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Changing Spaces: art, politics, andidentity in the home studios of theSuffrage AtelierTara Morton

Version of record first published: 24 Aug 2012.

To cite this article: Tara Morton (2012): Changing Spaces: art, politics, and identity in the homestudios of the Suffrage Atelier, Women's History Review, 21:4, 623-637

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Changing Spaces: art, politics, andidentity in the home studios of theSuffrage AtelierTara Morton

The Suffrage Atelier was an artists’ group formed to produce propaganda for thewomen’s suffrage campaign. Its headquarters were located in a series of artists’London homes between 1909 and 1914. This article explores how Atelier artistsused these and other domestic spaces for a broad range of social, artistic, and politicalpractices. It examines how dwellings were altered and decorated, how they were usedfor exhibitions and performance, as well as for propaganda production and suffragelectures. Throughout, the article considers the interplay between the Atelier’s practices,its creative and feminist identities, and domestic space. Gender histories have pro-duced a wealth of scholarship on women’s diverse practices at home, examininghow these challenged bourgeois notions that separated domestic space from thepublic realm of work and politics. This article sets the Atelier’s home studios withinthese debates.

Introduction

In 1909, a group of London-based artists formed the Suffrage Atelier (Atelier) toproduce ‘effective picture propaganda for the suffrage’.1 This included the creationof textile banners, printed posters and postcards. The Atelier produced these using

Tara Morton is a PhD student in the History Department at the University of Warwick. Her currentresearch seeks to reappraise the contribution of the women’s suffrage art society, the Suffrage Atelier,in the wider context of the early twentieth century feminist movement. Her broader interests there-fore include, the suffrage and feminist movement; spatiality in the analysis of women’s communitiesand women’s contribution to visual culture. Correspondence to: Tara Morton, Department ofHistory, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, UK. Email: t.l.morton@warwick.ac.uk

Women’s History Review

Vol. 21, No. 4, September 2012, pp. 623–637

ISSN 0961-2025 (print)/ISSN 1747-583X (online)/12/040623–15 # 2012 Taylor & Francis

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09612025.2012.658177

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traditional handcraft methods that relied upon women’s collaborative work. Itsparticipants ranged from professional artists to amateurs, from illustrators toembroiderers. Unlike the Artists’ Suffrage League (ASL) or the Women’s Socialand Political Union (WSPU), which also produced artistic propaganda, theAtelier paid its artists for their designs, rather than relying on voluntary contri-butions. It did so by selling its art work to the wider suffrage community,paying its artists a percentage. The Atelier’s remunerative scheme was aided byits status as a non-partisan society, although in practice it was aligned with themore militant side of the suffrage movement. The broad spectrum of its activitiesencompassed regular feminist lectures, and occupational and artistic education,alongside suffrage propaganda production. This combination of activities madeit unique to the suffrage movement.2

The Atelier’s diverse practices took place at its headquarters, located in a shiftingseries of its artists’ London homes. Initially, it operated from the homes of artistsand Atelier secretaries, Edith Willis and Agnes Joseph, in Hampstead and Maryle-bone, though little is known about its work there. Subsequently, Joseph placed anadvertisement in the suffragette magazine, Votes for Women, requesting a moresuitable room for the Atelier’s fledgling work.3 In response, artists and siblingsLaurence and Clemence Housman offered their home studio at No.1, PembrokeCottage, Kensington. Whilst Pembroke Cottage remained the Housman’s homeuntil the 1920s, it became the headquarters of the Atelier and the hub of its activi-ties for the following two years.4 During that time the Atelier’s artistic undertak-ings for the campaign grew substantially, and the Housman siblings becameinfluential figures in the Atelier (and Laurence in the wider suffrage movementtoo).5 In 1912, the Atelier relocated its headquarters to larger premises at StanlakeVillas in the neighbouring borough of Hammersmith. This was also the new homeof Joseph and Willis, and the Atelier remained there until its demise, circa 1914.6

This article explores these locations and is concerned with the interplay betweenthe Atelier’s practices, feminist identities, and domestic space.

These are familiar themes to gender and suffrage histories. Numerous scholarshave shown how women engaged in a range of social, economic and feminist prac-tices at home. They have examined how their identities were shaped and nego-tiated in ways that complicated bourgeois ideals of domestic space as ‘private’and distinct from the ‘public’ world of work and politics ascribed to men.7

Within this body of scholarship, authors such as Deborah Cherry, JaniceHelland, and Lynne Walker have examined the nineteenth- and twentieth-century homes of female artists involved in feminist campaigning. Their studieshave shown how women artists reconfigured domestic space by working athome—as well as holding feminist gatherings there and facilitating social net-works within the women’s movement. These networks drew on close spatialrelationships with artists often living near to one another and to centres of fem-inist activity.8 They have also shown how domestic interiors were altered toreinforce feminist and artistic identities. Doors were removed and tables andchairs rearranged to prepare for feminist meetings. Artistic style and feminist crea-tivity were displayed through interior decoration.9 As Walker argues, how the

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spaces of home were employed and occupied by women; who lived nearby andvisited; and how its interior was laid out or decorated, were all central to themaking of women’s identities and their lived experience of domestic spaces.10

This article seeks to locate the Atelier’s home studios within these debates. Suffrageartists were the first to use their artistic skills directly and collaboratively to makefeminist propaganda. Not only did this represent a ‘radical break in the history ofrelations between women artists and the women’s movement’,11 it had new impli-cations for the way women’s organized, artistic, and political practices mightcombine to reconfigure domestic spaces.

