A History of the World in 100 Objects - Dr Neil MacGregor [240]
It literally is defacement, right across the king. And what’s interesting to me is the way that the ear becomes very central. As these letters are hammered home, the ear is left more or less intact, and it’s a bit like, ‘Are you listening?’ It’s got that real force to it.
Our Edward VII bronze penny was struck in the year of the formation of the Women’s Social and Political Union (the WSPU), whose founders included Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughter Christabel. There had been other peaceful female pressure groups before then, but none had achieved their goal. Thirty-three years before, Emmeline’s husband had drafted the first Women’s Suffrage Bill for Parliament, which was doing well in the House of Commons until the prime minister, William Gladstone, spoke out against it:
I have no fear lest the woman should encroach upon the power of the man. The fear I have is, lest we should invite her unwittingly to trespass against the delicacy, the purity, the refinement, the elevation of her own nature, which are the present sources of its power.
By invoking the delicacy and refinement of women, Gladstone made a calculated appeal to traditional, repressive ideas of how a lady should behave. So although the campaign for women’s votes continued and the Bill was repeatedly brought back to Parliament, for nearly a generation most women held back from direct action and unladylike encroachment on the established power of men.
But by 1903, the Pankhursts and others had had enough. (At this point they were still calling themselves suffragists, but after a few years of activism the Daily Mail would dub these new, feisty protestors ‘suffragettes’ – a derisory, diminutive term to distinguish them from women who stuck to peaceful means.) Under Mrs Pankhurst’s leadership the suffragettes swung into direct action. Defacing coins was just one tactic among many, but the choice of the penny was particularly ingenious: pre-decimal bronze pennies, about the same diameter as the modern £2 coin, were big enough to carry easily legible lettering, but too numerous and too low in value to make it practical for the banks to recall them, so the message on the coin was guaranteed to circulate widely and indefinitely. The suffragettes also embraced the cause in person: they disrupted trials in court by calling for votes, as Emmeline Pankhurst herself did:
The reasons why women should have the vote are obvious to every fair-minded person. The British constitution provides that taxation and representation shall go together, therefore women taxpayers are entitled to vote.
The moderation in Mrs Pankhurst’s words belies the escalating violence of the movement. Famously, the Rokeby Venus, a painting by Velázquez in the National Gallery, was slashed by Mary Richardson, who vigorously justified her action:
I have tried to destroy the picture of the most beautiful woman in mythological history as a protest against the government for destroying Mrs Pankhurst, who is the most beautiful character in modern history.
Suffragettes embraced many other tactics that can still shock us now: they chained themselves to the railings of 10 Downing Street; letter bombs were placed in postboxes; when put in jail they went on hunger strike. The most violent, self-inflicted action came when Emily Davison was killed as she threw herself in front of the king’s horse at the 1913 Derby. The suffragettes became systematic lawbreakers in order to change the law, and defacing the penny was just one element in a campaign that went far beyond civil disobedience. How permissible is this kind of violence? The human rights lawyer and reformer Baroness Helena Kennedy considers the acceptable limits:
Defacing coinage is against the law,