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Hi, it's Phoebe. We're heading back out on tour this fall, bringing our 10th anniversary show to even more cities. Austin, Tucson, Boulder, Portland, Oregon, Detroit, Madison, Northampton, and Atlanta, we're coming your way. Come and hear seven brand new stories told live on stage by me and Criminal co-creator Lauren Spohr. We think it's the best live show we've ever done. Tickets are on sale now at thisiscriminal.com slash live. See you very soon.
Hey, I'm Sean Ely. For more than 70 years, people from all political backgrounds have been using the word Orwellian to mean whatever they want it to mean.
But what did George Orwell actually stand for? Orwell was not just an advocate for free speech, even though he was that. But he was an advocate for truth in speech. He's someone who argues that you should be able to say that two plus two equals four. We'll meet the real George Orwell, a man who was prescient and flawed, this week on The Gray Area. This episode contains descriptions of sexual violence. Please use discretion.
In January 1913, museum and gallery directors in London received a memo from the police. It said in capital letters, CONFIDENTIAL. And it suggested that museums and galleries should change their rules for women who wanted to visit. And in particular, that memo suggests that they should change how they are inspecting female visitors so that female visitors should be asked to leave parcels and muffs at the entrances.
Archivist Bryony Millen. So in a way, it was suggesting that museum and gallery authorities should be particularly wary of female visitors. Museum and gallery directors met with the police and discussed what to do. One option was to make all women trying to enter a museum or gallery sign a declaration, promising that they wouldn't attack anything. Another option was proposed. Don't let women in at all. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. ♪
From the mid-1860s, the demand for the vote, the, should I say, the polite request for the vote was being expressed. Diane Atkinson is the author of Rise Up Women, The Remarkable Lives of the Suffragettes. The early campaigners were rather genteel in their approach. You know, they'd have polite meetings, they'd collect petitions, they'd have garden party meetings, they'd ask politicians nicely. But of course, that approach doesn't make any progress.
In 1893, New Zealand became the first country in the world to give women the vote, and over the next 20 years, Australia, Finland, and Norway followed. But in England, nothing was happening.
Political parties all across the board worried that if women could vote, they might vote for their opponents. Some things had changed in the 19th century, but it was very, very slow, and it was in a very hostile environment in Parliament. So whenever the idea of women having the vote is discussed, or women's issues discussed, it's mostly ridiculed and mocked, and of course nothing ever happens. In the 1870s, a woman named Emmeline Pankhurst got involved.
She'd grown up in a family that was engaged in politics. Her mother was active in anti-slavery and women's suffrage movements. Emily Pankhurst was one of those women who had been part of the conversation in the moderate suffrage campaign. They were called the suffragists. These are the women who are meeting and talking and gathering petitions together in the 1860s onwards. And she was involved in that conversation in the 1870s.
Emmeline Pankhurst was married to a lawyer named Richard Pankhurst. He was a feminist. He tried to stand as a feminist MP, but of course that didn't succeed. He was regarded as a sort of a curious creature, a man who'd unsexed himself to support women's issues. So they were an interesting couple in the north of England. They lived in Manchester and had five children. They'd been married almost 20 years when Richard Pankhurst got sick and died.
And Mrs. Pankhurst suddenly finds herself a widow, very unexpectedly, with very little money. And she takes a job called the Registrar of Births and Deaths in a really poor part of Manchester. And she's there taking the details of the births and deaths of local people.
And during this time when she's in her office and receiving often mothers reporting the births and sometimes the deaths too of their babies, she gets to see how poor these women's lives are, what impact poverty has on their lives and how they have no voice in parliament. She knows all the theory about why women should have the vote, but I think it's this experience that kind of changes her attitudes to how women are going to be able to proceed to equality.
Some of the girls who came into the office to report a newborn baby were only 13 years old. Emmeline Pankhurst wrote that many of them had become pregnant after being sexually assaulted by family members, but they had few legal protections. Emmeline Pankhurst wrote, "...I was shocked to be reminded over and over again of the little respect there was in the world for women and children."
Diane Atkinson says that at the time, women in England had very limited rights. They couldn't report marital rape or get a court order against a violent husband. It was almost impossible to get a divorce, and it was difficult for women to get custody over their children. They couldn't open a bank account or apply for a loan without their husbands. If they were single, they needed their father's signature, even if they made more money than their father.
Women could even be refused service if they were drinking alone in a pub, spending their own money. In October 1903, Emmeline Pankhurst invited a group of women to her house in Manchester. They wanted to start a new kind of organization. They voted to call it the Women's Social and Political Union, WSPU. And they came up with a slogan, Deeds, Not Words. And they said, we're going to get women the vote.