‘A house that exactly suited us’: politics and propaganda at Pembroke Cottage

Artist brother and sister Laurence and Clemence Housman moved into No. 1Pembroke Cottage, Kensington, in 1901 (see Figure 1).12 Kensington alreadyhad a long-standing and vibrant artistic reputation. Along with the neighbouringborough of Chelsea, it had attracted renowned and struggling artists since themid-nineteenth century.13 Laurence recalled that ‘for the first time we had ahome in London really to our liking, with which we could feel intimate’. It was,in his view, ‘a house that exactly suited us and made us a good deal more sociablethan we had ever been before’.14

Kensington was also a hive of suffrage activity, with a considerable feminist ped-igree.15 The Kensington Society, ‘a catalyst for the birth of the suffrage movement’,was formed there in the mid-1860s. By the early twentieth century, its successor,

Figure 1 1 Pembroke Cottage, Kensington.

Source: Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea.

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the law-abiding National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), had twobranches there. The militant suffrage organization, the WSPU, also had a branchand shop in Kensington.16 Unsurprisingly, the Housmans’ sociability increasinglyrevolved around suffrage campaigning, and they became active supporters of theWSPU in 1908. In turn, Pembroke Cottage was intimately bound with the siblings’broader and deepening commitment to the cause. The cottage was a ‘hub’ of fem-inist activity. The WSPU’s branch secretary, Louise Eates, spent some time living atthe cottage in 1908 and a WSPU banner was made there.17 By late 1910, the Atelierbased its headquarters there.18 Shortly afterwards, the cottage was embroiled incivil protest when suffragettes mounted a campaign to illegally boycott the 1911census. On census night, Laurence Housman harboured four women there whorefused to give their details to government officials ‘as a protest against their exclu-sion from the franchise’.19 Suffragettes also travelled from different parts of thecountry to stay at the cottage. Its London location allowed them to participatein militant acts in the capital. As Laurence remembered, ‘one friend came downfrom the North of England to reside with us for the necessary night or two . . .

She took her little bag of stones with her, returning at midnight with a cry of,“I’ve done it!”’20

Pembroke Cottage, like all built space, created ‘insides and outsides, and cat-egories of ‘inhabitants’, ‘visitors’, and ‘strangers’, structuring social relations.21

From the outside, to use Laurence Housman’s words, the cottage looked ‘notmuch bigger than a doll’s house’.22 However, though the rooms were relativelysmall, its internal space was flexible, with ‘the main room on the ground floorextending through double doors from front to back, giving it a large openaspect despite its external proportions’.23 It had a workshop in an outbuildingat the bottom of the garden, which had been converted into a studio, and thisbecame the official ‘home’ of the Suffrage Atelier.24 Nevertheless, suffrage craftwork was produced for the campaign from its premises as a whole. ClemenceHousman, an exemplary embroiderer, stitched Atelier banners in the Cottage.Laurence wrote how she ‘wore herself out’ sitting ‘on a floor cushion [in thecottage] most of the day doing needlework’ for the cause.25 Clemence, also ahighly regarded illustrator, kept her wood engraving materials and other toolsconnected with her profession at hand and on display in the house. Other suffrageobjects adorned the cottage like ‘Christmas decorations’.26 Laurence’s descriptionof the cottage (above)—his shift between ‘intimate home’ and ‘suitable house’—illustrates the ways in which this work complicated the concept of the space ofhome. The cottage was house and home, both imaginative and functional space.27

The Atelier engaged in various activities at the cottage site that combined thedevelopment of women’s artistic skills with the shaping of their suffrage identities.It ran a number of educational and creative classes alongside its suffrage banner-making and design work. Design and cartoon clubs ran there in the evenings,making them accessible to those with daytime occupations.28 Together with theAtelier’s remunerative scheme, this may have encouraged broader class partici-pation (see below). Instruction in life sketching was provided, where well-known suffragists acted as sitters whenever possible.29 Invited speakers lectured

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on various subjects, encouraging women to explore their feminist identities, suchas public speaking and elocution lessons, as well women’s travel and writing.30

Much of the Atelier’s time at the cottage was spent making textile banners forsuffrage rallies and processions, which were at their height during the Atelier’s resi-dence there.31 A number of Atelier banners were designed by Laurence Housman,while his sister Clemence became ‘chief worker’, likely heading the Atelier team, asbanner work was often collaborative.32 Working cooperatively on banners meantthat new relationships could be forged between women based upon a commonal-ity of interests in craft and the suffrage, rather than on normative family relations.The practice of embroidery and needlework was associated with women’s domes-ticity and their place in the home, but this notion was subverted at the cottagewhere it was used to create feminist propaganda. Suffrage banners representedwomen’s material and symbolic transgression of the cultural divides betweenpublic and private spaces. Executed in a domestic context and later carriedthrough the streets, the hand sewn, richly coloured banners brought to ‘masculinepublic life’ a ‘trooping of the feminine’. They embodied in material form women’sreclamation of the public arena.33 In this sense, as Rosika Parker and Lisa Ticknerhave argued, suffrage banners entwined women’s domestic and political practices,and their private and public identities.34

