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Abstract
In Holloway Prison in March 1909, in an astonishing act of bodily harm, the suffragette Constance Lytton punctured the membrane of her skin with two needles and a hairpin in order to inscribe the words “Votes for Women” across her skin-body. She used her own skin as the ground cloth for the inscription, and needles, hairpin, skin, body, cloth and pain were all implicated in the act. Instead of using the needle to work cloth, Lytton used it to probe the boundary of her skin-body. Skin became a projected cloth where she materially wrought and discursively wrote the beginnings of a visceral and political suffrage message, demonstrating that her quasi-“cloth-skin-body” was a political site and the locus of trauma.
Whilst Lytton did not leave any tangible evidence of hand-embroidering through cloth in Holloway, several suffragette embroideries worked there between 1911 and 1912 have survived. Hundreds of women were imprisoned at this time as the militant Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) turned to breaking windows and the destruction of property. They faced the threat of the hunger strike and forcible feeding.
In this paper the relationship between trauma and embroidering through the “cloth-skin-body” is explored with reference to six suffragette embroideries. Leaning on the psychoanalytical writings of Didier Anzieu, Nicola Diamond and Stella North, as well as drawing on my own practice as research, I argue that for imprisoned suffragettes embroidering was autobiographic, situated and embodied.
The paper proposes the concept of a “cloth-ego,” which can be psychically projected from the body: hyphenated in its proximity to skin and the body but abstracted and expanded into the world as an embroidered handkerchief, tablecloth, bag or panel. For suffragettes such as the embroiderer Janie Terrero, who registered her own forcible feeding and that of nineteen others on a cloth panel, I argue that embroidering through the cloth-skin-body helped to psychically re-make and repair the self and filter and expel the toxic and invasive “spine in the flesh.”Footnote1
Through the “procedural enactments”Footnote2 of embroidering, I claim that the women processed their somatic and affective experiences. The material practice of embroidering allowed their “absent present”Footnote3 bodies to “speak.” It enabled the body to tell a material story above and beyond the discursive limits of language, beyond the words and images on the cloth. Thus, a story could be articulated before words were found or before feelings were put into consciousness, thought or speech.
Notes
1 The psychoanalyst Laplanche refers to “the spine in the flesh” as an alien and intrusive group of ideas that break into our mental consciousness (Laplanche Citation1985, 24). Nicola Diamond adds to this definition stating that it is a sensory state that lives on in sensations and somatic dysfunction as something alien in our body (Diamond Citation2013, 118).
2 Nicola Diamond refers to “procedural processing and re-enactment as a form of working through and of altering semiotic-sensory set ups” as opposed to linguistic processing (Diamond Citation2013, 205).
3 The psychologist Lisa Blackman refers to the disavowed corporeal body as being the “absent present” body (Blackman Citation2008, 6).
4 Constance Bulwer-Lytton (1869–1923) was the daughter of the first Earl of Lytton, Viceroy of India. She was imprisoned four times including once in Walton Prison, Liverpool under the pseudonym of Jane Warton. She went on hunger strike and was forcibly fed despite her ill health. She was an active member of the WSPU and a paid organiser from June 1910.
5 In the Letters of Constance Lytton (1925), Betty Balfour described Lytton as a clever needlewoman and that she made many of her own clothes (Balfour Citation[1925]2015, 40). Lytton was described as doing needlework for hours undisturbed (Balfour Citation[1925]2015, 88). For Edwardian women and girls, the know-how of embroidering was powerfully reproduced via the family and in school. It was a designated subject in the National Schools Curriculum for all girls in secondary education (Parker [Citation1984]Citation2010, 188). It was a “language” that suffragettes understood (Jones Citation2020b, 66–72). A significant amount of time in an Edwardian woman’s life was devoted to it and it was worked both inside and outside of the prison. There is written evidence of other suffragette prison embroideries have not survived. For instance, Sarah Laughton discovered that her relative, Eileen Casey embroidered a handkerchief in Winson Green Prison, Birmingham in 1914, but it was confiscated from her outgoing washing parcel. A prison report stated that she had embroidered the message “Health A1. Feeding Painless” (Laughton Citation2018).
6 Ref: Janie Terrero panel (1912), The Suffragette Fellowship Collection (hereafter SFC), The Museum of London (hereafter MoL), SFC. MoL. 50.82/1496; shield badge embroidered with “ASC” (1912), SFC. MoL.50.82/1213; small bag embroidered with “Grace” (1912), SFC. MoL. 69.78; small bag worked by Mary Aldham (c.1910–1914) sold by Lockdales Auctioneers, Suffolk to a private collector in September 2015; small bag worked by Mary Ellen Taylor (March, 1912), The Women’s Library, The London School of Economics and Political Science (hereafter TWL), TWL.7/MET; and an embroidered handkerchief of sixty-six suffragette signatures and two sets of initials (March, 1912), The Sussex Archaeological Society, The Priest House Museum, West Hoathly, East Sussex.