Their slogan, Deeds Not Words, really describes the direction of travel they're going to be going in. They're not going to be asking for the goat. They're going to be demanding it. Where does the word suffragettes, that name, come from?
Well, it was first coined in 1906 by a tabloid newspaper called the Daily Mail. We still have the newspaper. And it was meant to be a term of abuse, really. And it was to be a put-down and to ridicule the activities of this group of women who dared to make their demands heard in a variety of ways. They weren't going to just be
chatting to politicians nicely and carrying on with the petition-gathering strategy. So it's a condescending nickname, but the suffragettes didn't mind it at all. They used it. They were quite happy to be called suffragettes because they said, well, let's make the G a hard G. Let's say suffragettes the vote. Emmeline Pankhurst quickly became popular. She would travel around the country to give speeches.
She was a very charismatic person on stage. She can hold a room. I mean, physically, she's quite small. Her shoe size, and I know this because when I worked at the Museum of London, we had one of her shoes. It was a very important part of the collection. Her shoe size was size two. So that tells you something about her kind of physical size, her
and how her small physical size was able to project and reach into the hearts, really, of everybody who went along to one of her meetings. One woman described going to a suffragette meeting. I was sitting in a crowded room of women with feeling running high, and it was as if one big heart was beating.
Emmeline Pankhurst was working with two of her daughters, Sylvia and Christabel Pankhurst. Her oldest daughter, Christabel, had a degree in law and had a first-class degree in international law. But because she was a woman, she wasn't allowed to be a lawyer. You could do the academic work, but you couldn't join the profession because all the professions, except medicine, were closed to women.
So Christabel has this brilliant logical brain. She's a great tactician, a strategist. And she's got a complete grasp of how to turn political theories into an active movement and a progressive movement. In 1905, Christabel Pankhurst went to a political meeting in Manchester with another suffragette, a woman named Annie Kenny, who worked at a cotton mill.
Before she left the house that day, Christabel told her mother, "We shall sleep in prison tonight." Diane Atkinson writes that the suffragettes had prepared for this moment for two years. The meeting was open to the public, so people could ask questions and talk to the politicians. Winston Churchill was there. This was decades before he became prime minister. Annie Kenney got up and asked about votes for women. The speakers ignored her.
When she asked her question again, two men pulled her down. Then the two suffragettes rolled out a homemade banner they had smuggled into the meeting. It read, "Votes for Women." They were dragged from the meeting and picked up by two police officers. They hadn't committed a crime, but Christabel Pankhurst wanted them to get arrested. That way, she knew their protest would be covered in the newspapers. So she pretended to spit at one of the officers.
Christabel Pankhurst and Annie Kenney were given two options: pay a fine or go to prison. They chose prison. Diane Atkinson writes that a rumor circulated that Winston Churchill had tried to pay their fines to keep them out of prison and minimize the publicity. But their plan worked. One historian writes, "The whole country read about the episode in the morning papers. Soon, everyone had heard about the suffragettes."
Diane Atkinson writes that political parties stopped admitting women to their meetings if they suspected that they might ask, quote, awkward questions. So some women would go in disguise. So they start off interrupting at meetings, and then that moves on to something a bit more sort of in the face of the politicians. So they would have a strategy from about 1908 onwards called pestering the politicians.
The suffragettes would find out what senior politicians were doing on the weekends, especially the prime minister, Herbert Asquith. Christabel Pankhurst said the prime minister was, quote, the principal enemy of women's suffrage and said he was beyond conversion. So she said the only thing to do was to make him appear ridiculous.
They would find out whether they're playing golf and they would hide in the bushes. And just as the politicians were sort of teeing up their shot or whatever you do, or however you call it, they would jump out of the bushes and say, Mr. Asquith, when are you going to give women the vote? And they would wait outside the church for Asquith to come out and they sort of
go straight for him and berate him and did as much as they could to pester the lives out of them, to make their lives as frustrating and as difficult as possible, just by being around all the wrong times. It was a fun slapstick kind of protest, but it drove the politicians mad. It drove Winston Churchill mad, really, because they were always attacking him and pestering him. And they wrote about it in the newspapers. And of course, the politicians hated it because it made them feel very foolish.
Emmeline Pankhurst's home in Manchester became a gathering place for suffragettes. They chose three colors to represent the movement, purple, green, and white.
They're kind of pioneers in political marketing and merchandising. Some of the earliest pieces were beautiful long silk scarves with purple and green stripes and printed on either end, "Votes for Women." Now these could be used as a scarf. They could be used to keep your hat on if you were on your bicycle or if it was windy, you could perhaps tie your hat on with this scarf. So that was one of the first pieces.