Through its poster and printing work, the Atelier set about improving women’scommercial prospects in the design and printing trades. The printing trade was aprofession from which women had been progressively excluded for centuries, andthis remained the case in the early twentieth century.35 The suffrage press reportedthat the Atelier intended to meet this discrimination head-on, by training womento make designs suitable for reproduction and familiarizing them with the pro-cesses involved in printing them.36 The Atelier’s commitment to traditionalmethods meant that its designs were reproduced using a hand operated printingpress, which it acquired in 1910.37 The Atelier began a burgeoning business train-ing women in the ‘hands-on’ processes of commercial design and manual printingtechniques. Such was the Atelier’s commitment to bolstering women’s commercialprospects that, while its art work for the cause was produced using traditionalmethods, this was set aside during training classes, when its artists were alsoinstructed in the latest commercial techniques.38 Despite being an egalitariansociety that in principle welcomed men, the Atelier was explicit in stating thatall of its printing work was exclusively carried out by its female members.39

Thus, its practices created a distinctly gendered space where women resisted occu-pational exclusion. The Vote was unequivocal in stating that its practices chal-lenged the ‘definite campaign on foot to drive women out of the printing trades’.40

The Atelier’s commitment to pay its artists likely combined with its feministdynamic to encourage broader class participation. The scope of the Atelier’s remu-nerative scheme is uncertain, but it is probable that it sold its artists’ embroideredcraft items, such as curtains, mantle and book covers, as well as paying them a per-centage on the number of posters and postcards it reproduced (see the sectionbelow on domestic exhibitions). Payment on this range of items must haveproved attractive to professionals who wished to supplement their income, but

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also to amateurs, who were able to train with the Atelier and engage in an econ-omically productive hobby whilst contributing to the suffrage cause.41 The nucleusof Atelier artists was middle class, though most were ‘working’ designers andembroiderers, who generated their own often precarious incomes. Lynne Walkerhas rightly argued that it was professional, middle-class women who were the ben-eficiaries of most organized female art or craft schemes.42 However, Atelierbanners show signs of amateur as well as professional needlework, and the ‘unso-phisticated’ design of a number of its black and white posters and postcards has ledLisa Tickner to conclude that these were the work of amateur hands.43 Thesuffrage press reported that ‘nimble fingered ladies of all classes’—and abil-ities—regularly participated in banner making for the cause, and there is noreason to assume their contribution was limited to this activity.44

In summary, Pembroke Cottage acted as a hub for suffragists wishing to honetheir artistic skills and to shape and declare publicly their feminist subjectivities.The Atelier’s cooperative propaganda work created space for women to buildnew communities based upon their commonality of interests, as well as tofurther their employment prospects. As Myriam Boussahba-Bravard has arguedfor other suffrage sites and spaces, the Atelier’s practices at the cottage, which itcontinued at Stanlake Villas, represented private yet ‘parallel, public space’,‘where all the propaganda and debates were about women’.45

‘A pleasing decoration to any room’: domestic exhibitions

The Atelier’s remunerative scheme meant that, in order to pay its artists anddesigners, it needed to sell its art and craft products to the wider suffrage commu-nity. Consequently, it held regular exhibitions at its home studios. Holding exhibi-tions at home was familiar to women artists, but the Atelier’s collective display offeminist artwork in a domestic context represented something more unusual.Homes became feminist galleries. Early exhibitions took place at the Atelier’s firstheadquarters, Edith Willis’ home, in Hampstead. This included a separate displayof ‘sketches’ by artist and honorary secretary Agnes Joseph.46 Exhibitions continuedat Pembroke Cottage and later at Stanlake Villas, where they were held on the lastThursday of every month.47 Among the items on display were ‘pictorial postcards,educational posters and art needlework’. Press reports indicate that not all theexhibited work was suffrage related: ‘A one woman show of clever water coloursand fine lithographs by Miss Louise Jacobs’ filled one of the rooms at the Villas.This was contrasted with the downstairs area of the house where, ‘suffrage postersand postcards of the Atelier’s own publication were on sale’ (my italics), suggestingartists’ non-suffrage work may have been sold via Atelier exhibitions.48 This is con-sistent with the Atelier’s educational initiatives, which sought to promote womenartists’ independent commercial success alongside the suffrage cause. It mightalso explain the earlier, separate display of Joseph’s ‘sketches’ in Hampstead.

Exhibiting its artists’ work domestically was particularly important to theAtelier. While its banners and posters were at their most visible in the challengingmilieu of suffrage street parades, the Atelier hoped for its work to adorn the home.