Lockdales described the embroidery by Mary Aldham as being worked in Holloway but the date of execution remains uncertain. Aldham was imprisoned five times between 1910 and 1914 (Lockdales Citation2015).
The Museum of London records indicate that the “ASC” shield was given to the SFC and worked by the suffragette Dorothy Bowker in Aylesbury Prison. Home Office files show that the only suffragette in prison in March 1912 with the initials “ASC” was Aileen Connor Smith. Both Bowker and Connor Smith were in Holloway and then transferred to Aylesbury on the 26th March 1912 (The National Archives (hereafter TNA), TNA. HO.220.196 /16; TNA. HO.220.196.144/1195; and TNA. HO.220.196/154). The Terrero panel is the most “readable” of the embroideries. See: Parker Citation[1984]2010; Goggin Citation2009; Wheeler Citation2012; Jones Citation2020a, Citation2020b; Goggin Citation2020a, Citation2020b.
7 On 18th November 1910 a deputation to the House of Commons met with unprecedented police violence. The “battle” continued for six hours and one hundred and fifteen women and four men were arrested (Morrell Citation1981, 33). The day came to be known as “Black Friday”.
8 Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence decided on the WSPU colours for “Women’s Sunday” in Hyde Park, June 1908. They were: white for purity, green for hope and purple for freedom and dignity (Tickner Citation1987, 93).
9 Not all imprisoned suffragettes took part in the hunger strike although there was some expectation to do so (Gliddon Papers, 1912, TWL.7KGG/4/1;TWL.7KGG/1/6).
10 The names listed on the panel are: Janie Terrero, Louise Hatfield, Gladys M. Hazel, May R. Jones, Vera Wentworth, Olivia Jeffcott, Edith Hudson, Hilda Burkitt, Fanny Pease, Mary (Ann) Aldham, Leonora Tyson, Constance Craig, G.H. (Georgina Helen) Grant, Jessie Laing, M. (Maggie, Margaret) Macfarlane, Doreen Allan, Helena de Reya, Alice Green, Lettice Floyd and Isabella Potbury.
11 Terrero Papers, SFC. MoL. File group a. z6084.
12 “Ownership” of the body was a significant issue as referred to in the quote from Mary Leigh later in this text. The prison broad arrow, which marked dress and utensils in prison, signified that the objects were the property of the government (Ash Citation2010, 22–23).
13 Terrero Papers, SFC. MoL.50.87/62.
14 Terrero Papers, SFC. MoL.50.15/13.
15 The case of Leigh’s forcible feeding was taken to court. It was claimed that the Home Secretary and officials of the prison had “resorted to torture” (Rosen [1974]2013, 124). Leigh had been “handcuffed for upwards of thirty hours, her hands fastened behind her during the day and in front with the palms outward at night. Only when the wrists had become intensely painful and swollen were the irons removed” (E.S. Pankhurst [Citation1931]Citation2010, 318–319).
16 In April 1913, the Prisoners’ Temporary Discharge for Ill-Health Act (known as “The Cat and Mouse Act”) was introduced whereby suffragettes weakened by the hunger strike were released under licence and then rearrested to serve out their sentences once their health had improved (Purvis Citation1994, 169).
17 TNA. HO.220.196/597 is a petition of medical practitioners who were against forcible feeding. George Lansbury raised the issue in the House of Commons, TNA. HO. 220.196/412.
18 The psychoanalyst Esther Bick refers to the formation of a “muscular second skin” by analysands, as a substitute for the skin-container function (Bick Citation1968). Textile academic, Claire Pajaczkowska connects “second skin” with textile culture (Pajaczkowska Citation2016, 83). See also Textile: The Journal of Cloth and Culture (2008) 6 (3), which focuses on cloth as “second skin”.
19 Barbara Green discusses the “gaze” and the spectacular framing of suffragette performances in Spectacular Confessions (Green Citation1997, 12, 189). She discusses the gendered gaze and the idea of woman’s “to-be-looked-at-ness” and refers to Laura Mulvey “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (Citation1989) and its revisions.
20 I refer to embroidering as engaging with the surfaces and structure of cloth (Jones Citation2020b, 991).
21 He later extended the list of functions to include maintenance, individuation, intersensoriality, sexualisation, recharging and self-destruction. He re-evaluated the function of self-destruction (Lafrance Citation2013, 26).
22 Gliddon Papers, 1912, TWL.7/KGG/2/1. Gliddon transcribed “embroidery” as “embrodiary”.
23 This term is derived from Freud’s The Uncanny (1919), where the term Heimlich, the opposite of Unheimlich refers to homeliness and hearth, the familiar and comforting (Diamond Citation2013, 184).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Denise Jones
Denise Jones’s research has focused on embroidered textiles as material culture. She completed her PhD “Embroidering and the Body Under Threat: Suffragette embroidered cloths worked in Holloway Prison, 1911–1912” at UCA Farnham in 2020. She holds first degrees in Economic and Social History, and Embroidered Textiles, and an MA in Textiles. Denise Jones, University for the Creative Arts at Farnham, UK [email protected]