There was jewelry. So it's really rather brilliant in terms of reach and also brilliant in terms of raising money. And quite a lot of suffragettes who were of limited means would make things in purple, white and green and sell them to the suffragette shops all around the country because the WSPU had shops and offices. You could even buy chocolates and cigarettes and marmalade.
Diane Atkinson says that while some of the best-known suffragettes, like the Pankhursts, were middle or upper class, many working-class women, like cotton mill worker Annie Kenny, played a big part. Photos of Annie Kenny, sometimes in her cotton mill uniform, were put on postcards, and women would collect them. Most of the British suffragettes we know about were white women.
Although, Diane Atkinson says that at the time, the census didn't ask about race or ethnicity. Now, there are photographs of Indian suffragettes, Indian students who are in London. They go to a very, very important procession to coincide with the coronation of the new king. The photographs are dated June 17th, 1911. The marching suffragettes had hoped that the coronation of a new king would be helpful to their cause.
At the first suffragette protest in London, 300 to 400 women attended. They were holding banners and walked together in the rain to talk to members of parliament. The suffragettes came up with lots of different ways to make people pay attention. Two women tried to mail themselves to the prime minister as human letters. The story made the front page of the Daily Mirror, which reported that upon arrival, the suffragettes were told...
"You cannot be delivered here. You must be returned. You are dead letters," the Daily Mirror wrote. Though well laid, the plan did not succeed. Two other women wanted to attend a talk by a politician in Bristol. No women were allowed, so they went the night before, snuck into the conference hall, and hid inside of an organ. The next day, when the politician started giving his speech, the suffragettes interrupted him from inside the organ with "votes for women."
No one could figure out where the voices were coming from. The politician continued his speech, and when he started talking about liberty, the suffragettes shouted, Why don't you give women liberty? The women jumped out of the organ and were chased around while they kept shouting their slogans. Eventually, they were thrown out. Most people disapproved of the suffragettes. The Daily Mirror described one protest as, quote,
A desperate suffragette rioting where, quote, screaming women would attack police officers with umbrellas.
The sacrifices were enormous. I mean, to become a suffragette, especially to continue with your membership right through the whole gamut of militancy, ran the risk of losing your husband, losing your fiancé, being disowned by your father, being thrown out of your home, being disinherited, losing your job, losing everything. The suffragettes were not afraid of violence, and by one account returned from interrupting a meeting, quote,
Bruised and disheveled, hatless, hair dragged down and clothing torn. Some had their corsets ripped off, false teeth knocked out, faces scratched, eyes swollen, noses bleeding.
It wasn't just men attacking vulnerable women. Often women joined in, and it was extremely dangerous to be confronted by a crowd who were capable of doing all kinds of harm. And that's why a lot of suffragettes would take their brothers with them, or sometimes their husbands, or sometimes male friends who supported what they were doing, just to give them a bit of security. They'd make corsets out of cardboard to protect themselves. One suffragette explained how...
I rigged up one of these in the bath and fitted it to my shape and put on my hockey outfit and set off for London." After a violent protest in 1908, two suffragettes, angry about how they'd been treated by the crowd and the police, took a taxi to the Prime Minister's house and broke two windows. The suffragettes said they didn't want bloodshed. Emmeline Pankhurst said, "There is something that governments care far more for than human life.
And that is the security of property. And so it is through property that we shall strike the enemy. We'll be right back. Support for Criminal comes from Ritual. I love a morning ritual. We've spent a lot of time at Criminal talking about how everyone starts their days. The Sunday routine column in the New York Times is one of my favorite things on earth.
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Get 25% off your first month at ritual.com slash criminal. Start Ritual or add Essential for Women 18 Plus to your subscription today. That's ritual.com slash criminal for 25% off. Hey, Sue Bird here. I'm Megan Rapinoe. Women's sports are reaching new heights these days, and there's so much to talk about. So Megan and I are launching a podcast where we're going to deep dive into all things sports, and then some. We're calling it A Touch More.
Because women's sports is everything. Pop culture, economics, politics, you name it. And there's no better folks than us to talk about what happens on the court or on the field and everywhere else too. And we'll have a whole bunch of friends on the show to help us break things down. We're talking athletes, actors, comedians, maybe even our moms. That'll be a fun episode.
Whether it's breaking down the biggest games or discussing the latest headlines, we'll be bringing a touch more insight into the world of sports and beyond. Follow A Touch More wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes drop every Wednesday. If things got too violent at a protest, suffragettes would sometimes try to get arrested to get away from the scene. One day, Emmeline Pankhurst, along with eight other women, asked to speak to the prime minister. Two police inspectors stopped them.
