from NWSA Journal Volume 11, Number 2

Domesticating Emmeline: Representing the Suffragette, 1930-1993

Laura E. Nym Mayhall

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Through a juxtaposition of readings of the statue of Emmeline Pankhurst, leader of the militant British suffrage organization, the Women's Social and Political Union, and the blockbuster film of 1964, Walt Disney's Mary Poppins, this article argues that the figure of the suffragette, while potentially a radical disrupter of the political order, in fact, serves to consolidate the authority of the nation-state and women's subordinate place within it. By the 1960s, the figure of the suffragette emerges in Anglo-American popular culture as a symbol of modernity, standing in for democratization and political progress at a remove from then current political realities of the same struggles on the part of African Americans. Anxieties about shifting configurations of dominance and subordination along the lines of race, class, and gender find expression in a figure removed far enough historically to pose no threat to the established order, yet seemingly radical enough to denote progress.

The women's suffrage movement in Britain occupies a privileged position within the telling of Anglo-American women's history, for it has been understood by many men and women--feminist and nonfeminist alike--as the precursor of the modern Women's Liberation Movement. Members of the public, and indeed, some historians posit a direct link between the suffragettes in Britain and the Women's Liberation Movement in the United States and Western Europe in the 1960s (Purvis 1996). No better example of this exists than that mainstream children's classic, Walt Disney's Mary Poppins, released within a year of Betty Friedan's record of domestic discontent, The Feminine Mystique (1963). In Walt Disney's Mary Poppins, Mrs. Banks, an ardent suffragette and mother of two, serves as the progenitor of the modern woman. Mary Poppins arrives precisely to save the Banks children from their "liberated" mother, who must be educated into the proper maternal relation with them. The film assumes, as have many people since, a connection to exist between the suffragettes and the growing political consciousness of women in the 1960s, as both appear allied to the project of twentieth-century radicalism.

Assuming late-twentieth-century feminism's connection to an earlier suffragism, I was intrigued to learn of former Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's presence at a ceremony honoring the birth of Emmeline Pankhurst at Westminster. This celebration in July 1993, organized by Teresa Gorman, a Conservative Member of Parliament, took the form of a wreath-laying at the statue of Emmeline Pankhurst in Victoria Tower Gardens, adjacent to the Houses of Parliament. At a private ceremony following the public wreath-laying, Lady Thatcher dedicated a plaque in honor of the seventy-fifth anniversary of the first extension of the vote to British women in 1918.¹ These celebrations seemed curious. The laying of flowers at the base of Pankhurst's statue in Westminster on her birthday in 1993 re-enacted not only a ceremony taking place many times this century--at least 50 times, in fact, between 1930 and the 1980s--but also a ceremony organized originally by former suffragettes. What possible meanings might such a commemoration, organized by female Members of Parliament, have in the 1990s? What does Emmeline Pankhurst and, beyond her, the figure of the suffragette mean at the end of the twentieth century? A juxtaposition of readings--first, of the statue's entry into public space and of the rituals enacted with it as a focus, and second, of the figure of the suffragette in Walt Disney's Mary Poppins--reveals a gradual consolidation of representations of the suffragette. This figure, viewed at the beginning of the twentieth century by those on the left as a symbol of modernity, signifies to a much larger audience at our own fin-de-siècle an uninterrupted movement for women's political rebellion and progress, albeit a movement domesticated and operating primarily in the service of the nation (Lyon 1994-95; Wright 1985).

Commemorating Women's Suffrage

It was by no means inevitable that a statue of Emmeline Pankhurst would be placed within the precincts of Parliament. When the British parliament enfranchised women in 1918, at least three figures contended for the inscription that today describes the base of Pankhurst's statue--"courageous leader of the women's suffrage movement"--each a strong, charismatic widow with a unique claim to the title. These included Millicent Garrett Fawcett, president of the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), the oldest of the women's suffrage organizations and the largest, with more than 50,000 members in England, Scotland, and Wales; Charlotte Despard, president of the Women's Freedom League (WFL), the only major suffrage organization in Britain to continue its agitation on behalf of women's enfranchisement during the First World War; and Emmeline Pankhurst, leader of the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU), best known for its use of militancy, which, after 1912, included arson, the burning of post office boxes and the destruction of paintings in public galleries.² Each woman represented a suffrage organization with its own tactics and means of advertisement, and each organization made significant contributions to the campaign for women's parliamentary suffrage in the years before the First World War. In August 1914, however, the WSPU distinguished itself by the violence of its self-proclaimed war upon the Liberal Government. While Emmeline Pankhurst's co-leader, her eldest daughter, Christabel, remained in Paris to avoid arrest and further prosecution, the British government pursued various Union officials on conspiracy charges. Emmeline Pankhurst herself had spent the previous eighteen months in and out of jail (Rosen 1974, 159-172, 189-202).

The status of the relationship between the WSPU and the British Government changed dramatically when Britain went to war with Germany in August 1914. The Pankhursts immediately abandoned suffrage work and enthusiastically supported the war effort. By 1916, when the government raised the question of extending the franchise to women and servicemen as part of an attempt to reform voting rights, the WSPU had long been working to recruit men and women for military and munitions service. Nor did Emmeline Pankhurst's war work end with exhortations to fellow Britons to support their country in its prosecution of the war. In a series of private communication in 1915 with David Lloyd George, Minister of Munitions, she denounced conscientious objectors in South Wales.³ And by 1916, Emmeline Pankhurst argued that the Government should not jeopardize the enfranchisement of soldiers and sailors by the inclusion of women in the proposed reform bill.⁴

Emmeline Pankhurst's political career continued after she ceased agitating for women's suffrage. In 1917, she traveled on behalf of the British government to urge Russian women to support their nation's continued adherence to the Allied War effort. A vocal anti-Bolshevist, in 1926 she stood unsuccessfully as a Conservative Party candidate for the staunchly Labour constituency of Whitechapel and St. George's, in the East End of London. Pankhurst later opposed extension of the franchise to women at the age of 21, on the grounds that "'full and effective use has not been made of the vote we already have.'"⁵ Pankhurst's conversion from radical opponent of the Government to upholder of the status quo provides context for the commission of the statue and its postwar significance.⁶

