Introduction,” 12.

24. This discussion of gaze theory, responding to Charles Baudelaire’s famous essay, “The Painter of Modern Life,” 1863, is based on the work of the following scholars: Janet Wolff, “The Invisible Flâneuse: Women and the Literature of Modernity,” Feminine Sentences: Essays on Women and Culture (Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990), 34–49. She responds, in part, to Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,”14–26; and idem, “Afterthoughts on ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ Inspired by King Vidor’s Duel in the Sun,” 29–38, in Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1989), where Mulvey creates the concept of the male gaze. Other scholars have been challenging Mulvey and responding to Wolff’s initial call, looking for the flâneuse, or arguing that she does not exist. See, for example, Janet Lyon, “Women Demonstrating Modernism,” Discourse: Berkeley Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture 17 (Winter 1994–95): 6–25; Norma Broude and Mary Garrard, “Introduction,” in Reclaiming Female Agency: Feminist Art History after Postmodernism, eds., Norma Broude and Mary Garrard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 1–25; The Invisible Flâneuse? Gender, Public Space, and Visual Culture in ­Nineteenth-Century Paris, eds., Aruna D’Souza and Tom McDonough (Manchester/New York: Manchester University Press, 2006); Denney, Women, Portraiture and the Crisis of Identity; and Denney, Visual Culture of Women’s Activism. Barbara Green argues, specifically within the context of Edwardian suffrage women, that “what has remained persuasive is the notion that feminine spectatorship is a problem in popular culture and that femininity is aligned with a certain kind of visual pleasure” (Spectacular Confessions (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 189 n. 26). She further argues that “the gaze of the flâneur is incompatible with activism, inappropriate in the prison” in her study (57), where she examines the prison writings of suffragists Lady Constance Lytton and those of Elizabeth Robins in her novel The Convert. Green asserts that they show the limitations of that stance of the male viewer. She does not examine, as I do here, the visual culture, nor its place with relationship to the impossibility of a flâneuse construct.

25. Janet Wolff, “Gender and the Haunting of Cities (or, the Retirement of the Flâneur),” in Invisible Flâneuse, 18–31.

26. Amy Levy, “Women and Club Life,” The Woman’s World 1 (June 1888): 364; reprint in Levy, The Romance of the Shop, Appendix B2, 213.

27. On women’s club life as well as their entrance into the public sphere as consumers, see Erika Rappaport, “‘Resting Places for Women Wayfarers’: Feminism and the Comforts of the Public Sphere,” Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London’s West End (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 74–107.

28. Levy, “Women and Club Life,” reprint in The Romance of a Shop, Appendix B2, 217.

29. See Colleen Denney, “Introduction: Raise Your Banner High!” Visual Culture of Women’s Activism, 10–11; and, in the same volume, especially, “Les Femmes Ennuyées: Bored Women in European Culture; Presaging a Call to Action,” 17–63.

30. Madame Philonie Yevonde, “The P.P.A. Congress: Subsection: Photographic Portraiture from a Woman’s Point of View,” British Journal of Photography 68 (April 29, 1921): 251.

31. Her surviving male portraits are housed in the Museum of London; the British Library; the National Portrait Gallery, London; and Women’s Library, London School of Economics and Political Science.

32. Levy, “Women and Club Life,” reprint in The Romance of a Shop, Appendix B2, 219.

33. Ibid, 26.

34. Ibid, 38–39.

35. Ibid., 39.

36. See Denney, “Les Femmes Ennuyées,” 56–57, for a discussion of Orpen’s Edwardian images of women in interiors as examples of agitation in relation to events that were moving women’s rights and voices forward. See also Kenneth McConkey, “New English Intimisme: The Painting of the Edwardian Interior,” in The Edwardians: Secrets and Desires, ed., Anne Gray (Canberra: National Gallery of Australia/Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2004), 89–106.

37. Temma Balducci, Gender, Space, and the Gaze in ­Post-Haussmann Visual Culture: Beyond the Flâneur (London: Routledge, 2017), 10; and specifically, “Windows and Balconies,” 111–154.

38. Balducci, Gender, Space and the Gaze, 66.

39. Suzanne Moore, “Here’s Looking at You, Kid!” in The Female Gaze: Women as Viewers of Popular Culture, eds., Lorraine Gamman and Margaret Marshment (Seattle, WA: Real Comet Press, 1989), 44.

40. Film scholars have been debating the female gaze as the locale of women’s pleasurable looking at men since the 1997 cult classic, The Full Monty, in which women objectify men in strip clubs while having their own girls’ night out. This celebration of the female’s pleasurable gaze owes its existence to their increasing power in the 1980s economic shift. See, for example, Jill Marshall, “Going for the Full Monty: Comedy, Gender and Power,” Visual Culture in Britain 1 (2000): 31–48.

41. Kirby Farrell, “Wilde and the Penalties of Modernism,” in The Importance of Reinventing Oscar: Versions of Wilde during the Last 100 Years,” eds., Uwe Bölar et. al. (New York: Amsterdam, 2000), 26.