A crowd started to form, and Emmeline Pankhurst worried it could turn violent. One of the women in the group was in her 70s. It didn't feel safe. So Emmeline Pankhurst slapped one of the inspectors lightly on the cheek. The inspector said, "I know why you did that." Emmeline Pankhurst said, "Must I do it again?" The inspector said, "Yes." So she slapped him on the other cheek, and another suffragette knocked his hat off.
They were arrested and escorted to the police station where they were charged with obstructing the police and assault. At one point, the women's prison in London was so crowded, some suffragettes were sent to a prison out of town. Men who were seen as political prisoners got sent to better prisons where they could wear their own clothes, spend time with other prisoners, receive books and write letters. But the suffragettes were sent to regular prisons where they had to wear prison uniforms.
One suffragette wrote that she slept in, quote, rather soiled-looking sheets, and that she was kept in solitary confinement with one window that was so high she couldn't see out of it. Quote, the only sign of outside life was the occasional shadow of a bird as it flew across the window. The women had to work in the prison. Some scrubbed floors, and others made shirts for inmates at the men's prison.
Around the tail of the shirts, the suffragettes embroidered a message, Votes for Women.
At a certain moment, quite early on actually, the suffragettes decided that, well, some did, it's an individual decision, it's not a national strategy, that they would go on hunger strike until they were treated as political prisoners, until they got this special treatment. Diane Atkinson says that when the suffragettes started hunger striking, the authorities became nervous that someone might die in prison.
the suffragettes who wanted a hunger strike would have to be fed. And they would have to be fed by force if necessary. And that's what happens. You have women going to prison for various often trivial offenses, going on hunger strike and being force-fed. To be force-fed at that time, the way it was conducted was horrendous.
A tube was forced down the women's throat or through the nose so violently that injuries were common. Some women suffered from the effects of force feeding long after they were released. It's quite shattering to think what the process was and how they endured it, sometimes three times a day for weeks at a time. It was extremely gruelling. And what the suffragette says was that the government was torturing its women. And in fact, it was torture without any doubt.
And then, in November 1910, a bill was discussed in Parliament that if passed, would give some women the right to vote, but only women who owned property of a certain value.
It didn't suit the suffragettes because they didn't feel it went far enough, really, or enfranchised enough women. But they said, OK, well, you know, get our foot in the door one step at a time. We'll take this and then we'll keep agitating to make it completely universal women's suffrage. So this bill was being debated in Parliament. And there was quite a lot of interest and a lot of support for it. A lot of politicians voted for it.
But for the bill to become law, the Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith, needed to approve it. While they were waiting for his approval, the suffragettes gathered at a building close to Parliament. They know the vote's going through. They've decorated the hall with all their beautiful banners saying, "Rise up women, deeds not words." Mrs. Pankhurst had given a rousing speech. Some of their top speakers had given rousing speeches. And then they got word that the Prime Minister had chosen not to approve the bill.
When the messengers ran to this big meeting to say that Asquith had said, "Well, I see the results, but we'll discuss this during the next parliamentary session," he'd kind of torpedoed it. He'd stopped it going any further. And when the news came through, there was a real fury. They were pretty pumped up, actually, by the meeting.
And they decided they would go off in groups of 10 to 12, small deputations. They would leave the hall and they would walk to Parliament in small groups. They couldn't go as a mass because they'd be arrested en masse. That was illegal. So they set off. They walked to Parliament Square. Their plan was to confront the politicians who had let the bill die.
So there was a vast presence in Parliament Square. There were lots of men going about their business. It's a very busy part of Westminster. Of course, the government knew the suffragettes would react extremely poorly to this particular likely result. There were several hundred uniformed policemen, but there were more policemen in plain clothes who were there really as agent provocateurs.
And so these men were kind of in disguise. They were there to cause trouble. They were pretending to be supporters of women's suffrage. And so a horrible riot breaks out. And November the 18th, 1910 becomes known as Black Friday because of the violence, the physical and sexual violence that takes place there.
During that day, afternoon and the early evening, it's really bad. Women are punched and kicked, have their hair pulled. They're groped. They're taken into side streets. There's at least 39 or so examples of sexual violence, and there are horrifying descriptions of this. A report was later conducted into the behavior of the police that day, both in uniform and undercover.
One woman later described seeing an officer in plain clothes who kicked a woman, while others laughed and jeered at her. For six hours, this continued. One woman was dragged out of her wheelchair and beaten. A crowd had gathered, mostly men who didn't like the suffragettes. Reports described how the police forced suffragettes into the middle of the crowd. Around 150 women were physically and sexually assaulted.
One woman told a reporter that she had been to seven suffragette demonstrations, but she had never, quote, known the police so violent. A doctor said he would like to know who had told the police to treat the women with, quote, such brutality. The next day, one newspaper reported that the suffragettes had scratched men's cheeks and knocked off helmets, while the police, quote, kept their tempers very well.