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It was keen to report that its crafts ‘would make a pleasing decoration to anyroom’.49 Suffrage press reports note the display of mantel covers, curtains, andbook covers, as well as posters and paintings, at Atelier exhibitions.50 This testifiesto the diversity of ‘domestic’ items made by the Atelier and the broad range ofartistic products it sold. Home exhibitions provided an opportunity for potentialcustomers to mull over Atelier art and craft work in surroundings conducive tomaking a purchase. This increased potential sales and thereby its artists’ potentialincome. The importance of domestic exhibitions was clear in the Atelier’s consti-tution, written in 1909, where it urged its supporters to lend their ‘drawing rooms’as well as studios for exhibitions.51 Artist Louise Jopling-Rowe was among thosewho responded to this request. Rowe was a pioneering feminist artist whoenjoyed considerable commercial success in the late nineteenth century.52 Shedid not contribute artistically to the Atelier but was a keen supporter of itswork. Rowe was able to attract a wealthy, fashionable clientele to her home andhad frequently been cited in the general press for her ‘studio parties [that] arealways interesting [as]. . . she knows so many people who are always somebodyin literature and art’.53 Atelier exhibitions held at her Kensington home werereported in the suffrage press. On one occasion, it was announced that followingthe display of Atelier art work there, ‘several orders were taken by Atelier members’and ‘funds for carrying on this important work’ were raised.54

The true extent to which Atelier friends and supporters lent their homes forexhibitions is difficult to measure, as surviving accounts of these events are infre-quent. However, the location of Rowe’s home, together with press reports of otherexhibitions, suggests that the topology may have been a feature in sustaining theAtelier’s exhibitory practices (see Figure 2).

For example, artist Catherine Courtauld hosted an early exhibition when theAtelier was based in Hampstead, just a few minutes’ walk from her homestudio.55 When the Atelier relocated to Kensington, Louise Jopling-Roweopened her home in Pembroke Gardens for exhibitions. As the name suggests,Rowe’s house was around the corner from the Atelier’s home at PembrokeCottage.56 When finally the Atelier moved its headquarters to Stanlake Villas inHammersmith in 1912, it held supplementary exhibitions of its work in thehome studio of Mrs Mary Esther Greenhill.57 Greenhill was a sixty-six-year-oldcommercial portrait artist and animal painter, who lived just a few doors awayfrom the Villas in Abdale Road.58

There is nothing in the suffrage press or elsewhere to suggest that Greenhill con-tributed artistically to the Atelier, nor that either she or Jopling Rowe were associ-ated with the group prior to becoming its neighbours—indicating that the Ateliermay have formed new relationships with other sympathetic women artists throughlocal ‘encounters’ as it relocated its headquarters. Where Atelier practicesremained close at hand, supporting them, neighbourly exhibitions may have con-tinued. For example, the Atelier was based at Stanlake Villas in 1912, but, as Atelierwork continued unofficially at Pembroke Cottage, Rowe continued to host itsexhibitions at her home in Pembroke Gardens.59 Therefore, domestic exhibitionscontributed to overlapping practices that interlinked artists’ homes in Kensington

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and Hammersmith, while being based nevertheless on close proximity. Thisconcurs with spatial studies of women’s artistic and feminist communities,which acknowledge that whilst networks are not geographically bound, propin-quity nevertheless helps create and sustain certain support systems betweenthose with shared interests. This was especially true for feminist communitieswhose interests were culturally marginalized.60

‘The telling of fairy stories’: ritual, decoration, and performance at the Villas

The Atelier’s headquarters at Stanlake Villas, and the new home of unmarriedcompanions, artists, and Atelier secretaries, Agnes Joseph and Edith Willis, wasa larger property than Pembroke Cottage. It was set over four floors and the suf-frage press reported that it gave the Atelier ‘greater scope for [its] energies’.61 Thoseenergies encompassed various forms of self expression at the Villas in which ritual,

Figure 2. Map of Hampstead, Kensington and Hammersmith, London, 1910–1912.

Source: Author.

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decoration, and performance played an integral role. Barbara Green, Lisa Tickner,and Katherine Cockin among others, have discussed how ritual and perform-ance—such as suffrage street parades, theatrical plays and acts of militancy—enabled campaigners collectively to reconfigure public spaces with new feministmeanings, and to experiment with their subjective identities.62 Meanwhile,authors such as Elizabeth Crawford, Lynne Walker, and Hilde Heyden haveshown how the decoration and alteration of the domestic interior reinforcedwomen’s creative and political identities. Feminist artists and cousins Agnes andRhoda Garrett directly utilized the domestic space to represent their style andstatus as interior designers.63 Suffrage campaigner Emmeline Pankhurst alteredand decorated her home interior, rearranging tables and chairs and hanging fem-inist banners, when meetings took place.64 Women’s wider knowledge and beliefsabout the world were articulated and shared with others through the display ofpersonal objects imbued with cultural or political significance.65 These interactingdynamics functioned as generative processes, allowing to women to create andunderstand their identities in relation to others, as well as to reconfigure culturallyinscribed meanings of private and public spaces.66