However, the most significant players in the creation of a postwar public memory of the suffrage movement were former militant suffragettes themselves, organized in 1926 as the Suffragette Fellowship. Members of this group devoted themselves over the next half-century to memorializing their campaign.⁷ Through the creation of an archive, currently housed at the Museum of London, the Fellowship defined the practice of militancy for succeeding generations. The Fellowship devised a questionnaire designed to record former suffragettes' experiences of militancy. Centering on the question "when were you imprisoned?" this survey at once documented and defined suffrage militancy. To be authentic, suffrage militancy followed one trajectory: from militant action, defined narrowly as violence against property, through arrest, to incarceration and, eventually, the hunger-strike and forcible feeding. The very definition of militancy created by this archive obscured other militant practices, such as civil disobedience or tax and census resistance. As a consequence, the brand of militancy that Emmeline Pankhurst had called "'the argument of the broken pane,'"⁸ or suffragette attacks upon property, became the only kind of militancy considered authentic. Thus, a controversial and contested form of prewar militant protest--one associated with Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst--became the only acceptable definition of militancy after the war (Mayhall 1995, 332).

After Emmeline Pankhurst's death in 1928, the Suffragette Fellowship turned its prodigious energies toward honoring the memory of a woman who, for many, stood for what was most noble in the prewar women's movement. With the partial enfranchisement of women in 1918 (when men and women could vote in parliamentary elections at the ages of 21 and 30, respectively), and their full enfranchisement in 1928 (when both women and men could vote at age 21), the focus of the one-issue suffrage campaign of the earlier period disappeared. Organized feminists confronted profound, and sometimes irreconcilable, differences of opinion on a number of issues, including, but not limited to protective legislation for women workers, the need to compensate women for their work in the home, and equal pay for equal work (Smith 1990, 47-83). For many women, Emmeline Pankhurst symbolized a golden age of the women's movement, when women worked together, united by loyalty, obedience, and discipline (Davis, et al. 1982, 316).

No clearer example exists of how much Pankhurst meant to former participants in the suffrage movement than the campaign to create three memorials honoring her in London.⁹ Soon after her death in June 1928, a committee formed to raise the funds necessary to mount a statue of Pankhurst in Westminster, to place a portrait of her in the National Portrait Gallery, and to install a headstone at her gravesite in Brompton Cemetery. All three memorials shaped the public memory of the suffrage movement to varying degrees over the course of the century.¹⁰

Arguably the statue at Westminster constituted the most significant of the memorials to be created by the committee. Its prominent placement in the gardens adjacent to what is a premier attraction for tourists to the capital city has guaranteed a wide audience for its account of the prewar campaign.¹¹ The original appeal for funds for the statue in 1928 urged that a statue is the recognized form of tribute paid to historic personalities, the highest and most lasting honour that humanity has ever been able to pay to those who have rendered great services to civilisation. As in ancient days, so now, men commemorate their heroes and liberators by erecting statues; shall not women claim equal honour for her who led them to victory?¹²

As one historian has noted, this argument recognized the ideological significance of mounting a statue to a female heroine in public space (Midgley 1984, 80-1). Subsequent developments confirmed that both former suffragettes and the male civil servants with whom they sparred over its creation accurately gauged the political significance of such a memorial.

In June 1928, a member of the Suffragette Fellowship, Katharine Marshall, informed Lionel Earle, Minister of Works, that the Fellowship would commission a statue of their late leader to be placed either opposite the Prime Minister's official residence at Number Ten, Downing Street, or somewhere within the precincts of Westminster.¹³ Officials within the Ministry of Works perceived her request as deliberately provocative as both locations had been sites of major battles between suffragettes and the police during the prewar suffrage movement. The Minister of Works gave Marshall no encouragement, and in fact, internal memoranda of that department indicate that, at the very least, the Ministry determined to stall on this question indefinitely, if not avoid it outright.¹⁴ In January 1929, however, then Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin announced that he would dedicate the proposed statue after the upcoming General Election.¹⁵ Further opposition to the statue within the Ministry of Works abruptly disappeared, and the intransigence of officials ended with the announcement in April of the same year that the Government had granted a site for the statue in Victoria Tower Gardens, adjacent to the Houses of Parliament.¹⁶

The Suffragette Fellowship staged the statue's dedication on March 6, 1930, to attribute the enfranchisement of women in Britain solely to the efforts of the WSPU. Even though women belonging to a number of prewar suffrage societies comprised the Fellowship's membership, the group organizing the event acted to ensure the iconographic dominance of the WSPU. In November 1929, those planning the dedication requested an estimate for the bunting, banners, and canopy for the March festivities; the London firm consulted was asked to provide all decorations in purple, white, and green. One participant at the ceremonies the following spring noted that even the clergymen present exchanged their red cassocks for black, to avoid compromising the colors of the WSPU.¹⁷ The Times made much of the fact that the Metropolitan Police Band entertained the crowd in the hour before the unveiling, for many of the women present had battled members of the constabulary in the streets outside the Houses of Parliament during the campaign before the War.¹⁸

Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin's speech dedicating the statue points to two of the primary ways in which the statue, and Pankhurst herself, were to be read in subsequent years. While acknowledging Emmeline Pankhurst's role as a revolutionary, Baldwin situated her within a British tradition of gradual, peaceful reform, a tradition he viewed as evidence of Britain's distinctiveness from the rest of Europe. More specifically, Baldwin took care to point to the "very English" nature of the proceedings themselves: groups at odds years before now gathered to honor a controversial leader. By claiming Pankhurst as part of a long tradition of gradual reform, Baldwin effectively domesticated her, removing from her the more radical assertion of rights that had galvanized the prewar movement and had made it seem so threatening to the government in power.

