TMC Reviews… Women Like You

by Strawberry Cheesecake

Women Like You is a small exhibition at the Manchester Art Gallery supported by the Pankhurst Centre and organised to coincide with International Women’s Day. It celebrates the life of leading suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst, as well as the wider suffragette movement. It’s now been a little over 80 years since women won the right to vote on the same terms as men, and Women Like You is a profoundly worthwhile attempt to make sense of this history and present it to a new generation.

The centre-piece of the exhibition is Charlotte Newson’s stunning photo-mosaic of Manchester-born Emmeline Pankhurst (below). The mosaic was constructed from thousands of images of inspirational women submitted from all over the country. The brief was to suggest women known to members of the public who they had found to be inspiring and, as the artist put it, these could be “anyone from your mum, grandmother, sister, friend, to the wider world of peacemakers, politicians, colleagues, musicians and teachers”. The resulting effect is immediately moving, suggestive of the link between the past and the present, as Pankhurst’s legacy is sustained collectively to this day through all manner of inspirational women. Newson seemed to be suggesting that in their individuality and the difference they make to the lives of those around them, these women embody and keep alive a tradition of female radicalism which can be traced back to the original suffragettes.

Another piece on display was a video installation which progressively morphed from one woman to another, periodically interspersing the pictures submitted by the public with images of suffragettes. The effect was again a powerful one, underscored by the threads which link the courage and sacrifice of the suffragettes to the life and work of ordinary women today. However the risk is that this focus on the everyday and ordinary, though laudable, risks obscuring the profoundly political goals of the suffragette movement and particularly the radicalism which the subsequent generation of suffragettes exhibited (for instance Pankhurst’s daughter Sylvia was a very active communist and anti-fascist).

Even so the point made by the exhibition is a worthy one and, furthermore, a necessary one given the growth of what the feminist Natasha Walters calls the ‘new sexism’. All manner of intellectual arguments can be made for the contemporary relevance of feminist thought and tradition but Women Like You effectively makes the same point on an aesthetic level and is, perhaps, all the more powerful for it. The suffragettes and all they stood for must not be glibly dismissed as a historical curiosity for the very simple reason that the battles they fought have still not been won.

For instance, the government estimates that as many as 95% of rapes are never reported to the police at all and of those that were reported from 2007 to 2008, only 6.5% resulted in a conviction, compared with 34% of criminal cases in general. In a recent study  almost two thirds of Londoners said that they would not even tell their partners were they to be raped. In the same report over half of those surveyed said there were some circumstances where the victim should accept responsibility for being raped. Interestingly it was women who were most likely to think that certain behaviours (accepting a drink, dressing provocatively, going to the attacker’s house for a drink, getting into bed with them) implied that the victim was to blame for their assault.

The attitudes and legal outcomes surrounding rape in contemporary Britain are only the tip of the iceberg. Natasha Walters plausibly argues that the last two decades have seen a historically unprecedented sexualisation of sexuality which has tended to reduce women’s liberation to sexual self-confidence and the erotically ostentatious. While the liberation of women from staid sexual Puritanism is undoubtedly a social gain, Walters suggests that contemporary society has headed too far in the opposite direction. We now live in a time during which hundreds of millions of girls the world over are taught to be ‘little princesses’ through Disney’s multi-billion dollar princess range, porn and prostitution is continually rendered normal and ‘tits and ass’ plays an ever-increasingly crucial role in advertising as well as music videos. It is hardly surprising that this has social and culture consequences, as girls are taught to be princesses who, as they get older, ought to express that femininity through sexual exhibitionism with those that don’t deemed to be anachronistic prudes.  As Walters puts it,

“Many young women now seem to believe that sexual confidence is the only confidence worth having, and that sexual confidence can only be gained if a young women is ready to conform to the soft-porn images of a tanned, waxed young girl with large breasts ready to strip and pole-dance. Whether sexual confidence can be found in other ways, and whether other kinds of confidence are worth seeking, are themes that this hypersexual culture cannot address.”

Other research released recently further underscores the plausibility of her claims. Within this context the legacy of the suffragettes is something which should be retained, celebrated and rearticulated to make sense of the new sexism which pervades 21st century Britain. Women Like You is an admirable artistic contribution to what seems to be a resurgence in UK feminism led by groups such as the F Word, UK Feminista and The Fawcett Society.

Watch out for Newson’s photo-mosaic which will be placed on 44 city centre billboard sites throughout Manchester and visit Women Like You at the Manchester Art Gallery – on until Sunday 9th May.