The #MonthofMillie & Processions 2018 - Celebrating Women's Suffrage in London

SELFIE TIME AT PROCESSIONS 2018

As 2018 is the centenary of some women in the UK getting the vote, I decided I wanted to get involved in the celebrations and learn much more about the history of the women's suffrage movement.

I wanted to add to the things I thought I already knew and discover some of the lesser known stories that I didn't know. As a self-employed woman of 53, whose offspring have all flown the nest, I was fortunate enough to have time to devote to this personal project. The positive things I have gained from doing it, have far exceeded my expectations and have inspired me to do much more in the future.

As June marked Suffragist Millicent Fawcett's birthday, completing some of these things during the #MonthOfMillie was also part of the "Votes for Women" Suffragette challenge I had set myself.

Through my blog I researched and told the stories of many lesser known Suffragettes and Suffragists from Essex, Wales, and Scotland. Ireland is coming in a future blog post!

MILLICENT FAWCETT STATUE

I discovered many stories of women whose names are not as well remembered as The Pankhursts or Millicent Fawcett. I learned that  refusing to pay taxes or not filling in a census form was just as much a part of the fight for suffrage as smashing windows, planting bombs and slashing works of art.

I read Dr Fern Riddell's superb biography of Kitty Marion - Death in 10 Minutes. I read Sarah Jackson's fascinating book on the East End Suffragettes. I read Jenni Murray's  History of Britain in 21 Women and then gave it to my daughter for holiday reading as instructed! I read Anita Annad's biography of Sophia Duleep Singh alongside Emmeline Pankhurst's own autobiography to get a fuller, more rounded view of events.

I studied the iconic suffragette photography of Britain's first female press photographer, Christina Bloom, and fell in love with it so much that I bought a coffee table book!

PANKHURST MEMORIAL

I watched all the TV shows on the BBC that were
dedicated to telling the stories of the fight for women's suffrage. There was Lucy Worsley's exciting drama-documentary on militant suffragettes to soak up, Sally Lindsay's 30 minute biographical study of Emmeline Pankhurst, the Suffragettes Forever series presented by Amanda Vickery and special editions of Antiques Roadshow and the genealogy show Who do You Think You Are.

As a dedicated life long leaner, I signed up for a free online course on the Suffragettes and I also volunteered to help with spreading the word on social media about Snapping The Stiletto - a brilliant local women's community history project in Essex that celebrates strong women and offers free training on how to research archives in conjunction with local museums and Essex Records Office.


I went to see the free Museum of London suffragette collection and attended the talk 'How the Vote was won' hosted by the Fawcett Society with key speakers Elizabeth Crawford and Sumita Mukherjee - two very knowledgeable historians that I have followed on Twitter for some time

WOMEN'S HALL EXHIBITION POSTER

With my daughter, I visited Millicent Fawcett's statue - and also the Pankhurst statue nearby. I also took her to The Women's Hall re-creation in Tower Hamlets Local History Libray - just a stones throw from where she attended university at Queen Mary's over 12 years ago and also where my grandmother's working class family grew up in the East End in the 1900's through to the 1940's.

My daughter was only the second woman in our family to get a degree after me, but her grandmother and her great grandmother left school at 16 and 14, and their only option was factory or office work before marriage and having children. The significance of all of this was not lost on my daughter who, in her 30's has become a strong, focused, independent, politically aware woman who is not afraid to express her own opinions and fight for what she believes in.

Although spending quality time with my daughter was really special, the highlight of my suffragette fest, and the most immersive, uplifting and inspiring part of the experience was taking part in Processions 2018 in London,

It's not everyday that you get the chance to participate in a nationwide event, creating a living piece of art, that commemorates one of the most important moments in women's history! I grabbed that opportunity with both hands, after watching the build up to Processions 2018 on social media. I registered online and looked forward to attending my first ever "March" but I really wasn't sure what to expect!

I was staying with friends on the South Coast on the Saturday evening, and was stopping off in London to take part in Processions on my way home to Essex on the Sunday.