But when another newspaper published a photograph of a 50-year-old woman who was lying face down in the street after a police officer had punched her, people were shocked. People said Winston Churchill was responsible for the violence. Churchill wrote that the whole thing was no doubt, quote, a misunderstanding.
Black Friday was the trigger and there was writing, sporadic writing over the next five to six days in and around Westminster. You might imagine that lots of the women who had been badly pummeled or traumatised or shocked or groped, all these things.
that that would be it for them. They wouldn't go back and do any more of that. But they were determined to have their voices heard. And where physically possible, they went back and carried on protesting police behavior. Many women were arrested in the weeks following Black Friday, including one who threw a potato at Winston Churchill's front door. One woman hit a policeman in the face and reportedly said, that is for Friday. Mrs. Pankhurst said...
We've got to think of another way of protesting. We need to go underground and we need to wage a guerrilla war on this government. And they were her exact words. So Black Friday is a really important moment because the campaign changes and it goes underground and then it spreads like wildfire. It really is like a wildfire spreading around the country.
Diane Atkinson says that after Black Friday, the suffragette movement changed. All sorts of new militant tactics are going to be invented and deployed, like putting small phosphorus bombs into mailboxes all around the country, destroying the mail, and generally causing a great deal of disruption. For example, the telephone wires between London and Glasgow were cut.
burning with acid onto golfing greens, no vote, no golf, attacking buildings, burning down empty houses, nobody was ever killed, they always wrecked the building before they attacked it. Sports facilities, sports stadia were affected by suffragette militancy. So they're popping up everywhere. Writer Helen Scott notes that the authorities had a hard time keeping up with the suffragettes, who were unpredictable because they were often acting independently of one another.
and kept coming up with new tactics. She writes that the atmosphere has been called one of, quote, "pressurized one-upmanship." And then, in January 1913, London's police chief commissioner gathered directors of museums and galleries to warn them that they might be next. The police had reason to believe that the suffragettes might start attacking works of art.
The museum and gallery directors discussed banning women from coming in at all, or making them sign a declaration at the entrance, promising that they wouldn't do anything, or even just closing altogether for a little while.
However, it was decided that these kinds of measures were impractical. So it wasn't practical to close for the duration of however long this might take because it was appreciated that the campaign for suffrage was not one that was going to be over quickly. So that would be them deciding to close for a very long period, an unknown period of time. Archivist, Bryony Millen. For a lot of my career, I worked at the National Portrait Gallery in London. So I was there for 15 years, all told.
A little bit about the National Portrait Gallery. Sure. So it's a national collection of portraits that's basically supposed to tell the story of British history through figures who have made significant contributions to its history, to its culture and to its society. And it does that by acquiring and displaying portraits of significant figures, men and women who have made the history of Britain as it's come to be today.
Briony Millen found some documents in the museum's archives from 1913 and 14, in which museum administrators discussed how they could keep their collections safe from suffragettes.
Because of the kind of fear of attack, you begin to see that obviously museums and galleries are having to change the way that they display their works of art in response to this threat. Works of art which they thought would be particularly provocative or potentially had a greater risk of being targets, they were taken off display. So for example, there were two large group portraits of the Houses of Parliament which were taken down so that they wouldn't potentially be targeted. Other works of art were moved, so they were kind
Because the woman's arm couldn't reach high enough. Exactly. So there's even some remarks in the press saying, you know, that works of art had been rehung at such a high level that only a very tall person would have been able to reach the sort of the main part of the work.
Bryony Millen says that galleries and museums at the time looked quite different from what we're used to today. Today we kind of expect there to be space for the works of art to breathe, but at this time the approach to display was far busier. It's visually much more crowded. So you would quite often see works of art, not quite floor to ceiling, but a much larger number of works of art on display on any wall at a particular time.
In 1913, the National Portrait Gallery also decided to close off some parts of the museum, and they hired undercover police officers to patrol the galleries, pretending to be museum visitors. But that got expensive, so eventually the police officers were let go, and two staff members were assigned to pretend to be visitors. Briony Millen found letters between museum directors worrying about women and trying to figure out what to do.
There's a kind of dichotomy in how the leadership are representing the level of threat. So when the National Portrait Gallery's director is talking to his superiors, as it were, so when he's interacting via letter with the board of trustees who he answers to, he
downplays the level of threat. So he's trying to say sort of, you know, we've taken every sensible precaution. We're in a better position than some of our peers are at. And actually, I think that, you know, we are well placed in terms of responding to this.
