At the Society for the Protection of Birds’ sixth annual general meeting in 1896, Miss Julia Andrews, a fifty-eight year old spinster and local secretary for the Society’s branch in Teddington, rose to ask a very uncomfortable question to all the good and the great – as well as the more middling sort such as herself – there gathered: how, if they were to be a society for the protection of birds, could they avoid opposing the shooting of pheasant, grouse, and partridge for pleasure? It was a question she had asked at the Society’s three previous annual meetings, and one, given that a not insignificant portion of her audience was made up of members of the landed gentry who not only profited from the hunting on their lands, but took active and enthusiastic part in such hunts themselves, that was received with, as Tessa Boase describes in her new book Mrs. Pankhurst’s Purple Feather, “an awkward silence.”
Ms. Boase is no stranger to uncomfortable questions – she asks a great many in her book; questions not only about the protection of birds but about the welfare of people, particularly the poor and disenfranchised, as well. Indeed, the disenfranchisement of women, by the laws as well as the economic structures of Nineteenth and early Twentieth Century Britain, is intricately intertwined with the other side of her narrative. Indeed, as she so deftly draws out while drawing her readers in, the establishment and growth of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, and the suffrage movement for the civil enfranchisement of women, are inseparably linked – but not always in the ways we would expect such an inter-relationship perhaps to develop and exist today.
The “Mrs. Pankhurst” in the title is, of course, the famouse suffragette leader Emmeline Pankhurst, who – often, at least early on, with the assistance of her daughters Christabel and Sylvia – came to be the terror of many British politicians and a favorite of newspaper writers due to her confrontational activities on behalf of the suffrage cause. However just as Emmeline Pankhurst is inseperable from the suffrage movement, so Etta Lemon was equally foundational in the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. If you’ve not previously heard of Mrs. Lemon or her association with the RSPB, there is a reason for that; however precisely what that reason is forms the second principle narrative of Ms. Boase’s fascinating book.
Journeying into the now largely forgotten world of the late Victorian feather trade – the often noted impetus for, and central public focus of, the early Society for the Protection of Birds in the United Kingdom (as well as the Audubon Society in the United States), Ms. Boase guides her readers not only into the shops of high street milliners and the parlor organized boycotts of feathered haberdashery (which is most commonly where such narratives both begin and end in books on this topic), but into warehouses of wholesalers where vast lots of feathers from around the world were shown and purchased by a group of businessmen as secretive and exclusive as modern-day diamond merchants. She also ventures into the dimly-lit workrooms and slum flats where workers, always female, engaged – for starvation level wages – in the myriad and now wholly forgotten jobs required before feathers, bird skins, and other assorted items could be worked into not only hats but a variety of other articles of clothing as well.
To say that this female feather trade workforce was vulnerable to abuse is wholly insufficient to describe their precarious state. Which is why today we would assume that such an economic boycott, as was mounted by the original SPB (later the RSPB) would be assumed to have included some element of economic justice for those whose livlihoods would be destroyed were it to succeed; however as Ms. Boase explains, in later Victorian – Edwardian Britain, such was not at all the case. While on occassion women in the trade could be induced to provide evidence of illicitly obtained feathers being used, such women did not attend the teas or the AGM sessions of the society – they simply could not afford – economically or socially – to do so.
Nor was it the case that one such as Mrs. Lemon who cared so passionately about the welfare of “dumb creatures” such as birds would be equally interested in the rights not legally afforded to members of her own sex, for indeed, she was ardently anti-suffrage. To many, the very idea that there were any women at all in opposition to women’s suffrage may come as a surprise, but that there was a strong and organized movement of women in opposition to it speaks to not only the fact that the victors write the history books, but that we have greatly impoverished the actual history of the period through over-simplification and the application of a contemporary bias to our understanding of it.
Likewise, a similar point could be made regarding the interest of Mrs. Pankhurst and her suffragette movement toward the cause of animal welfare. After all, don’t most people today who express concern for the well-being and fair treatment of disenfranchised humans also tend to align with, or at least offer sympathetic gestures toward, the ideas of animal welfare and the compassionate treatment of them? Not so in this case – for while there were those such as Virginia Woolfe who supported both suffrage and animal welfare, one of the key weapons in the suffragettes’ arsenal was a vigorous application of fashion and style – including outrageously feathered headwear – in all public activities.
In addition to all the biographical information Ms. Boase includes in this book, a number of exceptionally enlightening vignettes of events of which we might have previously heard or read passing references to are included to provide the reader with unshakeable images that bring them to life and allow them to be better understoon in the power they provide to their respective causes. Of particular merit are her descriptions of how the force-feeding of arrested suffragettes was carried out and how professional egret hunters plied their execrable craft that was essential to the ongoing success of the feather trade. After reading either of these passages, no future reference to them will ever be understood the same way again.
Mrs. Pankhurst’s Purple Feather is a truly eye-opening book. Not only does it present a deeper look into the histories of two fascinatingly inter-twined social movements that are commonly thought (incorrectly) to be popularly well-understood today, it also inspires a wealth of questions about contemporary assumptions we might hold on a number of topics both related and distant from each of these causes – topics such as the often limited socio-cultural perspective of even the most seemingly noble of social reform causes, or the manner in which present-day organizations with seemingly self-conflicting relationships between their members and their goals are popularly simplified and thus at risk of being misinterpreted and thus seen merely as charicatures rather than people with sincerely held positions. Ms. Boase presents us a great gift in this book; the opportunity for correction to a host of historical oversights, misunderstandings, and in the case of Etta Lemon, seemingly intentional erasures – we would be wrong not to accept it with gratitude.
Title: Mrs Pankhurst’s Purple Feather; Fashion, Fury and Feminism – Women’s Fight for Change
Author: Tessa Boase
Publisher: Aurum Press
Format: Hardback
Pages: 336 pp., w/ B&W and Color Photos
ISBN: 9781781316542
Published: 2018
In accordance with Federal Trade Commission 16 CFR Part 255, it is disclosed that the copy of the book read in order to produce this review was provided gratis to the reviewer by the publisher.