I did the whole walk from Hyde Park to Parliament Square carrying a large handbag AND an overnight bag. Thanks to Processions I more than met my daily step count on the Samsung Health App. I learned that history can keep you healthy physically as well as mentally fit - really important for a 50 something blogger like me who spends a LOT of time sitting in front of a laptop screen!

I had arranged to meet another woman from Essex at the entrance to Hyde Park. After connecting on social media a few days before the event, we had decided to keep each other company rather than walk by ourselves. We made our way to the start to collect our scarves. We were in with the Purple contingent. We remarked to each other that connecting with a random stranger was quite a radical thing for us both to do - but we had a lot of interests in common, and a friendship was quickly formed which I hope will continue.

 As we both waited with bated breath for the procession to get underway, the atmosphere was electric and full of happy, positive vibes. Hundreds of colourful banners with great women's suffrage slogans were being waved and carried aloft  as thousands of women gathered at the starting point, wearing green, purple or white clothing.

People were cheering, laughing, linking arms, sharing the experience together, and taking pictures and videos on their phones.


 As we moved en-mass through the streets of London past Trafalgar Square, towards the houses of parliament, we truly were a great and wonderful spectacle to behold! To hear younger women, some less than half my age leading chants

demanding "equal pay" made me realize how far we have come since the 1970's and how far we still have to go to close the gender pay gap for our daughters and granddaughters.

For just one moment, when we stopped for a short break, I took a minute to frame a lasting image of Processions in my mind - rather than on my phone. I let the reality of what was happening wash over  for posterity. I studied the people behind me, in front of me, and all around me and it made me proud.

There were women of all ages, shapes, colours and sizes. Marching side by side with radical
feminists and LGBT community leaders, and political groups, were ordinary mothers and grandmothers like myself. Sisters walked besides sisters. Best friends strode arm in arm and bought their daughters along. Students, teenage girls, children of both genders, babies in buggies sleeping soundly through it all  - and even few MEN showing their support too!

There were people from every single social, religious and ethnic group  - ALL with a scarf either around their shoulders, tied upon heads or held aloft overhead. The beautiful thing was that regardless of our own lives and backgrounds, we all joined together as one  -for a just few hours - to do a positive, creative, memorable respectful thing in celebration of women's achievements  - and that can only bring hope for a better future and lead to a fairer, more equal society for all the coming generations.

As I marched beside a host of women dressed in full suffragette outfits - one actually had a model of the houses of Parlimament on her head -it was almost like being transported back 100 years! I felt a shiver go down my spine as the ghosts of all those women who fought for the right to vote marched beside us in spirit. It bought it home to me how hard that battle had been and how every single woman in the UK should use her vote to bring about change and never ever take it for granted.

The Suffragette battle cry was DEEDS NOT WORDS - but as a blog writer I think I fulfilled my suffragette challenge with both deeds AND words. At times it was hard, but never the less - I persisted!



When I got home, my feet were aching, I was really tired but I'd had such a totally amazing time, I really didn't care. I spent the rest of the evening watching the excellent coverage of the event on BBC iplayer - and kept thinking to myself, "I was actually there - that will be something to tell people about when I am older and greyer!". Getting more involved with history, sometimes mean that you also end up making it too.

The whole experience has given me the confidence to take the #HiddenHerStories blog to the next level. I am now really excited about working with a female business mentor and self-publishing my first collection of women's biographies later this year.

I am connecting with more and more historians, writers, women's history bloggers & podcasters. I am going to be hosting and collating the first #WomensHistoryHour on Twitter next Sunday (1st June) from 7pm-8pm GMT.

Please feel free to join us online for this brand new online discussion hour.

Thank you Processions for giving me a wonderful opportunity to take part in something really creative that I will cherish for the rest of my life. I am keeping the purple scarf
safe in my box of memories.


You can find other stories, photo's and videos from Processions as well as souvenir merchandise at
www.processions.co.uk/

Here are some other useful links to places and organizations mentioned in the blog:

THE FAWCETT SOCIETY

MUSEUM OF LONDON

SNAPPING THE STILETTO

WOMENS HALL EXHIBITION 

Enjoy my personal video and images of Processions 2018. 