But if you look at how he communicates with his assistant keepers, obviously somebody who is reporting to him, he's perhaps far more candid. So the level of threat that he expresses when discussing kind of with a colleague is greater. The museum director wrote that some other museums were more at risk because of, quote, the entire incompetence of the staff.
But he also told his employees that he wanted wired glass installed in the window in his office in case suffragettes would think it was, quote, a favorable spot for the insertion of combustibles. We'll be right back.
The Walt Disney Company is a sprawling business. It's got movies studios, theme parks, cable networks, a streaming service. It's a lot. So it can be hard to find just the right person to lead it all. When you have a leader with the singularly creative mind and leadership that Walt Disney had, it like goes away and disappears. I mean, you can expect what will happen. The problem is Disney CEOs have trouble letting go.
After 15 years, Bob Iger finally handed off the reins in 2020. His retirement did not last long. He now has a big black mark on his legacy because after pushing back his retirement over and over again, when he finally did choose a successor, it didn't go well for anybody involved.
And of course, now there's a sort of a bake-off going on. Everybody watching, who could it be? I don't think there's anyone where it's like the obvious no-brainer. That's not the case. I'm Joe Adalian. Vulture and the Vox Media Podcast Network present Land of the Giants, The Disney Dilemma. Follow wherever you listen to hear new episodes every Wednesday.
Hi, everyone. This is Kara Swisher, host of On with Kara Swisher from New York Magazine and Vox Media. We've had some great guests on the pod this summer, and we are not slowing down. Last month, we had MSNBC's Rachel Maddow on, then two separate expert panels to talk about everything going on in the presidential race, and there's a lot going on, and Ron Klain, President Biden's former chief of staff. And it keeps on getting better. This week, we have the one and only former Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi. And we have the one and only former Speaker of the House,
After the drama of the last two weeks and President Biden's decision to step out of the race, a lot of people think the speaker has some explaining to do. And I definitely went there with her, although she's a tough nut, as you'll find. The full episode is out now, and you can listen wherever you get your podcasts. By March 1914, Emmeline Pankhurst was wanted by the police. She was 55 years old and described as looking frail.
When she arrived at a meeting in Scotland, she was smuggled inside in a laundry basket. Then police burst into the room and dragged her out. She was badly hurt and was described as half-fainting when she was thrown into a car. In prison, she went on hunger strike. Suffragettes were worried about her. One morning in March of 1914, a woman named Mary Richardson made her way to London's National Gallery.
She came from quite a well-off background. She was largely brought up by her grandparents because her parents died quite young. She wanted to be an artist. She wanted to be a writer. She really wanted to make an independent life for herself. And she was really somebody who wanted to be the middle of things. Mary Richardson was there to see one painting in particular. It's called The Roquebe Venus.
It was painted in the mid-1600s by the Spanish painter Diego Velazquez. It's one of his most famous paintings. The painting shows the goddess Venus lying on a bed naked. She's painted from the back. In front of her, Cupid is holding up a mirror. It's almost as if Venus is looking directly at the viewer through the mirror. Art historians have called the Roqueby Venus one of the most famous nudes in Western art.
In 1905, it was purchased from a wealthy family for 45,000 pounds, almost 9 million U.S. dollars today. A newspaper at the time described Venus in the painting as Mary Richardson was 31 and devoted to the suffragette movement. She heard the news about Emmeline Pankhurst's arrest.
So what she did, she got up in the morning, she went and bought a meat cleaver, which she hid in the sleeve of her jacket. She walked into the museum and headed straight for the Rokeby Venus. This was, you know, this was March. London was full of tourists from all around the world. So she'd have walked through the front door. Nobody could imagine that this woman who walked in was going to pose any threat. She knew exactly which room the painting was in. She'd reckoned the building beforehand.
She pretended to be an art student and started drawing. The museum had staff and undercover police officers walking around the gallery floor. When the moment seemed right, she got closer to the Rokeby Venus. And she walked up to it and took the meat cleaver out of the silver jack and just hacked at it. The protective glass shattered. There was a lot of noise. Two German tourists tried to stop Mary Richardson by throwing their guidebook at her.
Then she slashed the canvas itself. She slashed the painting at least six or seven times. A museum attendant said that he heard the glass break and tried to run over. He said he went as fast as he could on the, quote, slippery floor. According to the Daily Telegraph, quote,
The presumption is that if the floor had been less slippery, or the attendant more practiced in moving over it, or better shooed, for instance with rubber shoes, some of the damage might have been prevented. Mary Richardson was arrested and, quote, went quietly. Before she was escorted out of the room, she turned around and said, Yes, I am a suffragette. I broke the picture. You can get another picture, but you can't get a life.