Some rituals the Atelier appropriated, such as ‘taking tea’, were common to mostsuffrage ‘at homes’ and were used to subvert existing cultural assertions aboutidentity and space. 67 On the one hand, tea provided an affirmation of femininityand domesticity (amongst the middle classes, at any rate) that conformed to cul-tural notions of the feminized domestic interior. On the other, it encouraged newencounters and conversations between women at suffrage gatherings following lec-tures and meetings. Paradoxically, taking tea was therefore part of a public ritualthat continued women’s historical subversion of traditional notions of domesticculture as ‘private’. Moreover, the blending of personal and political experiencesover tea was often cited in recruiting new members to the cause. It facilitatedan informal space, which helped foster a sense of shared identity and solidarityamongst suffragists that Lisa Kelly argues was irrespective of class.68 During anAtelier ‘at home’ at the Villas, it was reported that ‘tea was served which includedhome-made cakes which were voted by all to be delicious’—an affirmation of itsmembers’ domestic skills. Moreover, it was also reported that ‘everyone doubted ifthe anti-[suffragists], with all their time spent at home, could have made thembetter’.69 Thus, the Atelier’s ‘delicious’ home-made cakes also served as a riposteto widespread, anti-suffrage propaganda, which asserted that spending time‘outside’ the home, made suffragists, and by implication, all working women,domestically incompetent. Therefore, through the ritual of ‘tea’ the Atelier wasable to subvert—by the double gesture of domestic assimilation and displace-ment—the identities culturally imposed upon them.70

Great attention was paid to the Atelier’s alteration of the Villas for home events.Press reports indicate that its interior was ‘transformed’.71 Art and craft work wasdivided by content between rooms that were distinctly decorated, separating anddefining its interior spaces. This elicited different responses from women movingthrough those rooms, enabling identities to be shared or experimented with indifferent ways. For example, an upstairs room at the Villas ‘displayed the

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needlework of Mrs Gosling’. It had been decorated with ‘flowers from the garden’of a suffragette, Miss Bennett, who had recently been imprisoned for acts of mili-tancy.72 Observing the flowers at the Villas prompted visitors to reflect upon ‘whata solace this garden must have been to her during her terms of imprisonment’.73

Therefore, the flowers as objects, helped forge empathic connections betweenwomen, encouraging them to imagine or to identify with Bennett’s private suffer-ings in prison and her ‘solace’ in remembrances of her garden. This supportsHeyden’s view that objects invested with memories or personal significance arecapable of articulating identities and eliciting emotional bonds.74

Two further upstairs rooms, probably attic rooms, were used to display Ateliercraft items. One, ‘a quaint little upstairs room was turned into a market place. . . itssloping roof and alcoves presented an old world air which lent itself to the tellingof fairy stories from Hans Anderson’. These were ‘cleverly rendered by MissRaleigh’.75 The presentation of the room, and the telling of fairy stories withinit, transformed the space into a domestic theatre. This performative theme waslikely shaped by the Atelier’s close connections to the theatrical community. Col-lectively, the Atelier experimented with performance in the public arena as early as1910. That year it ‘put on’ two new one-act plays by Laurence Housman at theRoyal Court Theatre, London. The show included a short comedy by RoseMathews of ‘The Play Actors’ group.76 It was also supplemented by other enter-tainments during the interval including ‘movement’ and dance arranged by theAtelier embroiderer Mildred Statham together with suffragist and Swedishgymnastics teacher, Miss Olive Mary Lett.77

Theatre and performance were integral to the identities of many individualAtelier members. Edith Craig was an Atelier supporter and also belonged to the suf-frage organization the Actresses’ Franchise League. She directed and producedmultiple suffrage plays as well as designing sets and costumes for suffrage proces-sions and parades. Craig was an active member of several significant theatresocieties producing experimental drama in London, including the Stage Societyand the Pioneer Players, to which Laurence Housman and Atelier artist PamelaColman Smith were also affiliated.78 Smith designed miniature as well as full-sizestage sets and costumes for suffrage and non-suffrage plays, and privately for herhome. Born in London, she later spent time in America and Jamaica, where shehad become fascinated by fairy tales and folklore. Known as ‘Pixie’, she hadwritten and published several folk stories, the ‘Tales of Annancy’, about an unscru-pulous spider from the West Indies. An amateur actress, Smith retold these storieson numerous occasions, reciting them at public exhibitions and at galleries.79

Katharine Cockin has argued that the constant traffic between the theatre’s per-forming artists and other suffrage art organizations produced a dynamic betweenwomen, which was ‘unconventional’.80 This unorthodoxy was embodied in theAtelier’s transformation of the Villas, which became a ‘symbolic container’ forthe creative identities of its inhabitants.81 Decoration and performance at theVillas represented a spatial interactivity between the Atelier’s home studios andpublic theatre performances that complicated cultural boundaries betweenprivate and public space. Whilst set in the domestic dwelling, its artistic displays

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and performances nevertheless encouraged women to solicit the public gaze and toexperiment with alternative identities. This experimentation challenged culturalroles prescribed to them in the domestic context and consequently acted as a‘direct threat to the particularised conventional notion of domestic space’.82

Conclusion

The Atelier’s home studios functioned as private dwellings and as public embodi-ments of the Atelier’s creative subjectivities, as well as sites of its feminist agency.Domestic spaces were divided, laid out, and changed for varying practices atdifferent times. They were intimate spaces to those that lived there, but theyalso served as cooperative hubs for feminist and artistic activities. They servedas craft workshops and studios producing feminist propaganda; facilitatedwomen’s creative and occupational training; and became political meetingspaces and lecture venues, as well as sites of civil disobedience. Home interiorsbecame feminist galleries, interconnecting the spaces of other artists’ homesthrough domestic exhibitions; moreover, what was sold augmented women’sincomes. They also became domestic theatres in which ritual, decoration, and per-formance elicited experiment, communal identities, and emotional bonds. Thesecombined practices made the changing spaces of the Atelier’s home studiosuniquely complex.