Domesticating Emmeline had multiple resonances. Certainly, the more conventional connotation applies: Baldwin's speech attempted to tame her political rhetoric, to bring her into the realm of the familiar and the safe. Perhaps more significantly, however, by rendering her and the protests associated with her as quintessentially "English," Baldwin removed the taint of foreignness from her ideas. Emmeline Pankhurst, and indeed, numerous suffragettes, claimed the French Revolution as inspiration for their political activism (West 1933, 261). By 1930, however, the Russian Revolution served as the barometer by which political radicalism would be measured. Baldwin placed Pankhurst's political agitation and, by implication, her conversion to Conservatism, as the logical outcome of two centuries of political reform in Britain. Faced by the new political landscape in Europe created by the Revolution in Russia, Baldwin sought to redefine acceptable and unacceptable political activism. Emmeline Pankhurst, incorporated into the pantheon of great fighters for English liberties, thus helped form what Bill Schwarz has called "the Conservative articulation of people and nation" so skillfully brought under the umbrella of the constitution by Stanley Baldwin in the late-1920s (Schwartz 1984, 6).

However, Baldwin's speech laid out additional meanings for this statue. Baldwin attempted to placate those who had opposed women's suffrage prior to the war bypointing out that opponents of women's suffrage in the earlier period fell well within that era's mainstream of opinion. Including himself in his characterization of opponents of women's suffrage as "men of culture and broad minds," Baldwin led with apparent inevitability to the conclusion that the war--and women's work for the nation during the war--had brought about the enfranchisement of women. For Baldwin, the war defined the political movement epitomized by Emmeline Pankhurst because it provided the arena in which women could prove their fitness for citizenship, their willingness, in his words, "to put on their overalls and [to go] into the factories and the fields; [where] they were nursing, and they made munitions, and they endured sacrifices with the men." It was "in the furnace of the war" that opposition to women's suffrage would melt.¹⁹ No room exists in this rhetoric for those women whose suffrage agitation continued during the First World War, or for those who publicly opposed the war. By elevating Emmeline Pankhurst, the Prime Minister effaced the spectrum of women's political activism before the war.²⁰

Baldwin's emphasis on the centrality of the war to the enfranchisement of women mirrored public discourse on women in the 1920s, a discourse placing renewed value on women's sacrifice and loss. In the decade after the Great War, commentators valorized, and indeed, romanticized, Emmeline Pankhurst and her organization's use of militancy as a form of political violence, perhaps in part because what had transpired during the War so completely eclipsed it. The very qualities for which Emmeline Pankhurst was lauded--martyrdom, sacrifice, and loss--described another category of postwar women, mothers who had lost sons in the war (Grayzel 1999). One contemporary observer noted that, "assuredly, too, their movement, despite all its errors and follies, was full of the true heroic spirit. A leadership which inspired to martyrdom deserves its niche in history."²¹ Suffrage militancy thus emerged in the 1920s as an acceptable sacrifice made by women for the nation, and former suffragettes quickly embraced it as such.

"Days of Obligation"

But how does the statue of Emmeline Pankhurst, unveiled by Stanley Baldwin in 1930, acquire the cachet that would assure its use as a symbol of women's political rights by a Conservative member of parliament, and a Conservative prime minister, in the 1990s? In order to explain how this statue became emblematic of women's political rights some six decades after its commission, we must turn to the public rituals associated with the statue, rituals highly formalized, repetitive, and calendrical (Connerton 1989, 44-5). Organized by the Suffragette Fellowship, these rituals created, conveyed, and sustained a public memory of the women's suffrage movement, fulfilling the projection of Baldwin's speech, and continuing the process of winnowing the memory of a complicated and contentious movement to a single, unified, and idealized point: the statue of Emmeline Pankhurst.

As early as 1928, the Suffragette Fellowship organized what one participant would refer to later as "Days of Obligation," or ritual commemorations of events significant within the suffrage movement.²² Three such days celebrated annually were February 6, Women's Suffrage Day, acknowledging passage of the 1918 Representation of the People Act; July 14, Emmeline Pankhurst's birthday; and October 13, Prisoners' Day, commemorating the first imprisonments (1905) suffered by members of the WSPU in the course of agitating for women's suffrage. Members of the Suffragette Fellowship celebrated all three days, with the assistance of various celebrities and members of the public, during the next 50 years. Emmeline Pankhurst's birthday, especially, became a focus of the organization's energies.²³

Suffragette Fellowship celebrations of Pankhurst's birthday continued well into the 1980s. Early celebrations, from roughly 1930 to 1945, emphasized the bodily connection of the many women in the Suffragette Fellowship who had known Emmeline Pankhurst personally. These celebrations followed the same pattern every year: a service memorialized Pankhurst at St. John's Church, Smith Square, Westminster, after which members formed a procession outside the church for a walk to the Gardens, where they laid flowers and wreaths at the foot of the statue. Tea or a supper party followed. After the Second World War, the birthday celebrations of 14 July assumed a different form. Members of the Fellowship met at the statue, where they laid flowers and wreaths. Those present then proceeded to Caxton Hall, in Westminster, for a political meeting at which women of various party affiliations, either Members of Parliament or women working in local government authorities, addressed the group on issues concerning women in politics. A young Conservative Member of Parliament, Margaret Thatcher, spoke at the 1960 commemoration.²⁴ Birthday meetings appear to have grown in size as the years passed, with the largest meetings held at the centenary of Pankhurst's birth in 1958, and upon the fiftieth anniversary of the extension of the suffrage to women in 1968.

The difference in form between early and later celebrations parallels the shift begun by Stanley Baldwin's 1930 speech, away from the significance of Emmeline Pankhurst the individual, and toward Emmeline Pankhurst the ideal. Baldwin had argued that just as "there would have been a Reformation without Luther," a Renaissance without Erasmus, and a French Revolution without Rousseau, Emmeline Pankhurst did not make the women's suffrage movement. In his words, "it was too big a thing for that . . . but if she did not make the movement, it was she who set the heather on fire" ("Votes for Women . . ." 1930). Baldwin's insistence on Pankhurst the conflagration, the abstract force that would not be resisted, mirrors the movement within Suffragette Fellowship celebrations of her birthday from the personal to the ideal. The immediacy of early celebrations, where friends met to memorialize the individual who was Emmeline Pankhurst, disappeared in later meetings, where Pankhurst emerged as an abstraction, an ideal driving political action. Accounts of early commemorations evoke the spirit of a wake, where friends gather to share memories of a lost loved one, savoring and sharing stories of experiences with a now-departed friend, while later accounts dismiss the laying of flowers and focus instead on the opportunity provided by the occasion for women's continuing political activism.