They are killing Mrs. Pankhurst. Mary Richardson had also written a statement that she shared with the press. She wrote, "'I've tried to destroy the picture of the most beautiful woman in mythological history as a protest against the government. If there's an outcry against my deed, remember that such an outcry is a hypocrisy, as long as they allow the destruction of Mrs. Pankhurst and other women.'"
In court, Mary Richardson said she cared more about justice than art. She was sentenced to six months in prison. It's interesting that she chose this picture first. You know, if you look at it, it's a woman staring at a picture of herself in the mirror. But she seems so calm and complacent and just, you know, perfectly happy to just be looking at herself and not, you know, stirred up in any way. And it's interesting that this would be the choice for her to
talk about what women were really feeling.
Yeah, you're right. It's a very kind of ambiguous work of art. You know, what is Venus thinking? It's really hard to tell. And Mary Richardson at the time was very clear that she'd targeted this work of art because she felt that really the public should be thinking about the damage that was being done to women in the present day. It's interesting because in later years, you know, she wrote her own autobiography and the way that she portrayed Venus
The motivation many decades later was slightly different. When she was in her 70s, I think she said that she'd targeted this work of art because she didn't like the way that men gulped at it. So there was an implication that she didn't like naked female forms being subjected to the male gaze. But when she was making statements at the time, the focus was very much on trying to bring attention to the treatment of imprisoned suffragettes.
Art historian Linda Need writes that the attack was seen as a battle between two types of femininity, quote, the patriarchal ideal, the Venus, and the deviant, the militant suffragist.
Press reaction was incredibly frenzied. The reaction to the attack was very negative, as one might expect. But also it's interesting because the focus is very much on talking about this work of art as if it were a human body, as if Mary Richardson had physically attacked a person rather than a work of art. So the staff at the National Gallery talk about the attack being on the most important part of the portrait, the naked flesh.
Linda Need writes that even though the suffragettes never hurt anyone, the press framed the story as a, quote, sensational murder case. The painting was the perfect, quote, victim. The press nicknamed Mary Richardson Slasher Mary and The Ripper. The Daily Telegraph described it as probably the most wicked act of vandalism ever committed in this or any country.
The other interesting aspect is that there was initially a real focus on the financial damage, so how much the work might be depreciated by the fact that she had actually slashed it, in addition to the kind of embarrassment and shock factor of this happening in such a public place. Mary Richardson has been described as, quote, a viewer who would no longer play the game. After her attack on the Rokeby Venus, several other art attacks followed.
It's happening in London, it happened in Manchester, wherever there are interesting important buildings and local suffrage activists prepare to do it, then no gallery and museum and historic house that's open to the public is safe.
A work called Primavera was attacked and that was another example of a work of art representing a female nude being attacked. And on the same day, so on the 23rd of May 1914, a portrait study of the then King George V was attacked while it was on display at the Scottish Royal Academy in Edinburgh.
So all around the country you're getting reports. In Manchester, several paintings were attacked. There was an attack at the National Gallery again, so that was targeted for a second time. And on that occasion, five old masterworks were attacked. The five paintings were all hanging in the museum's Venetian room. The mummy case at the British Museum was attacked. One suffragette smashed the glass case protecting the mummy. She was arrested.
A portrait of Henry James at the Royal Academy on the 12th of May 1914. A portrait of the Duke of Wellington was attacked. And that's an instance where she could only, because of the height at which the work was hung, she could only get the lower portion of the work to do damage to it. Bryony Millen says museums and art galleries change their tactics. At the British Museum, women could only enter if they had been vouched for by a man.
The National Portrait Gallery closed entirely for two weeks. A less expected precaution was that some of the floors of the gallery, the wooden floors, were treated with a turpentine mixture. And I think that this actually is a direct result of the attack on the Roqueby Venus at the National Gallery because it was said at the time in contemporary press reports that some of the attendant staff had slipped on the highly polished floors when they were trying to chase Mary Richardson down to restrain her.
So I think that in the wake of that attack, the National Portrait Gallery decided that it had to change the floor surface a little bit. So it treated it with a turpentine solution so that it was less slippery in the event that staff had to give chase. Bryony Millen says the gallery started using a stronger type of glass, marketed as hammerproof. The staff started working longer hours, patrolling the museum.