Notes

[1] Common Cause (24 June 1909), p. 144; L. Tickner (1989) The Spectacle of Women:imagery of the suffrage campaign, 1907–1914 (London: Chatto & Windus), p. 20.

[2] The Atelier was closely affiliated to the Women’s Freedom League and the WSPU.For general information on the Atelier, see The Suffrage Atelier Papers, Constitutionand Addresses (CA), circa 1909, Women’s Library (WL) Records of the FawcettSociety and its Predecessors (RFSP), Box No 2/LSW/154/7; Tickner, Spectacle;E. Crawford (1999) The Women’s Suffrage Movement: a reference guide 1866–1928(London: UCL Press).

[3] Votes for Women, 23 July 1909, p. 962.[4] The Housmans officially left Pembroke Cottages in 1924, although they spent less

and less time there once they began establishing their new home in Street, Somerset:Housman Papers, Street Library, Somerset. See also E. Oakley (2009) InseparableSiblings: a portrait of Laurence and Clemence Housman (Warwickshire: BrewinBooks), p. 109. Their brother was the famous scholar and poet A.E. Housman.

[5] Clemence was a member of the WSPU and a founding and active member of theWomen’s Tax Resistance League. She was arrested on the 29 September 1911 andimprisoned in Holloway for failure to pay Inhabited House Duty Tax, and wasreleased on 6 October. See The Standard (London) 30 Sept. 1911. Laurence wasaffiliated to the WSPU, the Men’s league for Women’s Suffrage, and wrote a signifi-cant number of suffrage plays, dramas, and poems. The siblings’ true contribution tothe campaign has only begun to emerge in recent years. See Oakley, Inseparable Sib-lings; L. Hart (2005) Laurence Housman: a subject in search of a biographer,Housman Society Journal, 31, pp. 15–36; S. Stanley Holton (1997) Manliness andMilitancy: the political protest of male suffragists and the gendering of the suffrage

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identity, in A. John & C. Eustance, The Men’s Share?: masculinities, male support, andwomen’s suffrage in Britain, 1890–1920 (London: Routledge), pp. 110–134;S. Stanley Holton (1996) Suffrage Days: stories from the women’s suffrage movement(London: Routledge).

[6] Home studio addresses have been obtained from a variety of sources including, TheSuffrage Atelier Papers, CA, RFSP, Box No 2/LSW/154/7; L. Tickner, Spectacle;Crawford The Women’s Suffrage Movement; 1911 census records, National ArchiveUK (NA); regional record offices; Post Office Directories; suffrage press.

[7] E. Chalus (2000) Elite Women, Social Politics, and the Political World of Late Eight-eenth-Century England, The Historical Journal, 43(3) pp. 669–697; K. Gleadle(2009) Borderline Citizens: women, gender and political culture in Britain, 1815-1867 (Oxford: Oxford University Press); J. Tosh (1996) New Men? The BourgeoisCult of Home, History Today, 46(12), pp. 9–16; S. Hanson & G. Pratt (1995)Gender, Work and Space (London: Routledge); H. Heynen & G. Baydar (2005)(Eds) Negotiating Domesticity: spatial productions of gender in modern architecture(London: Routledge); A. Rappaport (1995) A Critical Look at the Concept of‘Home’, in D. Benjamin (Ed.) The Home: interpretations, meanings and environments(Aldershot: Avebury), pp. 25–53.

[8] D. Cherry & J. Helland (Eds) (2006) Local/Global: women artists in the nineteenthcentury (London: Ashgate); D. Cherry (2000) Beyond the Frame: feminism andvisual culture, Britain 1850–1900 (London: Routledge); D. Cherry (1993) PaintingWomen: Victorian women artists (London: Routledge); Walker (2006) Locating theGlobal/Rethinking the Local: suffrage politics, architecture, and space, Women’sStudies Quarterly, 34(1/2), pp. 174–196; and Walker (2006) Women Patron-Builders in Britain: identity, difference, and memory in spatial and materialculture, in D. Cherry & J. Helland, Local/Global, pp. 121–136.

[9] Walker, ‘Locating the Global’.[10] Walker, ‘Women Patron-Builders in Britain’.[11] Cherry, Painting Women, p. 94.[12] My thanks to the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea for permission to repro-

duce this photograph.[13] The Cottage was taken over by the Housmans from the artist William Rothenstein.

Renowned local artists in Kensington and Chelsea included J. W. M. Turner, JamesMcNeil Whistler, Walter Sickert, and the arts and crafts artists, William and Evelynde Morgan. See G. Walkley (1994) Artists’ Houses in London, 1764–1914 (Aldershot:Scolar).

[14] Housman (1937) The Unexpected Years (London: Jonathan Cape), pp. 195, 200.[15] Crawford, The Women’s Suffrage Movement; J. Liddington & T. Morton (2011)

Walking with Women’s Suffrage in Kensington and Chelsea, Herstoria, 8(Spring),pp. 30–39.

