I recently engaged in a brief and pointless debate on Twitter with an impassioned adherent of the school of Roland Barthes’ “The Death of the Author” who argued that it was not only unnecessary to know anything about the person who wrote a book but limiting, the intellectual equivalent of showing up to compete in the Tour de France with a set of training wheels.
To read Laugh a Defiance, Mary Richardson’s memoir of her experiences in the Suffragette movement without some biographical context, however, would set you up to reach some seriously mistaken conclusions. On the surface, it’s terrific book — immediate yet self-reflective, moving but frequently quite funny. You would wonder why on Earth it’s been out of print since 1953.
Mary Richardson was a Canadian woman who settled in England and was working as a reporter for the Toronto Globe and other Canadian newspapers when, one day in early 1913, she encountered a young man distributing Suffragette pamphlets. This led to a meeting with Christabel Pankhurst, and she was soon set to work in the campaign aimed at raising public awareness through acts of property destruction. On her first mission, she threw rocks through windows of the Home Office before she was chased away by policemen. She was able to get away in part due to their being encumbered by heavy capes, which, she observed, “must surely have been designed before any idea of quick-footed, quick-firing felons like Suffragettes had disturbed the official mind.”
Richardson was an ideal foot soldier for the cause. “I was better able to undertake the more difficult tasks,” she wrote, “in that I had no family to worry about me and no one I needed to worry over. In the fullest sense I was free to do what was asked.” Soon after stoning Whitehall, she was sent to the Derby on the day that King Edward II and Queen Alexandra would be in attendance. There, as she stood holding a copy of The Suffragette in her hand, she watched in horror as one of her fellow militants, Emily Davison, calmly slipped under the rail, stepped into the racecourse in front of the oncoming horses and riders, and was knocked down and fatally injured. The hostility of the mob towards Davison, both at the track and at her funeral, only hardened Richardson’s resolve.
Richardson joined the Suffragettes when they had made a deliberate shift in tactics, one aimed at raising awareness of the movement through acts of disruption and, in particular, the destruction of property. This was considered an appropriate response to a prevailing order in which “values were stressed from the financial point of view and not the human.” She witnessed this attitude in its most glaring self-contradiction when she and several others tried to interrupt an Anglican church service to offer a prayer for Emmeline Pankhurst, then gravely ill in Holloway Prison. Their actions, she wrote, “had the effect of so changing the faces of Christians that they resembled gargoyles on their own medieval churches.”
Some of the incidents recalled in Laugh a Defiance make you want to cheer for their ingeuity. Marion Wallace-Dunlop, raised in a stern Scottish family and reluctant to become involved in violence, arranged for a male friend to sneak her into the House of Commons disguised as an older woman. Once there, she started marking up the walls of the lobby with an inked rubber stamp reading, “No taxation without representation.” When MPs finally noticed what she was doing, much of one wall was defaced and it took hours for cleaners to remove the graffiti. Wallace-Dunlop later introduced the hunger strike as a non-violent response to the abusive treatment the Suffragettes received in prison.
Few Suffragettes saw the inside of a prison as often as Mary Richardson. Between July 1913 and June 1914, she was arrested nine times, and she was one of the first to be subjected to forced feeding, the initial and barbaric response to the Suffragette’s hunger strikes. Heading off on one mission, she handed a bundle of her things to a housemate and told her, “If I’m not back for breakfast tomorrow morning, send this parcel to His Majesty’s prison at Holloway for me.” After the Cat and Mouse Act was passed, prisoners such as Richardson who staged hunger strikes were merely discharged when they fell ill and weak and then imprisoned again once they’d recovered, but that didn’t stop prisoner authorities from trying get the upper hand. On one visit to Holloway, the warders sent in a woman trained in ju jitsu to subdue her.
Richardson’s best known act of destruction was her slashing of Velasquez’s painting The Toilet of Venus, better known as the Rokeby Venus, in the National Gallery in March 1914. For Richardson, the Venus and its prominent display — then one of the most expensive works of art in the gallery — symbolized much that she despised in the British establishment, including its public display of the nude female form. So, acting alone, she decided to damage or destroy the painting as an act of protest.
She bought what she refers to as an axe — but in photos looks more like a cleaver — at an ironmongers in Theobalds Road, then walked to the National Gallery. She slipped the cleaver up her sleeve and entered. The Venus painting was being guarded by two police detectives and, at first, there was enough of a crowd that it was impractical for her to approach the painting. So, she wandered for a while, then returned and started to sketch in a drawing pad. When one of the detectives left the room, the other took out a newspaper and she saw her opportunity:
I dashed up the the painting. My first blow with the axe merely broke the protective glass. But, of course, it did more than that, for the detective rose with his newspaper still in his hand and walked round the red plush seat, staring up at the skylight which was being repaired.
Though the detective and the nearest attendant were caught off guard, two visitors were not:
Two Baedeker guide books, truly aimed by German tourists, came cracking against the back of my neck. By this time, too, the detective, having decided that the breaking glass had no connectio with the skylight, sprang on me and dragged the axe from my hand. As if out of the very walls angry people seemed to appear round me. I was dragged this way and that; but as on other occasions, the fury of the crowd helped me. In the ensuing commotion we were all mied together in a tight bunch. No one knew who should or should not be attacked. More than one innocent woman must have received a blow meant for me.