Other cultural productions concerning the suffrage movement in the years following 1930 followed this pattern. "I Knew Mrs. Pankhurst," Member of Parliament Thelma Cazalet Keir's 1937 BBC radio address, asserted the influence of Mrs. Pankhurst, the woman, upon Keir's decision to enter politics (Keir 1937). By 1968, however, the image on the stamp issued to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of women's suffrage in Britain featured not a photographic likeness of any one of the leaders of the major suffrage organizations, but instead reproduced a photographic image of the torso and head of the statue of Emmeline Pankhurst.²⁵ Increasingly, the statue of Emmeline Pankhurst stood in for the women's suffage movement as a whole. Television and radio broadcasts played a pivotal role in that development. Mrs. Pankhurst's annual birthday celebration became an occasion for the annual airing of suffragette memories on the BBC's radio program, "Woman's Hour," during which speakers rarely neglected to mention the statue and the ritual celebrations.²⁶ The BBC televised the 1950 Birthday commemoration at the statue, bringing a wide range of Britons into contact with Mrs. Pankhurst, the symbol, and endowing the ceremony with the prestige of air-time.²⁷ And the passage of time meant that those who might contest the use of Emmeline Pankhurst as a symbol for first-wave feminism based on the authority of their own experiences of that movement, were simply not present to do so, as most of those women had died by the late-1970s. Representation of the suffrage movement in Britain between 1930 and 1980 as the preserve of the WSPU under the direction of Emmeline Pankhurst did not pass entirely unchallenged.²⁸ But champions of the WSPU proved to be more persistent and more successful at putting their versions of the past before the public. Officials in the radio and television sections of the BBC quickly learned that divisions within the prewar movement affected the production of programs decades later. Factionalization among former suffragettes shaped a TV script, undertaken by writer Jill Craigie and producer Norman Swallow in 1949. Swallow wrote to Craigie in the course of negotiations: "It must be remembered that the Movement split on several occasions, thus leaving a residue of ill-feeling which blocks any attempt at literal truth."²⁹ Others at the BBC shared Swallow's assessment of the difficulties posed by working with the various groupings of former suffrage activists. BBC officials learned they could avoid controversy by abstaining from comprehensive treatments of the movement, reducing much of the programming on the prewar campaign to what former suffragette Teresa Billington-Greig later called the "purely personal story on I-went-to-prison lines."³⁰

In the period following the Second World War, a public memory of the suffrage movement crystallized, celebrating the contributions of those women led and inspired by Emmeline Pankhurst. This recounting of the suffrage movement, produced for British domestic consumption, circulated among tourists in the metropolis through guidebooks and that very public piece of statuary adjacent to perhaps the premier tourist attraction in the nation: the Houses of Parliament. The incorporation of Emmeline Pankhurst and the spirit of revolt into a constitutional narrative ultimately obscured the more revolutionary potential of the enfranchisement of women, as well as the contributions of large numbers of other women active in the movement. A journey across the Atlantic would transform her into a symbol of women's political activism more generally.

"Hands Across the Water": The Figure of the Suffragette in Anglo-America

Walt Disney's Mary Poppins made explicit a connection that would take root in the popular imagination, a connection between first- and second-wave feminism, or a lineage from Emmeline Pankhurst to Betty Friedan. The film received international distribution in 1964, and its receipts at the box office soon outstripped those of all other Disney productions, generating $31 million in domestic release and $45 million internationally (Maltin 1995, 232). A thorough-going media blitz in major American, European, and Asian cities accompanied the film's release, and included the mass marketing of merchandise bearing the imprint of Walt Disney's Mary Poppins, as well as multiple recordings of the film's score.31

Viewing this film as a cultural artifact of the 1960s is essential to explaining what had become of the figure of the suffragette in the almost fifty years between the film's release and Anglo-American women's political enfranchisement. Seeing the film as performing cultural work, that is, as expressing a society's world view at a particular moment, brings us one step closer to understanding how a seemingly radical figure like Pankhurst could be invoked so comfortably by a Conservative prime minister some seventy-five years after her death.³² Walt Disney's Mary Poppins popularized the equation of the Edwardian suffragette with the contemporary Anglo-American liberated woman by the transposition of an English children's story through a thoroughly American consciousness. Disney's use of the comic mode in the film rescaled explicitly political conflict to the realm of the familial, humorously subordinating women's political activism in the service of the family, thereby domesticating it. The film also subordinated the demands of middle-class masculinity, notably professionalism, or careerism, to the family, to great comedic effect. The film ultimately assimilated all rebellion, domestic or otherwise, into a revised order, with traditional gender, racial,and class hierarchies intact (Cuomo 1995, 216).