[16] Ibid.[17] Votes for Women, 11 June 1908, pp. 229–230.[18] Votes for Women, 23 July 1909, p. 962.[19] Suffragettes evaded the census by leaving their homes on census night or by refusing

to give their details to government officials on the premise of ‘no votes, no infor-mation’. See, J. Liddington & E. Crawford (2011) ‘Women do not count, neithershall they be counted’: suffrage, citizenship and the battle for the 1911 Census,History Workshop Journal, Issue 71(Spring), pp. 98–127; Clemence Housman‘evaded’ the census, leaving the cottage and hiding out at another property inDorset on census night. See Oakley, Inseparable Siblings, p. 81; for the PembrokeCottage census schedule, see Liddington & Morton, Walking with Women’s Suffrage,p. 33.

[20] Housman, Unexpected, p. 268.

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[21] T. Markus (2002) Is there a Built Form for Non-Patriarchal Utopias?, inA. Bingaman, L. Sanders & R. Zorach (Eds) Embodied Utopias: gender, socialchange and the modern metropolis (London: Routledge), pp. 15–33; here, p.17.

[22] Housman, Unexpected, p. 194.[23] Ibid, pp. 194–195.[24] Ibid, p. 274.[25] Clemence sat on the floor because she often had ‘leg trouble’. Letter from Laurence

Housman to Sara Clark, 6 Dec (no year; likely 1911/1912); Housman Papers.[26] Oakley, Inseparable Siblings, p. 92.[27] Housman, Unexpected, pp. 195, 200; Walker, ‘Women Patron-Builders’, p. 122.[28] Women’s Franchise, 8 July 1909, p. 670.[29] Votes for Women, 1 April 1910, p. 430; Housman, Unexpected, p. 192.[30] The Vote, 9 Nov. 1912, p. 31.[31] Tickner, Spectacle.[32] Housman, Unexpected, p. 274.[33] M. Lowndes (1909) On Banners and Banner Making, pp. 1–2; WL archives, Ref:

234163.3; Votes for Women, 11 June 1908, pp. 229–230.[34] L. Tickner (2004) Banners and Banner-Making, in J. M Przyblyski & V.R Schwartz

(Eds) The Nineteenth Century Visual Culture Reader (London: Routledge),pp. 341–347; R. Parker (1996) The Subversive Stitch: embroidery and the makingof the feminine (London: Women’s Press).

[35] F. Hunt (1983) The London Trade in the Printing and Binding of Books: an experi-ence in exclusion, dilution, and de-skilling for women workers, Women’s StudiesInternational Forum, 6(5), pp. 517–524; D. Crowley & P. Jobling (1996) GraphicDesign: reproduction and representation since 1800 (Manchester: Manchester Univer-sity Press).

[36] The Vote, 13 April 1912, p. 294.[37] The Common Cause, 27 Oct. 1910, p. 467.[38] The Vote, 13 April 1912, p. 294; Tickner, Spectacle, pp. 21, 25.[39] The Vote, 5 Oct. 1912, p. 401.[40] The Vote, 13 April 1912, p. 294.[41] A. Myzelev (2009) Craft Revival in Haslemere: she who weaves. . ., Women’s History

Review, 18(4), pp. 597–618.[42] L. Walker (1989) The Arts and Crafts Alternative, in J. Attfield & P. Kirkham (Eds) A

View from the Interior: feminism, women and design (London: The Women’s Press),pp. 163–175.

[43] Oakley, Inseparable, pp. 75–76. Tickner, Spectacle, pp. 250–252 et passim.[44] NUWSS circular, Press Reports on Banners, cited in L. Tickner, Spectacle, p. 71.[45] M. Boussahba-Bravard (Ed.) (2007) Suffrage outside Suffragism: women’s vote in

Britain, 1880–1914 (London: Palgrave), p. 6.[46] The Suffrage Atelier Papers, CA, RFSP.[47] The Common Cause, 27 Oct. 1910, p. 457; The Vote, 9 Nov. 1912, p. 31.[48] The Vote, 9 Nov. 1912, p. 31.[49] The Vote, 29 June 1912, p. 177.[50] The Vote, 10 Aug. 1912. p. 281.[51] Suffrage Atelier Papers, CA, RFSP; reproduced in part in Tickner, Spectacle, p. 241.[52] Meaghan E. Clarke, ‘Jopling, Louise Jane (1843–1933)’, Oxford Dictionary of

National Biography (online), Oxford University Press, 2004. http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/67590, accessed 21 Oct. 2011; W. Slatkin (1993) TheVoices of Women Artists (California: University of Redlands).

[53] Illustrated London News, Ladies Column, 12 April 1890, p. 474; Cherry, PaintingWomen, p. 89.

[54] The Vote, 10 Aug. 1912, p. 281.

