Exhibition of the week Unfinished Business: The Fight for Women’s Rights
British Library, London NW1 (01937-546546, bl.uk). Until 21 February 2021 (currently closed – check website)
When we think of the history of feminism, we often think of the “razzle-dazzle chapters”, said Lucy Davies in The Daily Telegraph: “the bloody battle for the vote in Edwardian England”; the great untying of the apron strings in the 1970s. This new exhibition on “the rich history of women’s campaigning” makes it clear that these were only “flashpoints in what is a much wider, longer and – crucially – still very much unfolding story”. Bringing together a wealth of exhibits, from a first edition of Mary Wollstonecraft’s proto-feminist text A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), to a costume inspired by the recent TV adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale, it charts the development of female protest movements in Britain from the Enlightenment to the present day, with great intelligence and visual panache. It’s an “absorbing” exhibition that could hardly be more timely in a year when “the structural inequalities of society” have been thrown into sharp relief by the global pandemic and Black Lives Matter.
There are some undeniably “interesting” exhibits here, said Melanie McDonagh in The Critic. One highlight is a letter from Charles Darwin to an American woman who “took exception” to his disparaging view of female intelligence, displayed alongside her own reply. Elsewhere, we see a poem by Sylvia Pankhurst “written on prison loo paper”; a “pretty dress” customised by an Edwardian girl so that she could ride her bicycle safely; and the diary of an anti-suffragist, describing how a meeting she attended was disrupted by the suffragettes. But most of the time it barely acknowledges the truth that women opposed to universal suffrage “probably outnumbered the radicals”. There isn’t nearly enough space allocated to women who “weren’t feminist”; and the endless bits of “campaign literature” and sloganeering placards on display give the show a hectoring tone. Personally, I spent much of my visit feeling “as if I were being hit with a rolled-up copy of Spare Rib”.
That’s unfair, said Zoe Williams in The Guardian. The exhibition is “as questioning as it is celebratory”, acknowledging that the protagonists of the struggle for equality were “complicated, ambiguous, difficult and, frankly, not always right”. It deftly addresses the women’s movement’s “myopia on race”: Christabel Pankhurst, we learn, celebrated British colonial rule abroad while simultaneously agitating for universal suffrage at home; the influential reproductive rights campaigner Marie Stopes, meanwhile, held hateful views on race and was a “well-known eugenicist”. The show addresses schisms in contemporary feminism, fully acknowledging an “inconvenient truth: the trouble with women is we don’t all agree”. This admirably nuanced approach makes for a fascinating survey of the “imagery, philosophy and artefacts” of the women’s movement, “with one eye always on the work left to do”.