A clearer sense of the cultural work performed by the film emerges from a comparison of the children's books written by P.L. Travers and the film produced by Walt Disney Studios in 1964.³³ P.L. Travers' first four Mary Poppins books, published between 1934 and 1952,³⁴ have been characterized by critic Steffan Bergsten as fitting into the genre of "the fantastic tale," where "everyday reality exists side by side with the supernatural and the marvellous" (Bergsten 1978, 8). Travers locates her stories in the 1930s. The Banks family, English and middle-class, resides in the suburbs of a great city which remains unnamed, but whose cultural geography leads us to infer is London. Appropriately for their class, Mr. Banks commutes to work in the City, and Mrs. Banks manages the household with the assistance of a nanny, cook, and maids. All of this, however, remains incidental to the primary purpose of Travers' stories, which is to allow free expression of the adventures Mary Poppins undertakes with the four Banks children. Travers' tales celebrate the access children have to alternative ways of apprehending their surroundings; the world of adults rarely intrudes. That world exists only as a narrative device, to locate the protagonists of the stories in time and space. In contrast, despite its Edwardian setting, Walt Disney's Mary Poppins is a film rooted in the complexities of the Cold War American middle-class family. The film concerns itself, above all, with a late-1950s American ideal: family togetherness (Mintz and Kellog 1988, 180). Contemporary commentators inevitably made this connection. In a 1968 review of a revival of the film, critic Bob Sokolsky observed that Walt Disney's Mary Poppins "strikes a mighty blow for togetherness, clearly indicating that business and good causes must become secondary to the welfare of one's children."³⁵ P.L. Travers commented early, and frequently, in the film's production upon the American sensibility shaping the film. In a series of conversations recorded in April 1961 with Richard and Robert Sherman, Disney's song-writers for the cinematic adaptation, Travers continually expressed her concern with maintaining the "Englishness" of Mary Poppins' character. Travers enunciated aspects of that national character for the Shermans: Bert, the Cockney jack-of-all-trades, is acquainted with Mary Poppins, but is "not on her level." Nor would Mary Poppins "put herself on the same social level as Mr. Banks." Travers' understanding of behavior appropriate to Mary Poppins' class position differed from that of the Sherman brothers as well. At one point in their discussion, Travers asserted of Mary Poppins that she would not sing; rather, she "taps neatly with a teaspoon . . . or her foot."³⁶ One doesn't have to look far beyond Dick Van Dyke's portrayal of Bert, tripping over his American accent, to see the way in which American democratic notions of classlessness are employed to rewrite the class-consciousness of the original books. And Van Dyke's later portrayal of the chairman of the bank, the elder Mr. Dawes, occupying the diametrically opposed class position to that held by Bert, points as well to the American desire to see class relationships as artificial and mutable.

One consequence of adapting English stories for a contemporary American audience was that the Sherman brothers felt compelled to explain Mrs. Banks' activities outside the home. Over the course of their discussions with Travers, the Shermans raised the possibility that the Banks' household requirement of a nanny was due alternately to Mrs. Banks' attendance at flower society meetings, or to her work with Abyssinian orphans. Travers' response, "why do you want her to work so hard?", points to the fundamental discrepancy between her vision of the English family and theirs. Travers' portrayal of the Banks' household, nostalgic and Victorian, sits uneasily with the Shermans' sense, shaped by the historical context of Cold War North America, that women's--and men's--primary responsibility was to create happy families.³⁷

As described by promotional literature for the film, the portrayal of Mrs. Banks as a suffragette occurred accidentally. When Glynis Johns, who would portray Mrs. Banks in the film, discovered that Julie Andrews and not she would portray Mary Poppins, Disney scrambled to make the smaller role appealing to the more established actress. Disney's promise of a new song especially written for Johns put the Shermans to the test, as they had largely completed the score and no such song then existed (West 1989, 25-6). As neither the Travers' books nor the 1961 conversations between author and song writers mention suffragettes, the song appears to have been penned as the film went into production. By the time the film hit the screen, Mrs. Banks' overriding passion in life had become the suffrage movement. In an opening scene of the film, she extols the virtues of one Emmeline Pankhurst in a song celebrating the ubiquity of women's demand for equality. The political seriousness of Mrs. Banks' paean to Pankhurst is undercut, for while singing, Mrs. Banks raises her dress to reveal her bloomers. This act provides a fascinating prefiguration of the trivialization of "Women's Libbers" as "bra-burners," a synechdoche similarly reducing women's political activism to the public exposure of their undergarments.

Mrs. Banks' song hints at the legacy of her political involvement as well. The suffragettes' great-granddaughters, she claims, will acknowledge the work done by their foremothers to gain political rights for women. These lyrics link the suffragette agitation of the early twentieth century to the nascent feminist consciousness articulated in The Feminine Mystique (1963) through its assertion of generational bonds: Mrs. Banks' great-granddaughters are those very women to whom Friedan will address her lament. The film's trivialization of Mrs. Banks' political activism, with its simultaneous assertion of generational bonds between women, points to a profound ambivalence within American culture of the late-1950s and early-1960s around the relationship between women's political activism, public roles, and familial responsibilities (Meyerowitz 1994, 231), an ambivalence it eagerly projects onto Edwardian Britain.

The primary focus of the film, however, lies in Mr. Banks' relationship to his children, and the toll his worklife takes on fatherhood. One reviewer noted in September 1964: "The film's object lesson is complete in the last scene, when Mr. Banks is seen in the middle of the work day out flying a kite with his two children. And amid all the color, animation, music, and make-believe, Mr. Disney has a lesson for all fathers."³⁸ Mr. Banks' education unfolds as a gradual progression through the film, from his early celebration of masculine power to a more sober realization of engaged fatherhood by the end of the film. In his opening musical number, Mr. Banks boasts of the privileges attending middle-class masculinity in Edwardian England. By mid-film, however, he commiserates with Bert over his paternal responsibilities, and eventually, in a dark and gloomy boardroom, his inability to control his children results in the systematic stripping of the attributes of his masculinity: the flower from his lapel is removed, his bowler hat is crushed, his umbrella is turned inside out, and he is sacked.

The film's concern with family togetherness forms part of a wider cultural discourse on the impact of careerism on the American family, and of the consequences of the suburbanization of the middle class, as middle-class whites deserted American cities throughout the 1950s (Fishman 1987; Jackson 1985). As Steven Mintz and Susan Kellogg have argued, a cadre of contemporary social commentators, including sociologists, novelists, and architects "charged that the new suburbs [of American cities] fostered conformity, isolation, and matriarchy." According to these experts, commuting to and from work left fathers little time for their families and pushed mothers into the unnatural role of acting as both mother and father (Mintz and Kellogg 1988, 184). And, as Ruth Feldstein has observed, suburban matriarchy was becoming associated increasingly with black pathology (Feldstein 1994, 269). In this context, it is significant that the film juxtaposes Mr. Banks' crisis with the apparent freedom of movement enjoyed by the chimney sweeps, who bear race and class in the film. The figure of the chimney sweep first appears when Bert materializes in front of the children as they flee the bank (and their father's unbridled careerism) and rush wildly into the bowels of the East End. Bert looms as a frightening apparition in blackface, reminding us of the traditional designation of the East End as the Dark Continent (Brantlinger 1988, 100; Rogin 1996, 18). Class and race intersect in the sweeps' strenuous dance scene across the rooftops of London borrowing heavily from West Side Story (1961).³⁹ In Walt Disney's Mary Poppins, the chimney sweep functions as white middle-class masculinity's Other: urban, black, working class, disenfranchised and, if we listen to Bert's reassurances to Mr. Banks upon the chimney sweeps' descent into the drawing room via the chimney, irresponsible, and not family men.⁴⁰