Everybody knows that British people are very focused on their tea. So there were changes to the way that staff worked. And one of the changes that they made is that they had to intensify the way that staff patrolled. And so it meant that afternoon tea was abolished, which I mean, there wasn't anything in the archive in the National Portrait Gallery to show how staff reacted. But I could only imagine that it was quite a controversial decision. Museums and galleries continued receiving updates from the police and
and the police would circulate photos of suffragettes,
Bryony Millen says most of the photos were taken in prison exercise yards without the women's consent. There's an incredibly interesting example. If you look in particular at the surveillance photograph which was circulated to museums and galleries of Evelyn Minesta, who was one of the suffragettes who attacked Manchester Art Gallery. If you look at the photograph of Evelyn Minesta, that's been subjected to what I will term terror.
you know, proto-Photoshop, as it were. So it's been manipulated. The undoctored photograph of her, you can see that her head is being held up. So somebody's got their arm around her throat and is holding, is making her hold her head up so that she can be photographed. And she's still trying, I think, to resist the photographic process because she's closing her eyes and kind of screwing her face up.
But when that photograph was actually cropped and circulated to museums and galleries, the arm has been removed. And instead, there's a scarf which has basically been doctored and placed in the photograph instead of the arm. So that's why I sort of say it's a sort of early Photoshop, because they've tried to manipulate the image to make it less confronting and make it look like she's just wearing an accessory, when in reality, she had someone's arm around her neck so that that photograph could be taken.
Between March and July of 1914, 14 different artworks were attacked in British museums and art galleries. The National Portrait Gallery had not been attacked until July 17th, 1914, when a woman who used the alias Anne Hunt walked into the museum. A staff member noticed her and thought he had also seen her at the museum the day before.
His suspicions were initially aroused by her because he remembered seeing her the day before and rather unflatteringly, he thought that she was an American because, in his words, because of the closeness with which she examined the pictures.
But then he thought that she couldn't possibly be an American because, to his mind, no American would pay the sixpence entry fee for a second day to come on site at the National Portrait Gallery to view the collection. So he followed her as far as he could as she progressed through the gallery. But then he had to take up his post and she continued on. Anne Hunt had served several prison sentences for her activities as a suffragette.
One time she was arrested near the Wimbledon tennis club with some wood and matches. But no one at the National Portrait Gallery knew that. So she went into the east wing, into room 25, where portraits of men of literature of the 19th century were on display. And in that room there were two female art students who were engaged in copying works of art that were on display in that room. Anne Hunt had chosen a portrait of Thomas Carlyle,
a British writer and one of the museum's founders. She waited until a member of staff had left the room
An art student was standing close to her, making sketches. She saw Anne Hunt's hand coming over her shoulder with a meat cleaver in it, and thinking that she was being attacked physically herself, she kind of turned away, and then realising what was happening, she tried to prevent Anne Hunt from making further contact, so she tried to wrestle with her. So a member of staff obviously became aware that something was going on and rushed back into the room and effectively restrained Anne Hunt.
that that's how the attack ended. She had broken the glass and hit the painting at least three times. That was the last attack on a work of art by the suffragettes.
The larger militant campaign actually was wound down in the summer of 1914. And that's largely because on the 4th of August 1914, Britain declared war. So we entered into the First World War. And at that stage, the suffragette leadership basically took stock and decided that they would switch their focus. So the militant campaign was wound down and suffragette prisoners were released and instead...
The suffragette leadership changed their focus to getting women involved with the home front and in encouraging men to join up to be part of the armed forces and contribute to the war effort in that way. When the suffragette Anne Hunt was in court after attacking the portrait of Thomas Carlyle, she gave a speech to defend herself. She made a very inflammatory, shall we say, statement when she was in court.
this portrait will be of greater value and interest because it has been honoured by the attention of a militant. So obviously she was being deliberately provocative, but actually...
Certainly as an archivist, I would say that she had a point because the portrait itself is perhaps of greater historical interest. So the fact that it lived through this period, that it was impacted by the suffragette campaign, means that in a way its story is enriched, that there's a different layer to its history and one that we can know about, interpret and appreciate as the decades have gone on.
Both the Roqueby Venus and the portrait of Thomas Carlyle were restored. Earlier this month, the Roqueby Venus was targeted again, this time by two climate activists protesting new oil and gas projects in the UK. They hit the protective glass covering the painting 10 times with small hammers. A spokesperson for the museum said the painting sustained minimal damage.
One of the activists said, "It's time for deeds, not words." They were both arrested. Criminal is created by Lauren Spohr and me. Nadia Wilson is our senior producer. Katie Bishop is our supervising producer. Our producers are Susanna Robertson, Jackie Sijico, Lily Clark, Lena Sillison, Sam Kim, and Megan Kinane. Our technical director is Rob Byers. Engineering by Russ Henry. Julia Young Harrison fact-checked this episode.
Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at thisiscriminal.com. We're on Facebook and Twitter at Criminal Show and Instagram at criminal underscore podcast. We're also on YouTube at youtube.com slash criminal podcast. Criminal is recorded in the studios of North Carolina Public Radio, WUNC. We're part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Discover more great shows at podcast.voxmedia.com.
I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.