Amazingly, this was not her last blow for the Suffragettes. Once in prison, she again went on a hunger strike and she again was released after falling ill. While out, however, she took on another job that was almost as spectacular, if not as public. She and another young woman, a new recruit, were sent to torch a large but abandoned country house on an estate outside London. Finding the grounds surrounded by a dense hedge, the recruit balked. Richardson simply wrapped her scarf around her head and went crashing through it.
She made her way to the house, dowsed the walls and floor with kerosene, and climbed outside to set light to the fuse. As soon as the flame caught, she ran back to where she’d broken through the hedge. Expecting the police to show up at any moment, she began crawling on hands and knees across the field when, “Suddenly, I felt a moist gust of warm air in my face and froze with horror.” In the darkness, she had smacked into the side of a cow.
Though she was quickly apprehended and charged, this would be her last mission. After war was declared in early August 1914, Emmeline Pankhurst called the Suffragette’s campaign to a halt and urged the women to support the war effort.
In popular accounts, the actions of the Suffragettes have taken on a certain rosiness of hue. No doubt their acts of protest were heroic and dramatic and their punishment by police and jailers disproportionate to their crimes. But some historians question the efficacy of their tactics. Brian Harrison and Martin Pugh have suggested that non-militancy, rather than militancy, and particularly violent militancy, ultimately played a bigger role in winning the vote for women.
In a detailed survey of Suffragette acts of destruction, C. J. Bearman raises the question: Did the WSPU’s campaign of distruption actually work? Based on his analysis, “The only returnable answer is that it did not. The main reasons for the militancy’s failure were that it did little economic damage and that it visibly lacked mass support….” The acts of arson, in particular, made not even a marginal difference in the number of arsons that occurred in an ordinary year — in fact, fire damage in the greater London area decreased in 1913, the year when WPSU arsonists were most active.
And ironically, Richardson herself recounts a most un-violent incident that may have had a greater impact that all her other missions. Once, she camped out on the doorstep of the Bishop of London to persuade him not to deliver a speech against suffrage he was scheduled to deliver in the House of Lords. After being put off all day, she was finally invited by the bishop’s secretary to return the following morning at 11. Once seated with the Bishop, though, her mind went blank.
I must earlier had rehearesed a dozen speeches. But I could remember nothing of these. It was as if I were compelled by something outside me to speak as I did. I could not remember afterwards what I did say. When I was at the end of my arguments, I remember, I paused and waited for the Bishop’s reaction.
“Before we discuss this any further, you must take refreshment,” he told her. He pushed a button and a servant came in with coffee and pink-iced cakes. The Bishop produced the text of his speech and said, calmly, “In view of what you have told me, I shall not make the speech I have written…. I think you have persuaded me.” And that was that.
And, indeed, based on Richardson’s account, the Suffragettes ultimately succeeded through a similarly peaceful conservation. After hearing that the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Enfranchisement Bill, which greatly expanded suffrage among men, made no mention of “Votes for Women,” Emmeline Pankhurst called upon Prime Minister Lloyd George. She warned him that her followers would resume militant action if women’s suffrage was not also addressed. Lloyd George, who supported the cause, expressed dismay, and afer consulting with his Cbinet, ensured that language was added to give the vote to women over the age of thirty.
As a historian, Brian Harrison has little patience for Richardson, who he describes as coming “as near as anyone to the ideal” of the self-sacrificing follower he claims that the Pankhursts sought to inspire. Likewise, Bearman dismisses Laugh a Defiance as “the unreliable memoirs of a self-dramatizing woman.” On this point, at least, their views don’t differ greatly from those express by the editors of the Evening Standard, who wrote after the slashing of the Rokeby Venus that “her lack of a sense of proportion pass the frontier between eccentricity and mental unsoundness.”
But we must bear in mind that historians, unlike some literary critics, do take context into consideration. And if we do the same, Laugh a Defiance no longer seems simply an entertaining piece of writing. Diane Atkinson, a historian overall favorable to the Suffragette cause, notes that after her time with the cause, Richardson “published several books during the war, … owned properties and was a somewhat unsuccessful landlady.” She also became one of a wave of women who sought public office after suffrage was approved.
Atkinson also notes, however, that in the early 1930s, Richardson joined the British Union of Fascists under Oswald Mosley and set up the Women’s Section for the party. Between 1932 and 1934, she spoke frequently in support of Fascist policies and candidates. Although she eventually grew disillusioned and rarely became involved in political causes after that, while she was as enthusiastic in her support of the Blackshirts as she had been of the Suffragettes. She illustrates a point made by Eric Hoffer in his classic study of extremist movements, The True Believer: “The danger of the fanatic … is that he cannot settle down…. The taste for strong feeling drives him on to search for mysteries yet to be revealed and secret doors yet to be opened. He keeps groping for extremes.”
I learned about Laugh a Defiance after Andy Miller mentioned it in a recent tweet. As Andy noted in speaking of the book on the Backlisted podcast, anyone thinking of reissuing it would need to ensure that appropriate historical and biographical context was provided. Without it, readers might fail to see the narrow but crucial line that divides Mary Richardson’s actions from ones with far more sinister conseqeuences.
The book is extremely rare — I was unable to find any copies available for sale — but there are over eighty copies available in libraries worldwide, so it wasn’t too hard to borrow one via Inter Library Loan. Here is the link to the WorldCat.org listing: Laugh a Defiance