The film's final scene restores the family's natural order. Mr. Banks, newly fired and still wearing his emasculated bowler, joins Mrs. Banks and the children in the park, while Mary Poppins unsentimentally prepares to leave, her work done. Mr. Banks' former employers offer him a partnership in the bank.⁴¹ Mrs. Banks proffers her political sash as a tail for the children's kite, a more appropriate use for that emblem of feminine independence, we are to gather, now that her proper role in the family has been assured through Mary Poppins' intervention.

Understanding the domestic struggle within the Banks' family in the context of a perceived crisis in the American family in the 1960s appreciates only part of the cultural work performed by this film. As significant was its production at the height of the Cold War, and the insight it provides into the U.S. perspective on the Anglo-American dialogue known as "the special relationship." Walt Disney's Mary Poppins displays the American propensity in the years after 1945 to lavish affection on Britain as the film humorously valorizes--and thereby renders harmless--independence struggles within the domestic body politic. Loving depiction of the landscape of London in Disney films like One Hundred and One Dalmatians in 1961, and Walt Disney's Mary Poppins three years later, underscores an affection for Britain on the part of these American mythmakers, perhaps due to the parallels implicit at that historical moment: the decline and ascent of British and American empires, respectively (Hathaway 1990; Horne 1986, 92-101).

"The Special Relationship" made up a complicated brew. Alongside the much touted anti-colonialism of American politicians and the public existed fierce pride in American nuclear supremacy, intense anxiety over Soviet competition, and heavy draughts of nostalgia for a simpler world order, one in which the hegemony of the British empire served as a model. However, American political scientists' admiration for the British party system, and widespread American regard for British civility, parliamentary democracy, and the rule of law, cannot, and must not, be seen as distinct from American respect and envy for the most important mechanism of British rule in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries--its colonial empire--as they were mutually constitutive (Hathaway 1990, 57; Samuel 1989, xxvii). Nor should we underestimate Anglo-American public consciousness of the passage of the mantle of imperialism from Britain to the United States. Prime Minister Harold Macmillan eloquently described that changing relationship, when he noted of Britain after Suez that "'we are the Greeks of the Hellenistic age: the power has passed from us to Rome's equivalent, the United States of America, and we can at most aspire to civilise and occasionally to influence them'" (quoted in Hitchens 1990, 24).

Nostalgia for empire in Walt Disney's Mary Poppins complements what historian Elaine Tyler May has described as forms of "domestic containment" in postwar American culture: an emphasis upon "early marriage, sexual containment and traditional gender roles" as a means of bolstering American men and women against the twin threats of atomic war and communism (May 1985, 91, 102). And, as Ruth Feldstein has argued, "when the quest for civil rights is considered part of the 1950s, the political implications of domestic containment widen" to include the preservation of racial hierarchies (Feldstein 1994, 268). Walt Disney's Mary Poppins marries domestic containment to imperial ascendancy, demonstrating how the American century would continue: with hierarchical assumptions about families and nations intact. In this Anglo-American dialogue, anxieties about family life and the further expansion of democracy pivot around the figure of the suffragette. As the quintessential "new woman," precursor of the 1960s liberated woman, the suffragette offers something of an English morality tale, a model both to be, and not to be, emulated. The figure of the suffragette emerges by the early-1960s as a symbol of modernity, standing in for democratization and political progress at a remove from then current political struggles on the part of African Americans. Anxieties about shifting configurations of dominance and subordination along the lines of race, class, and gender find expression in a figure removed far enough historically to pose no threat to the established order, yet seemingly radical enough to denote progress.

The Suffragette and the Nation

Why and how, then, should we consider Emmeline Pankhurst, Stanley Baldwin, Walt Disney's Mary Poppins, and Margaret Thatcher within the same semiotic domain? Certainly, the figure of the suffragette in Walt Disney's Mary Poppins acts as a fulcrum for specifically American anxieties about postwar challenges to gender, class, and racial hierarchies. But the film reached a far wider audience than merely the American movie-going public. It circulated, and continues to circulate, internationally. What connects this film to other twentieth-century representations of the suffragette is the cultural work these do in celebrating the women's suffrage movement in Britain as a unified campaign under the leadership of a strong, charismatic woman. Emmeline Pankhurst the woman, and the statue, situated at the center of converging understandings of women, the political, and the historical, serves as the suffragette par excellence. Lady Thatcher's comments at Pankhurst's statue in 1993, Walt Disney's tribute to those indomitable campaigners for women's suffrage, and Stanley Baldwin's speech at the unveiling in 1930, all contribute to a process underway since 1930: the domestication of Emmeline Pankhurst, and, by extension, of women's political activism.

Walt Disney's Mary Poppins quite literally domesticates women's political rebellion, moving it back into the private sphere, but by then, women's political activism had been domesticated in another sense as well. By 1964, women's political activism in Britain had assumed a weight in the Anglo-American imagination, where it had become synonymous with the history of women, and not seen to be so merely by proponents of radicalism, but by conservatives as well. The conflation of these categories--women's political activism in Britain, women's history, and indeed, progress toward democracy--underwrites what historian Antoinette Burton has critiqued as the essentialization of a "women's" history that is implicitly white, western, and Anglo-Saxon (Burton 1992). All of this further consolidates the myth, propounded by the suffragettes themselves, that England was the "storm-centre" of an international movement, and thus, in some sense, the originary point of feminism.⁴² If Britain were the birthplace of feminism, it is clear why Anglo-American feminists of the 1970s might want to claim a lineage to Emmeline Pankhurst, as a kind of foremother (Sarah 1983). By seeing the figure of the suffragette as a cultural agent of limited reform, a "pioneer of progress," Thatcher celebrated the movement "led" by Emmeline Pankhurst for reasons remarkably similar to Stanley Baldwin's. Suffragette militancy, quelled by love of the nation, and in Walt Disney's Mary Poppins, by love of the family, restores the narrative of British constitutionalism as a gradual, nonviolent progression through the assimilation of selected, disruptive elements.

