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Suffragette-defaced Penny

Edward VII penny, from England

AD 1903–1918

Our history has now reached the beginning of the twentieth century. Previously, we have been largely in a world of things that were made, commissioned, or owned by men. This object has on it the image of a king, but this particular example has been appropriated by women – disfigured by a slogan as an act of female protest against the laws of the state. It is a British penny with King Edward VII in elegant profile, but his image has been defaced in what was then a criminal act. Stamped all over the king’s head in crude capitals are the words VOTES FOR WOMEN. This suffragette coin stands for all those who fought for the right to vote. Recent objects have been about nineteenth-century mass production and mass consumption – this one is about the rise of mass political engagement.

Power is usually not willingly given, but forcefully taken; and in both Europe and America the nineteenth century was punctuated by political protest, with periodic revolutions on the continent, the Civil War in America and, in Britain, a steady struggle to widen the suffrage.

The process of redefining the British political nation was a slow one. It began in the 1820s, and by the 1880s roughly 60 per cent of the male population had the right to vote – but no women. The campaign for women’s suffrage had begun shortly after the Great Reform Act of 1832, but the battle only really got going at the start of the twentieth century, when the suffragette movement was born and with it a new level of female assertiveness, indeed violence. Here are the words of Dame Ethel Smyth, who composed the song ‘March of the Women’, which was a battle hymn of the suffragettes:

At exactly 5.30 one memorable evening in 1912 relays of women produced hammers from their muffs and handbags and proceeded methodically to smash shop windows in all the big London thoroughfares inspired by the knowledge that exactly at that moment Mrs Pankhurst was opening the ball with a stone aimed at a window of 10 Downing Street.

Smyth was jailed, along with many other women. One day a prison visitor found her leaning out of a window, using her toothbrush to conduct her co-suffragettes in singing the song during their exercises.

The British establishment was stunned by the vision of highly respectable women deliberately committing criminal acts. It was a big step beyond the posters, pamphlets, rallies and songs that had so far been the norm. Defacing a coin of the realm is a more subtle crime – one with no evident victims – but perhaps a more effective attack on the authority of a state that excluded women from political life. As a campaigning strategy it was a stroke of genius. The artist Felicity Powell has a special interest in subversive medals:

The idea is incredibly clever, because it uses the potential that coinage has, a bit like the internet today, to be widely circulated. Pennies probably were the most used coin, and so to be able to get the message out, subversively, into the public realm, to those who would be consoled by it as well as those who would be shocked by it, is a brilliant idea.

This particular coin makes full use of the fact that coins have two sides, not visible at once, and on the other side there’s an image of Britannia, which hasn’t been defaced. An image of a woman standing there, very strongly, symbolizing nationhood. There’s a real potential for shock value, real subversion, when you see what’s on the other side.

On the other side is the profile of Edward VII – balding, bearded and gazing off to the right. He’s in his early sixties – this coin is dated 1903. Surrounding him, running round the edge of the coin, is the Latin inscription which translates as Edward VII by the grace of God, King of all Britain, Defender of the Faith, Emperor of India. A mighty title, redolent of both ancient rights and new imperial power – an entire political order devised over centuries and sanctioned by God. But running across the top of the king’s ear and right