And we only need to look to social media to see that the suffrage movement’s witty, dry and brutal poster design continues to influence political movements today, she says. Oral histories on the suffrage movement carried out in the 1970s. Listen to an interview about the organising of Emily Wilding Davison's funeral.

By visualising women’s experiences, posters emphasised the poor treatment of women and Suffragettes’ while also showing the extremes Suffragettes went to in confronting patriarchy. They made visual moves to construct the government as threatening to suffragette prisoners’, and more generally women’s, lives. These posters circulated nationally and communicated to the public women’s experiences to a greater degree than talk of force-feeding alone could. It rendered the unimaginable imaginable by showing events. It also inspired action. Posters of force-feeding and women’s suffering became crucial to revealing women’s insecurities by calling attention to the pervasiveness of patriarchal controls over their bodies and the definitions of acceptable femininity that constrained women to the domestic, private, sphere.The March of the Women: a Revisionist Analysis of the Campaign for Women’s Suffrage 1866-1914, Martin Pugh (Oxford University Press 2002) Suffragettes Annie Kenny and Christabel Pankhurst 1906 (COPY 1/494) 2.2 What period do the records cover? Image credit: Alfred Pearse for WSPU, The Modern Inquisition (1910). Source: Museum of London, image no. 001313′. LSE Library; Museum of London Picture Library. To admit women to politics was considered a ‘dangerous leap in the dark’. The Suffragettes were accused of trying to undermine British institutions. If you read the spoken discourse for and against suffrage, there are all sorts of arguments that women getting the vote will masculinize them and make them lose their feminine identity," said Catherine H. Palczewski, a professor of women's and gender studies at the University of Northern Iowa and a vintage postcard archivist. "But there's not much about what women's vote will do to men. But all over the postcards, there are these images of men being feminized."

In the case of the Suffragettes, a combination of texts, visuals and practices was used to show and tell stories. Each of these mediums gave meaning to the others to constitute the women’s cause and none should be privileged over the others. To do so loses the complexity of the politics at play. Increasingly, we are seeing similar combinations of texts, images, and practices as women and people marginalized because of their non-normative sexuality, gender identity, race, class and/or ability protest their political and social subjugation. If we are to fully understand the threats real people face, articulated in/by (global and local) political movements, we must turn attention to the ways that images show things that may otherwise go unsaid. We must think through the ways that images may just speak, or at least compliment, a thousand words.The speaker also stated that in a recent canvas by postcard, of the 200 odd women in East Grinstead, they found that 80 did not want the vote, 40 did want the vote and the remainder would not sufficiently interested in replying.Lady Musgrave, President of the East Grinstead branch of the Anti-Suffragette League said she was strongly against the franchise being extended to women, for she did not think it would do any good whatsoever, and in sex interests, would do a lot of harm. She quoted the words of Lady Jersey: "Put not this additional burden upon us." Women were not equal to men in endurance or nervous energy, and she thought she might say, on the whole, in intellect. (4) A meeting of the Anti-Suffrage Society was reported in the East Grinstead Observer on 3rd June 1911.

From as early as 1832 attempts were made to introduce legislation to give women the vote. Parliament.uk has a useful timeline of key legislation that you can use to inform your research. Some of the most useful are listed below.The Vote was the newspaper of the Women’s Freedom League. Its first editor was Charlotte Despard and it was published from 1909 to 1933. The Daily Mail photos can be contrasted to some of those taken by the police in secret. Number 13 is a photo of Christabel Pankhurst. Princess Sophia Duleep Singh, a member of the WSPU and the Tax Resistance League. She was often seen selling The Suffragettenewspaper outside Hampton Court Palace. Men’s League for Women’s Suffragewas founded in 1907 and supported the work of the WSPU and Women’s Freedom League. Records of the Men's League for Women's Suffrage and other men’s suffrage societies are dispersed throughout the collection.