Thus, the nation happily incorporates the suffragette, reconstituting her as a bulwark to the status quo. This analysis makes explicable recent paeans to the suffragettes made by Conservative Member of Parliament Teresa Gorman. On the anniversary of Emmeline Pankhurst's birthday in 1993, Gorman introduced a bill to increase the number of women in Parliament. In her comments before the House, Gorman asserted that "the suffragettes were not militant feminists, but Christian women who believed that democracy was part of the Christian message, which taught that women were equal to men."⁴³ The suffragette appealed to on that day in 1993, as in Disney's film 30 years earlier, and like that celebrated by Stanley Baldwin in 1930, arises from a conservative articulation of the nation, one in which the ultimate triumph of British institutions allows for celebration of the suffragette's "willingness to struggle, sacrifice, and thus contribute to 'nation-building'" (Morgan 1994, 211). Women's domestic rebellion paradoxically shores up the nation, and a range of representations of the campaign for women's parliamentary enfranchisement operate to preserve connections between Britishness, women's history, and political progress, without disturbing foundational assumptions about power and authority in modern British--and American--society.

Laura Mayhall is currently completing a book-length manuscript on gender and citizenship in Victorian and Edwardian Britain. Correspondence should be sent to Mayhall at Department of History, The Catholic University of America, Washington, DC 20064; Mayhall@CUA.edu

Versions of this paper were presented at the North American Conference on British Studies (1995), and in the Library of Congress Scholars' Colloquia (1993). Numerous individuals have commented upon or contributed to this project. My thanks to Susan Groag Bell, David Doughan, Michael Dunn, Ian Christopher Fletcher, Carol Harrison, Jim Lehning, Fred Leventhal, Mary Sheila MacMahon, the Millsaps College Works-in-Progress Colloquium, Bryan Murdock, Maura O'Connor, Susan Pedersen, Paul Seaver, Michael Saler, Martha Sledge, Dan Sherman, Peter Stansky, Chris Waters, and Jessica Weiss. My thanks also to Claire Midgely for sharing her unpublished work, the two anonymous reviewers of this journal for their comments, and archivists Jacqueline Kavanagh (BBC Written Archives Centre) and Jonathan Franklin (Heinz Archive and Library, National Portrait Gallery). Permissions to quote material were granted by the British Broadcasting Corporation Written Archives Centre, Caversham, England, and the Disney Publishing Group, Burbank, California; the Fawcett Library, London Guildhall University, granted permission to reprint the photograph taken at the statue of Emmeline Pankhurst in 1930 (Muriel Pierotti Papers, 7/AMP/D1/4).

Notes

1. Accompanying the ceremony was an exhibit, underwritten by British Gas and British Telecom, "Commemorating the Achievements of Women in Politics in the 75 Years Since They Got the Vote" (July 12-16, 1993). Emmeline Pankhurst, and her organization, the Women's Social and Political Union, featured prominently in this account. My thanks to Lara Pearce of Teresa Gorman's office, and to Diane Atkinson, Education Department, Museum of London, for sharing their expertise.

2. The literature on the women's suffrage movement in Britain is extensive. For recent influential work, see Holton 1996; Burton 1994; Kent 1993.

3. Correspondence between Emmeline Pankhurst and David Lloyd George, 14 and 15 October, 1915, David Lloyd George Papers, D/11/2/24 and /25, House of Lords Record Office, London.

4. Emmeline Pankhurst, Britannia (August 18, 1916); quoted in Rosen, 260.

5. Pankhurst to Margaret Rhondda, 30 November 1925, quoted in Smyth 1934, 259.

6. Of course, part of the context for the commission can be understood as a function of the WSPU's self-presentation; see Tickner 1988. But the pre-war context fails to explain how and why both other organizations and leaders disappeared from view after 1918. The process by which Emmeline Pankhurst came to represent the women's suffrage movement resulted not from her actual leadership during the suffrage campaign; rather, the representation of women's suffrage by this one woman must be seen as a political process serving a variety of interests.

7. Suffragette Fellowship Constitution and Rules (n.d.), Teresa Billington-Greig papers, Box 401, Fawcett Library, London Guildhall University (hereafter Fawcett Library).

8. Quoted in E. Sylvia Pankhurst 1977, 372.

9. The Fellowship memorialized other suffragettes as well; see Stanley and Morley 1988. See also Edith How Martyn, "S.F. Memorials" (n.d.), Edith How Martyn papers, Box 385, 12/2, Fawcett Library; "Roll of Honour: Suffragette Prisoners, 1905-1914" (n.d.), Fawcett Library.

10. As announced in The Times (London), 26 January 1929, Georgina Brackenbury painted the portrait "from life," and J.P. Allan created the headstone. Both artists were former suffragettes. The role played by the portrait of Pankhurst in shaping the public memory of the suffrage movement remains elusive. Reproductions were available soon after the Gallery's receipt of the painting, but figures for production and sales of these images are not available. See correspondence between Georgina Brackenbury and the gallery's director, Henry Mendelssohn Hake, 3 October 1929, Heinz Archive, National Portrait Gallery, London.

11. Pankhurst's statue, for example, is one of only four such monuments to women highlighted in Kent 1937.

12. "The Mrs. Pankhurst Memorial," Public Record Office, Kew (PRO), WORK 20/188.