Berthe Morisot: The Forgotten French Impressionist

Berthe Marie Pauline Morisot was a painter in Paris who became known as one of "les trois grandes dames" of Impressionism alongside two other female artists of the period - Marie Bracquemond and Mary Cassatt. For a brief time Berthe Morisot’s works outsold that of her more well-known male counterparts, Monet, Renoir and Pissarro, but why has there been such a long wait for her true artistic genius to be acclaimed and recognized?

Berthe Morisot was born on January 14, 1841 in Bourges, France, into an affluent bourgeois family. Her father, Edmé Tiburce Morisot, was the senior administrator of the department of Cher. He also studied architecture at École des Beaux Arts. Her mother, Marie-Joséphine-Cornélie Thomas, was the great-niece of Jean-Honoré Fragonard, one of the most prolific Rococo painters. She had two older sisters, Yves (1838–1893) and Edma (1839–1921), plus a younger brother, Tiburce, born in 1848. The family moved to Paris in 1852, when Morisot was a child.

It was common practice for daughters of bourgeois families to receive art education, so Berthe and her sisters Yves and Edma were taught privately by Geoffroy-Alphonse Chocarne and Joseph Guichard. Morisot and her sisters initially started taking lessons so that they could each make a drawing for their father for his birthday but Morisot decided that she wanted to be an artist and pursued her goal with seriousness and dedication. 

In 1857 Guichard, who ran a school for girls in Rue des Moulins, introduced Berthe and Edma to the Louvre gallery where they could learn by looking, and from 1858 they learned by copying paintings. He also introduced them to the works of Gavarni. 

Joseph Guichard warned their mother, 'With natures like those of your daughters my teaching will not confer the meagre talents of genteel accomplishment, they will become painters. Do you have any idea what that means? In your milieu of the grande bourgeoisie it would be a revolution.’

Luckily Mme Morisot offered unstinting support to her artistic daughters. Her sister Yves married Theodore Gobillard, a tax inspector, in 1866, and was painted by Edgar Degas as Mrs Theodore Gobillard. As students, Berthe and Edma worked closely together until Edma married Adolphe Pontillon, a naval officer, Edma then moved to Cherbourg, had children, and had less time to paint once she became a wife. Letters between the sisters show a loving relationship, underscored by Berthe's regret at the distance between them and Edma's withdrawal from painting. Edma wholeheartedly supported Berthe's continued work and their families always remained close. 

Edma wrote “… I am often with you in thought, dear Berthe. I’m in your studio and I like to slip away, if only for a quarter of an hour, to breathe that atmosphere that we shared for many years…”

EDMA IN THE PARK

Morisot had registered as a copyist at the Louvre where she befriended other artists and teachers including Camille Corot, the pivotal landscape painter of the Barbizon School who also excelled in figure painting. In 1860, under Corot's influence she took up the plein air (outdoors) method of working. By 1863 she was studying under Achille Oudinot, another Barbizon painter. In the winter of 1863–64 she studied sculpture under Aimé Millet, but none of her sculpture is known to survive. 

In 1864, at the age of twenty-three, she exhibited two landscape paintings for the first time in the highly esteemed Salon de Paris. Sponsored by the government, and judged by Academicians, the Salon was the official, annual exhibition of the Académie des beaux-arts in Paris. One Art Critic announced to his readers, 'You see, ladies, one may be an artist and take part in public exhibitions of painting and remain, as before, a very respectable and very charming person.’

 

Bertha Morisot continued to show regularly in six subsequent Salons, to generally favourable reviews, until 1873, the year before the first “rejected” Impressionist exhibition, held at the studio of the photographer Nadar, which included works by Morisrot, Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Alfred Sisley. It would be Berthe Morisot who would draw Edouard Manet into this circle of painters that would later become known as "The French Impressionists".

Renoir, Pissarro and Monet had all enjoyed much less public success than Mademoiselle Morisot. Their way of doing things – all choppy lines and visible brushwork – gave their canvases an unfinished look that was anathema to the selectors at the Salon. Not only did their dabs and dashes seem impudent, but there was something menacing in their implied contempt for the established order. When critics referred to the group as 'the Impressionists’ it was originally meant as a term of abuse. Morisot exhibited with the Impressionists from 1874 onwards, only missing the exhibition in 1878 when her daughter was born. 