42. See David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Malden, MA/Oxford: ­Wiley-Blackwell, 1991); and Barbara Marshall, Engendering Modernity (Malden, MA/Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994).

43. See Raymond Williams, Politics of Modernism (London, New York: Verso, 1996), 37–64; and Marshall Berman, All That is not Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982).

44. Votes for Women (8 October 1909): 29.

45. Kitty Marion, Autobiography; quoted in Suffragette Fellowship Collection, Museum of London.

46. See Thomas Kuhn, “Paradigms, Tacit Knowledge and Incommensurability,” in Modernism, Criticism, Realism, eds. Charles Harrison and F. Orton (London: Harper and Row, 1984), 42–82; and Katy Deepwell, “Introduction,” Women Artists and Modernism, 5.

47. Linda Nochlin, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? Thirty Years After: Women Artists at the Millennium, 2006,” in Women Artists: The Linda Nochlin Reader, ed., Maura Reilly (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2015), 312.

48. Nochlin, “Thirty Years After,” 314–15.

49. Discussed in Tom Payne, Fame: What the Classics Tell Us about Our Cult of Celebrity (New York: Picador, 2010), 6.

50. See Jeffery Kahan, Bettymania and the Birth of Celebrity Culture (Bethlehem, MA: Lehigh University Press, 2010), n. 30 168.

51. Hester Lynch Piozzi, British Synomy (Dublin: William Porter for P. Byrne and W. Jones, 1794), 134; discussed in Kahan, Bettymania, n. 32 167.

52. See, for example, Denney, “Epilogue: From the Hammer to the Fist: March, Process, Progress and Protest.”

53. Kahan, Bettymania, 20.

54. Jessica Evans and David Hesmondhalgh, “Introduction,” Understanding Media: Inside Celebrity, eds., Jessica Evans and David Hesmondhalgh (Maidenhead, Berkshire, England: Open University, 2005), 6.

55. Evans and Hesmondhalgh, Understanding Media, 8, 22–23, 50, on which the following discussion is partially based.

56. Henry James; quoted in Evans and Hesmondhalgh, Understanding Media, 50.

57. Antoine Lilti, The Invention of Celebrity, 1750–1850, trans., Lynn Jeffress (Cambridge, UK/Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2017), 257.

58. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction, trans. Richard Nice (London: Routledge, 1989).

59. Richard Brilliant, Portraiture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), 11.

60. Joanna Woodall, “Introduction: facing the subject,” in Portraiture: Facing the Subject, ed., Joanna Woodall (Manchester/New York: Manchester University Press, 1997), 5.

61. Woodall, “Introduction,” 5.

62. Paul Barlow, “Facing the past and present: The National Portrait Gallery and the search for ‘authentic’ portraiture,” in Facing the Subject, 221. On the history of the gallery’s formation see www.npg.org.uk/lie/history.asp; Malcolm Rogers, Camera Portraits: Photographs from the National Portrait Gallery 1839–1989 (London: National Portrait Gallery Publications, 1989), 9; and Maria Pointon, Hanging the Head: Portraiture and Social Formation in ­Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven, CT/London: Yale University Press, 1993), 227–245.

63. Williams, Other Observers, 9.

64. Heather McPherson, The Modern Portrait in ­Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 201.

65. Alicia Foster, “Gwen John’s ­Self-Portrait: art, identity and women students at the Slade School,” in English Art 1860–1914, eds., David Peters Corbett and Lara Perry (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001; Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), 178.

66. Joan Rivière, “Womanliness as Masquerade” (1929); reprinted in Formations of Fantasy, eds., Victor Burgin, James Donald and Cora Kaplan (London, New York: Methuen, 1986), 35–44.

67. Kathleen Woodward, “Youthfulness as a Masquerade,” Discourse 11 (­Fall-Winter 1988–89): 125.

68. Charles Baudelaire, “The Salon of 1846,” in Art in Paris 1845–1862: Salons and other Exhibitions reviewed by Charles Baudelaire, trans. and ed. Jonathan Mayne (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1965), 88.

69. This kind of representation of Muriel Matters has been recently translated to the stage. At the Adelaide Fringe Festival, South Australia, 2019, I was able to see a production of That Daring Australian Girl written, produced and performed by Joanne Hartstone, in which the stage was constantly suffused in fog, as if Matters were conjuring her past for her current audience or, as if Hartstone were emulating this Connell image, if not also evoking London’s infamous fog. In my time in Adelaide, I found this Connell portrait reproduced more often than any other image of her and she, herself, used it repeatedly to advertise her lectures. I will discuss its wide distribution at greater length in chapter three and the epilogue (See Joanne Hartstone, That Daring Australian Girl: A Play for One Performer, foreword by Frances Bedford (Edinburgh/Cambridge: 49 Knights Independent Publishing House, 2018)).