13. Phone call from Marshall to the Ministry of Works, 29 June 1928, PRO, WORK 20/188.

14. Internal memoranda, Ministry of Works, November 1928 to January 1929, PRO, WORK 20/188.

15. The Times (London), 26 January 1929.

16. Lionel Earle to the Secretary, Royal Fine Art Commission, 6 February 1929, PRO, WORK 20/188. Arthur Walker cast the statue in bronze, and Herbert Walker made the plinth of portland stone. The site chosen for the statue stirred controversy again, when the gardens were redesigned in the 1950s to accommodate a grouping of Rodin's Burghers of Calais. Indignation on the part of former suffragettes over the prospect of moving the statue away from the Houses of Parliament resulted in its current, and closer, placement. See the letter signed by Nancy Astor, M.P., et al., in The Times (London), 30 August 1955.

17. 18 November 1929 estimate, John Edginton and Sons, Ltd., PRO, WORK 20/188; Katherine Marshall, "Suffragette Escapes and Adventures," typescript, in the Harvester microfilm collection, "The Social and Political Emancipation of Women: The Suffragette Fellowship Collection at the Museum of London," 50.82/1130, p. 102. Ironically, red is the liturgical color associated with martyrdom, and would have been appropriate for the occasion. However, red, white, and green had been the colors adopted by the NUWSS in the prewar movement.

18. The Times (London), 7 March 1930.

19. Baldwin's speech at the ceremony, reported in The Times (London), 7 March 1930.

20. Historians disagree about the impact of the war on the extension of the parliamentary suffrage to women. Kent (1994) succinctly summarizes these positions, 76-86.

21. "The Mrs. Pankhurst Memorial."

22. The Women's Freedom League Bulletin, 28 October 1955.

23. Accounts of these meetings can be found in The Women's Freedom League Bulletin, 1933-1961; Suffragette Fellowship Newsletter and Calling All Women, 1935-1977; and in major newspapers, such as The Times (London), 1928-1977. Meetings also took place in Australia during the Second World War and immediately after; see Edith How Martyn papers, Box 385, Fawcett Library.

24. Women's Freedom League Bulletin, 29 July 1960.

25. The 9d stamp was issued on 29 May 1968 from Aldeburgh, the birthplace of Millicent Garrett Fawcett. See The Fawcett Society Newsletter (10 April 1968), Muriel Pierotti papers, Box 595, 7/AMP/D3/1, Fawcett Library.

26. "The Woman's Hour" files, BBC Written Archives Centre, Caversham, England.

27. Leaflet advertising the Suffragette Fellowship's celebration of the "Anniversary of Mrs. Pankhurst's Birthday," 14 July 1950, in Edith How Martyn papers, Box 385, Fawcett Library.

28. WSPU predominance in the mainstream press and in historical accounts marks a theme in the writings of several former suffrage activists; see Moyes 1971, and Stella Newsome to Billington-Greig, 28 August 1959, in Teresa Billington-Greig papers, Box 404, Fawcett Library.

29. Norman Swallow to Jill Craigie, BBC Written Archives Centre, T4/71-1949.

30. Teresa Billington-Greig to Christabel Pankhurst, 26 October 1956. Fawcett Autograph Collection, Fawcett Library.

31. The New York Times estimated that between 1 September and 31 December 1964, the "public would receive 'a billion and a half impressions of Mary Poppins'" (24 July 1964), including books, toys, party goods, and apparel bearing the imprint of the film (Box Office [17 August 1964]). Cash Box reported that more than six million copies of at least three different recordings based on the film's score had been sold in the United States, Europe, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand (4 June 1966).

32. The concept of "cultural work" belongs to the critic Jane Tompkins (1985). My thanks to Dan Sherman for suggesting this productive line of enquiry.

33. Critical commentary comparing the film to the book has been largely unkind. Bergsten notes that "the film version of 1964 was not a very happy treatment of the book, but it did stimulate wider interest" (Bergsten 1978, 7). Less generous is the assessment that the film "'mongrelized the classics'" (Bart 1965, 34). Travers early and consistently voiced her disapproval of the final product, even though she had approved the adaptation in April 1961. Eventually, Travers requested that Disney limit mention in the press of her contribution to the film to the publication of the original books (Walt Disney Inter-office memo [7 September 1972], Walt Disney Archives).

34. Mary Poppins (1934); Mary Poppins Comes Back (1935); Mary Poppins Opens the Door (1943); and Mary Poppins in the Park (1952). Patricia Demers has argued that these four books "form a solid unit," following similar plot and narrative development (Demers 1991, 70).

35. Bob Sokolsky, review of Walt Disney's Mary Poppins, Buffalo Courier-Express (25 January 1968). In Mary Poppins, Clippings Book (domestic), M25, Walt Disney Archives, Burbank, CA.

36. Recorded conversations between P.L. Travers and Richard and Robert Sherman, April 1961 (hereafter Travers/Sherman conversations), TR136 and TR 139, Walt Disney Archives. (c)Disney Enterprises, Inc. Scriptwriters for the film were Don da Gradi and Bill Walsh.

37. Travers/Sherman conversations, TR137 and TR141. (c)Disney Enterprises, Inc.

38. "'Mary Poppins,' A Disney Fantasy for Dad Too," National Observer (14 September 1964, 17).

39. Toronto Daily Star (24 October 1964); The Daily Cinema (2 October 1964).

40. The dramatic device bringing the sweeps into the Banks' household reveals the connection made between race and class in this film. Convinced he is under seige by "Hottentots," the Banks' neighbor, Admiral Boom, fires his cannon at the sweeps as they dance across the rooftops.

41. That play brings Mr. Banks back into the family is no coincidence, for it was through play that postwar experts urged American fathers to connect with their children; see Weiss 1998. Mr. Banks' bowler hat stands in contrast to the stovepipe hats worn by his colleagues, alerting us to the modernity of his masculinity; see Robinson 1993.

42. This claim is attributed to Carrie Chapman Catt; see Burton 1994, 200. The work of historians on feminism within an international context challenges this claim. See especially Mohanty, et al. 1991.

43. Teresa Gorman, "Speech to the House of Commons," 14 July 1993. Parliamentary Debates, Commons, 6th ser., vol. 228 (1992-93), col.985.

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