In 1874, Berthe Morisot married Eugène Manet, the brother of Édouard Manet. Eugene was also an artist but, unusually for the time, was prepared to sacrifice his own career in order to manage that of Morisot’s. It was a companionable and devoted marriage and their only child, Julie, posed frequently for her mother and other artists, including Renoir and her uncle Édouard.  

Before her marriage, Morisot had become good friends with Edouard Manet, who had painted several portraits of her, including a striking study in a black veil while in mourning for her father. Correspondence between them shows warm affection, and Manet gave her an easel as a Christmas present. To her dismay he interfered with one of her Salon submissions whilst he was engaged to transport it, mistaking her self-criticism as an invitation to add corrections.

 Manet wrote: "The young Morisot girls are charming. It's annoying that they are not men. However, as women, they could serve the cause of painting by each marrying a member of the French Academy and sowing discord in the camp of those dotards."

 

Although Manet is generally regarded as the master and Morisot as the follower, there is some evidence that their relationship and influence was reciprocal. Records show Manet's appreciation of her distinctive original style and compositional decisions, some of which he incorporated into his own work. It was Morisot who first persuaded Manet to attempt plein air painting, which she had been practising since having been introduced to it by Corot.

Morisot's mature career began in 1872 – just before she married. She found an audience for her work with Durand-Ruel, the private dealer, who bought twenty-two of her paintings. Morisot's work sold comparatively well during her own lifetime. She achieved the two highest prices at a Hôtel Drouot auction in 1875, The Interior (Young Woman with Mirror) sold for 480 francs, and her pastel On the Lawn sold for 320 francs. Her works averaged 250 francs, the best relative prices at the auction. Many years later in February 2013, Berthe Morisot became the highest priced female artist of all time, when After Lunch (1881), a portrait of a young redhead in a straw hat and purple dress, sold for $10.9 million at a Christie's auction. The painting achieved roughly three times its upper estimate.

Morisot’s works are almost always small in scale. She worked in oil paint, watercolours, or pastel, and sketched using various drawing media. Around 1880 she began painting on unprimed canvases—a technique Manet also experimented with at the time—and her brushwork became looser. In 1888–89, her brushstrokes transitioned from short, rapid strokes to long, sinuous ones that define form. The outer edges of her paintings were often left unfinished, allowing the canvas to show through and increasing the sense of spontaneity. After 1885, she worked mostly from preliminary drawings before beginning her oil paintings.

On the difficulty of painting the true likeness of nature, Berthe remarked: “I wear myself out trying to render the orange trees so that they're not stiff but like those I saw by Botticelli in Florence. It's a dream that won't come true but a love of nature is a consolation against failure.”

Morisot created a sense of space and depth through the use of colour. Although her colour palette was somewhat limited, her fellow impressionists regarded her as a "virtuoso colourist". She typically made expansive use of white, whether used as a pure white or mixed with other colours. In her large painting, The Cherry Tree, colours are more vivid but are still used to emphasize form. Morisot painted what she experienced on a daily basis. Her paintings reflect the 19th-century cultural restrictions of her class and gender. She avoided urban and street scenes and seldom painted the nude figure in her earlier days as such subjects were automatically closed to Morisot as a respectable single woman. There were limitations to how far she could accompany her male impressionist counterparts in their daring new journey into realism. 

“Real painters understand with a brush in their hand and it is important to express one’s self, provided the feelings are real and are taken from your own experience.”    

 Like her fellow Impressionist Mary Cassatt, she focused on domestic life and portraits in which she could use family and personal friends as models, including her daughter Julie and sister Edma. Prior to the 1860s, Morisot painted subjects in line with the Barbizon school before turning to scenes of contemporary femininity.  Paintings like The Cradle (1872), in which she depicted current trends for nursery furniture, reflect her sensitivity to fashion and advertising, both of which would have been apparent to her female audience. Her works also include landscapes, portraits, garden settings and boating scenes. Later in her career Morisot worked with more ambitious themes, such as nudes. Corresponding with Morisot's interest in nude subjects, Morisot also began to focus more on preliminary drawings, completing many dry points, charcoal, and colour pencil drawings.

