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so there is that issue of whether it’s ethical to break the law in certain circumstances. My argument would be that there are some times when in pursuit of human rights it is the only thing that people can do. As a lawyer I’m not supposed to say that, but I think there are occasions when the general public would agree, that somehow one has to stand up to be counted. Obviously there have to be limits of what we consider to be acceptable in terms of civil disobedience. There are some political acts which one would never condone, and grappling with the ethics of where it is appropriate and what is appropriate is difficult. The courage of these women was extraordinary, in that they were prepared to sacrifice their lives. Now of course today we have people who are also prepared to sacrifice their lives and one has to consider when and where that is appropriate. And I think most of us would say anything that involved harm to others has to be unacceptable.

The suffragette campaign was interrupted by the outbreak of the First World War, but the war itself provided powerful, indeed conclusive, arguments for giving women the vote. Suddenly women had the chance to prove their ability in traditionally male and distinctly ‘unladylike’ environments – battlefield medicine, munitions, agriculture and industry – and once the war was over they could not be slotted back into a stereotype of delicate refinement.

In 1918 British women over the age of 30 were given the right to vote, and in 1928 the Equal Franchise Act extended the vote to all women over the age of 21, on the same terms as men. And 100 years after our penny was stamped with VOTES FOR WOMEN, a new 50p piece was issued to mark the centenary of the Women’s Social and Political Union. On the front, the queen, a woman, and on the back a woman – a suffragette chained to a railing with a billboard next to her carrying the words, legitimately on the coin this time, GIVE WOMEN THE VOTE.

A new 50p piece was issued in 2003 to mark the centenary of the WSPO

PART TWENTY

The World of Our Making

AD 1914–2010

The twentieth century and beginning of the twenty-first were an era of unprecedented conflict, social change and scientific development. Technological innovation enabled more objects to be produced and used by humankind than at any previous time in history, changing the way we relate to each other and to the material world. But many of these objects (particularly since the invention of plastic) have been ephemeral and disposable, which has given urgency to questions about the environment and global resources. As has been true for almost two million years, the objects we have produced over the last century convey our concerns, our creativity and our aspirations, and will continue to reveal them to future generations.

96

Russian Revolutionary Plate

Porcelain plate, from St Petersburg, Russia

PAINTED AD 1921

Arise, ye workers from your slumber,

Arise, ye prisoners of want.

For reason in revolt now thunders,

and at last ends the age of cant!

Away with all your superstitions,

Servile masses, arise, arise!

We’ll change henceforth the old tradition,

And spurn the dust to win the prize!

Those are the words of ‘The Internationale’, the great socialist hymn written in France in 1871. In Russia in the 1920s, it was adopted by the Bolsheviks as the anthem of the Russian Revolution. The original words were about looking forward to a time of future revolution, but significantly the Bolsheviks changed the tense in the Russian translation, moving it from the future to the present – the Revolution was now. The workers, at least in theory, had taken control.

Throughout this book we have seen images of individual rulers – from Ramesses II and Alexander the Great, to the Oba of Benin and King Edward VII – but here we have the image of a new kind of ruler, not an ‘I’ but a ‘We’, not an individual but a whole class, for in Soviet Russia we see the power of the people, or, rather, the dictatorship of the proletariat. The object in this chapter