70. Deborah Cherry, Beyond the Frame: Feminism and Visual Culture, 1850–1900 (London, New York: Routledge, 2000), 173. In her assessment, Cherry refers to comparable portraits of medical men. See Ludomilla Jordonova, “Medical Men, 1780–1820,” in Portraiture: Facing the Subject, 101–15.

71. Cherry, Beyond the Frame, 162; and see also Susan P. Casteras, “Malleus Malificarum or The Witches’ Hammer: Victorian Visions of Female Sages and Sorceresses,” in Victorian Sages and Cultural Discourse, ed., Thaïs Morgan (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 142–70; and Beverly Taylor, “Female Savants and the Erotics of Knowledge in ­Pre-Raphaelite Art,” in Collecting the ­Pre-Raphaelites: The ­Anglo-American Enchantment, ed., Margaretta Frederick Watson (London: Scolar, 1997), 121–35. For a discussion of portraits of professional women artists, see also Colleen Denney, “Emergence of Women Artists and Audience: Temple as Safe Haven,” At the Temple of Art: The Grosvenor Gallery, 1877–1890 (Madison/Teaneck, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press; London: Associated University Presses, 2000), particularly 152–60; and Denney, Women, Portraiture and the Crisis of Identity; the Herford portrait discussion is partially based on this latter source.

72. http://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portraitExtended/mw242595/ElizabethGarrettAnderson?search=sp&sText=elizabeth+garrett+anderson&rNo=0#inscription.

73. Maud ­Arncliffe-Sennett Collection, Vol. 1, reel 1, 1907–8, British Library; Stanislaw Walery, Our Celebrities (London: Sampson, Low & Co., 1890); and on this phenomenon see also Rogers, Camera Portraits. Similarly, late Victorian/Edwardian photographer Frederick Hollyer published a ­three-volume set of nearly 200 portraits of Victorian and Edwardian celebrities, both men and women: Portraits of Many Persons of Note, Photographed by Frederick Hollyer in Three Volumes. See the Victoria and Albert Museum Collection which houses many of these portraits.

74. For a full examination of portraits of Garrett Fawcett, see Denney, “Voiceless London”: Millicent Garrett Fawcett’s Embodiment of the Common Cause, or, Resisting the Scandal of the Platform,” Women, Portraiture and the Crisis of Identity, 125–178.

75. Ann Heilmann, “General Introduction,” in Sex, Social Purity and Sarah Grand: Journalistic Writings and Contemporary Reception, Vol. I, ed., Ann Heilmann (London, New York: Routledge, 2000), 4. For a full examination of Madame Sarah Grand’s ­self-presentation see Denney, “Sarah Grand and the Scandal of the New Woman Novelist,” Women, Portraiture and the Crisis of Identity, 179–209.

76. Rose Broadley, “Painting Suffragettes: Portraits and the Militant Movement,” in Suffrage and the Arts, 159–83. See also Denney, Visual Culture of Women’s Activism, which focuses on allegorical imagery of the Edwardian movement, as well as march imagery, and decodes one new area that Garrett and Thomas call for in their “Introduction,” xxviii, namely imagery of women engaged in activism in the streets. Rosemary Betterton explored this shift in “Women Artists, Modernity and Suffrage,” in Women Artists and Modernism, 22, where she analyzed artists’ “concern with a new sense of identity for women which lies beyond their circumscription within the confines of the feminine and the domestic.”

77. Garrett and Thomas, “Introduction,” Suffrage and the Arts, 13.

78. Broadley, “Painting Suffragettes,” 162–162. See also Cherry, Beyond the Frame, 195.

79. Garrett and Thomas, “Introduction,” 13.

80. See Denney, Women, Portraiture and the Crisis of Identity.

81. David Welch, “’A much maligned and misunderstood word’: A Brief History of Propaganda,” Propaganda, Power and Persuasion (London: British Library, 2013), 5.

82. From BBC Sound Archive, Winifred Starbuck interviewed by Marjorie Anderson, 1958; quoted in Atkinson, Rise Up, Women!, 316.

83. Diane Atkinson, The Suffragettes in Pictures (Stroud, Gloucestershire, England; in conjunction with the Museum of London, 2010), 11.

84. Atkinson, Suffragettes in Pictures, 11.

85. Margaret Mulvihill, Charlotte Despard: A Biography (London: Pandora, 1989), 81.

86. In Beatrice Marion Willmott Dobbie, A Nest of Suffragettes in Somerset (1979), which includes excerpts from the diary of Emily Marion Blathwayt, she relays a visit to see the finished waxworks: “After tea I went with a very fair ­light-haired girl from Canada to see Madame Tussaud’s Waxworks. There is a Suffragette Group. Annie Kenney, Christabel Pankhurst, Mrs. Pankhurst and Mrs. P. Lawrence. They are very badly done, but Annie simply dreadful” (quoted in Atkinson, Suffragettes in Pictures, 21).

87. Welch, “A much maligned and misunderstood word,” 9.

88. Ibid., 12.

89. Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington/Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994), xi.