 

She always chose to exhibit under her full maiden name instead of using a pseudonym or her married name. In 1877, she was described by the critic for Le Temps as the "one real Impressionist in this group." In the 1880 exhibition, many reviews judged Morisot among the best, including Le Figaro critic Albert Wolff. Among other contemporary art critics such as Gustave Geoffrey the general view was that “no one represents Impressionism with more refined talent or more authority than Morisot"

Berthe Morisot died on March 2, 1895, in Paris, of pneumonia which she contracted while nursing her daughter Julie through the same illness.

JULIE MANET ROUART

The death of both her parents within a three-year period left Julie Manet orphaned at the age of 16. As a result, she came under the guardianship of the poet/critic Stéphane Mallarmé and went to live with her cousins. Bethe’s daughter also received support from, Renoir. In May 1900 Julie Manet married Ernest Rouart, artist and nephew of the painter Henri Rouart. The wedding, which took place in Passy, was a double ceremony in which Julie's cousin Jeannie Gobillard married Paul Valéry. 

Julie's memoirs, Growing Up with the Impressionists: The Diary of Julie Manet, were published in 1987 and provide insights into the lives of Morisot, Manet, Renoir, Degas, Monet, and Sisley, as well the 1896 state visit of Tsar Nicholas II and the Dreyfus Affair. 

Bertha Morisot’s work never lost its Manet-like quality—an insistence on design—nor did she become as involved in colour-optical experimentation as her fellow Impressionists. 

Delicate and subtle, exquisite in colour—often with a subdued emerald glow—her paintings won her the admiration of her Impressionist colleagues. However, like that of the other Impressionists, her work was also ridiculed by many critics. Commercially successful, she outsold Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Alfred Sisley. She was a woman of great culture and charm and she counted among her close friends Edgar Degas, Charles Baudelaire,
and Émile Zola, Despite Morisot being an acknowledged leader among Impressionist Artists, her work has tended to be overlooked and undervalued for more than a century. Only now are her paintings – exquisite essays in middle-class life that turn everyday acts into luminous moments – recognised as some of the most pivotal in modern art.

An early portrait of her by Edouard Manet – generally reckoned to be one of the best things he ever did – shows a young woman of shocking determination. Her face is all sharp planes and angles, topped by a tumble of jet-black curls. But it is the gaze that catches and holds you. Morisot stares out steadily at Manet, daring him to take her seriously as a fellow artist.

Portrait of Berthe by Manet

'I do not think any man would ever treat a woman as his equal,’ she wrote later in one of her notebooks, 'and it is all I ask because I know my worth.’

Paul Valéry, her son in –law and friend, put it best when he declared after her death, 'Berthe Morisot’s uniqueness was to “live” her painting, and to paint her life… she took up, put down, returned to her brush like a thought that comes to us, is clean forgotten, then occurs to us once again.’

It was perhaps the fact that Morisot died when her work was still developing that accounts for the way her reputation has declined sharply since her death. While Manet, Monet, Renoir and Degas continued to build reputations that towered over the 20th century, Morisot’s work has tended to be written off by critics as that of a minor lady painter.

Throughout her career, Berthe Morisot had to fight against preconceptions of women and their role. She was highly unusual in her decision to be an artist as well as a wife and mother, but 

 many people inevitably saw her primarily in her

traditionally female roles. Although she has been forgotten in some corners, Morisot was an important figure in the founding of Impressionism as a movement; she participated in their first exhibition and was a key artistic and social figure within their circle. Morisot was also a strong encouraging influence on other female Impressionist painters living in Paris at the time.

Her apparently 'trivial’ subjects have blinded critics to the revolutionary way in which she broke up line and form, reassembling them in ways that are truer to the way our eyes interpret light and colour. Not only that, but her domestic subjects are infused with a depth of feeling and subtle ambivalence that keep you looking far longer than you intended. Fortunately, a new wave of scholarship is redressing the balance, returning to us a Berthe Morisot whose art is as radical and shocking as it is supremely beautiful. The book, 'Berthe Morisot’, by Jean-Dominique Rey (Published by Flammarion) urges us to take a fresh new look at Bertha Morisot’s life and work.