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[55] Votes for Women, 20 June 1909, p. 381.[56] The Vote, 10 Aug.t 1912, p. 281.[57] The Vote, 7 Dec. 1912, p. 107.[58] Census returns 1891, RG12/42 p.23; 1901, RG13/42 p.22 and 1911, RG14/213 sch

183 (NA).[59] The Vote, 14 Oct. 1912, p. 211.[60] Liddington & Morton, ‘Walking with Women’s Suffrage’; N. Laurie, C. Dwyer,

S. Holloway & F. Smith (1999) Geographies of New Femininities (Essex: Longman);A. Escobar & W. Harcourt (2005) Women and the Politics of Place (Bloomfield:Kumarian Press); S. Deutsch (2000) Women and the City: gender, space and powerin Boston, 1870–1940 (Oxford: Oxford University Press); S. Benstock (1986)Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 1900–1940 (Texas: University of Texas Press);L. Walker (2001) Home and Away: the feminist remapping of public and privatespace in Victorian London, in I. Bordain et al. (Eds), The Unknown City: contestingarchitecture and social space (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), pp. 296–311; L. Walker(1995) Vistas of Pleasure: women consumers of urban space in the West End ofLondon, 1850–1900, in C. Campbell Orr (Ed.), Women in the Victorian Art World(Manchester: Manchester University Press), pp. 70–85.

[61] The Vote, 20 April 1913, p. 17.[62] Tickner, Spectacle; B. Green, (1997) Spectacular Confessions: autobiography, perfor-

mative activism, and the sites of suffrage 1905–1938 (London: Macmillan Press);K. Cockin (2001) Women and Theatre in the Age of Suffrage: the Pioneer Players,1911–1925 (Hampshire: Palgrave).

[63] E. Crawford (2002), Enterprising Women: the Garretts and their circle (London:Francis Boule); also, L. Campbell (2003) Questions of Identity: women, architectureand the Aesthetic Movement’, in Women’s Places: architecture and design (London:Routledge), pp. 1–21.

[64] Walker, Local/Global.[65] H. Heynen (2005) Modernity and Domesticity: tensions and contradictions, in

Heynen & Baydar (Eds) Negotiating Domesticity, pp. 20–23; also J. Neiswander(2008) The Cosmopolitan Interior: liberalism and the British home, 1870–1914 (Con-necticut: Yale University Press); Walker, ‘Women Patron-Builders’; B. Elliott &J. Wallace (1994) Women Artists and Writers: modernist (im)positions (London:Routledge).

[66] E. Comentale (2001) Thesmophoria: suffragettes, sympathetic magic, and H.D’. sRitual Poetics, Modernism/modernity, 8(3), pp. 471–492.

[67] J. Sewell (2008) Tea and Suffrage, Food, Culture and Society: an international journalof multidisciplinary research, 11(4), pp. 487–508; J. E. Fromer (2008) DeeplyIndebted to the Tea-Plant: representations of English national identity in Victorianhistories of tea, Victorian Literature and Culture, 36, pp. 531–547.

[68] L. M. Kelly (2009) The Politics of Tea and Theatre: how women’s suffrage groups usedtea and theatre to influence working and middle class women to become politicallyactive (MFA thesis, Virginia Commonwealth University).

[69] The Vote, 5 Oct. 1912, p. 401.[70] Heynen, ‘Modernity and Domesticity’, p. 23.[71] The Vote, 5 Oct. 1912, p. 401.[72] This was probably Sarah Bennett an active member of the WSPU and the WFL. She

had recently been released from prison when the Atelier event took place. See Craw-ford, The Women’s Suffrage Movement.

[73] The Vote, 5 Oct. 1912, p. 401.[74] Heynen, ‘Modernity and Domesticity’, pp. 20–23.[75] Ibid.[76] The Times, 28 May 1910, p.12; Cockcroft & Croft, Art, Theatre and Women’s Suffrage.

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[77] The Times, 28 May 1910, p.12; Olive Mary Lett lived with Helen Ogston by then asuffrage organizer for the New Constitutional Society for Women’s Suffrage. Shehad formerly been a speaker for the WSPU and had courted controversy by wieldinga whip at a meeting in the Albert Hall where Lloyd George was principal speaker. See1911 census return RG14/2145 sch 112, and Crawford, The Women’s Suffrage Move-ment. Mildred Statham participated in Atelier exhibitions and is listed as an embroi-derer in the Post Office London Directory. See POLD (1915) part II p. 1251, andT. Morton, The Suffrage Atelier (PhD thesis, University of Warwick, forthcoming).

[78] L. Tickner, Spectacle, p. 24; K. Cockin (1998) Edith Craig: dramatic lives (London:Cassell); Cockin, Women and Theatre in the Age of Suffrage.

[79] The Times, 4 Feb. 1908, p. 9; I thank Melinda Parsons of Neumann University, theleading authority on Smith, for information from her biography Pamela ColmanSmith: “primitivism,” visionary synaesthesia, and social reform (forthcoming).

[80] Cockin, Edith Craig, p. 85.[81] D. Miller (2001) Behind Closed Doors, in D. Miller (Ed.) Home Possessions: material

culture behind closed doors (Oxford: Basil Blackwell), p. 12.[82] A. L. Ackerman (1999) Theatre and the Private Sphere in the Fiction of Louisa May

Alcott, in I. Bryden & J. Floyd (Eds) Domestic Space: reading the nineteenth centuryinterior (Manchester: Manchester University Press), p. 164; G. Pollock (2006) LouiseAbbema’s Lunch and Alfred Steven’s Studio: theatricality, feminine subjectivity andspace around Sarah Bernhardt, Paris, 1877–1888, in Cherry & Helland (Eds),Local/Global, pp. 99–121; D. Keates & J. W. Scott (Eds) (2004) Going Public: femin-ism and the shifting boundaries of the private sphere (Illinois: University of IllinoisPress).

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