Hester Bateman's neo-classical silver art

Bateman home and workshop
107 Bunhill Row Islington, London

Wo­men had long operated successful businesses in the early English gold­smith­ing trade. But Hester Needham (1708–94) came from a poor family with no for­mal education. At 24, she married John Bateman who worked in gold and silver eg watch chains. He died in 1760, then Hes­ter took over.

Bateman's house was in Bunhill Row Islington, the ground floor forming the workshop as was typical with Georgian bus­inesses. Bateman never re­­­married and took over John’s silver­smithing workshop, init­ially as­sist­ed by two sons, Jonathan and Peter, and an apprentice. Bunhill Row is now a Grade II Listed Building. 

  
In 1761 she regist­ered her own mark at Goldsmiths’ Hall London and over 26 years, she registered more marks. British hall­marks were a safeguard for purchasers of silver articles for hund­reds of years, and is still an important form of con­sum­er pro­tection. Examine Hester’s HB hallmark. 

check the hallmarks on Hester Bateman art objects: 

her initials, date, silver standard

By the C18th the term goldsmith was applied to an artist admit­ted to full memb­er­ship of The Goldsmiths’ Co. Yet the term was also applied to a wide range of roles related to the precious met­als industry, from refining and casting.. to being a plate worker. By the mid C18th the term goldsmith implied a retailer, while the term silver­smith referred to a manufacturer or artisan. Docu­ments relating to the Bate­man enterprise generally referred to Bateman as a gold­sm­ith.

In any case, by the later C18th the maker’s mark didn’t always signify the artist who made the object; it may have been the patron or retail­er. As the bus­­in­ess owner, Bateman was responsible to the Assay Office, the organisation ens­ur­ing that all legal require­ments had been complied with. Thus during the first period (1761-74) of the Bateman enterprise, little Bateman work was known, ? because the shop was busy with work commissioned by other silversmiths.

But from 1774 on, Bateman began purchasing pre-prepared light weight sheet silver from the Birmingham manufacturer Boulton & Foth­ergill, and focused on assem­b­ling, decorating and finishing works for sale. She took full advantage of new mechanised mass-production tech­nol­ogies eg the introduct­ion of steam-powered rolling machines to create much thinner gauge sheet sil­ver than available before. It also reflected the emergence of a new branch for silver, that of low-level mass production, which enabled Bateman and others to compete success­fully with the new Shef­field plate trade. Sheffield plate ref­erred to a technique developed in the 1740s of plating/fusing a copper alloy ingot with a thin sheet of silver to produce flatware and tablewares looking like sterling silver, but cheaper.

Note her broad range of dom­estic silver of elegant simplicity i.e wares for the table, including cutlery, salvers, cruet stands, jugs, salts cellars, mustard pots, tankards, tea and coffee services, civic and church pl­ate. The speeding up of the Indus­t­rial Rev­olution saw many families leaving the land and migrating to the cities for work, promp­ting a general inc­r­ease in education and wealth through­out soc­iety. And a rising middle class with strong social aspir­at­ions. The wide output of domestic wares by the Bateman workshop re­f­l­ected the so­c­ial change and Bateman’s servicing of a growing middle-class market

Despite tea having arrived in Europe earlier, by the late C18th it was still very exp­ensive. So the lady of the house pres­ided over the prep­ar­at­ion and serving of tea each aft­er­­noon, a desirable social ritual.

Bate­man understood that her workshop had to produce all the tea ser­v­ices elements: tea kettle on stand/samovar; teapot on a footed salver; milk jug; sugar bowl; sugar tongs; tea­spoons and lemon strain­er. The cups and saucers in tea serv­ices were preferably Chinese porcelain.

                                            

Bateman. Georgian silver cream jug, London, 1779.

pear shaped, pedestal foot, chased rural design,11.8cm high 

Antiques Atlas    

                      

Bateman. George III silver sugar basket, London, 1779.

Urn-shape, swing handle, vertical piercing alternating with bands of pierced cornflower, 

pier­c­ed cornflower footband, swing handle, crest eng­raved, cobalt blue liner.           

Afternoon tea prompted very changes for women of social standing. When her shop became successful, she specialised in tableware i.e table ut­en­sils for holding, serving and hand­l­ing food and drink. Working with grace­ful and refined shapes, her tableware includ­ed many types of cont­ain­ers, spoons and forks/flatware, knives and a range of accessories.

Bateman. Silver jug 1783

Waisted upper section with beaded rim, a domed lid with urn finial, 

mounted with fruitwood handle, applied bands of beading and circul­ar foot, 30 cm high 

Hester’s designs were increasingly influenced by late C18th Neo-class­ical taste, made famous by architect Robert Ad­am. Her designs ref­lected fashionable - oval, classical vase and helmet shapes, brig­ht punching, en­graving and pierced decoration of fol­iage, fes­t­oons, med­allions and shells. Many works were edged with fine bead­ing and surmounted with urn fin­ials. Machine piercing helped her produce large numbers of objects at fair prices and ensured rapid sales.

After retir­ing in 1790, the business was continued by her sons, Jon­a­than and Peter who’d serv­ed apprenticeships and were fully qu­al­ified silver­sm­iths. They continued a succ­ess­ful fam­ily ent­er­p­r­ise in central London, supp­lying elegant tableware to the middle classes. The sons were lat­er suc­ceeded by other family memb­ers who ran the bus­in­ess: daughter­-in-law Ann, Jonathan's wid­ow (worked 1748–1813), grand­­son William (worked 1774–1850) and great-grandson William Jnr (worked 1839-43).

Conclusion
I saw my first Hester Bateman silver at London Silver Vaults, showing all the best Hug­uenot and early C18th British silversmiths in London. I fell in love. 

Read Philippa Glanville & Jennifer Goldsborough, Women Sil­ver­smiths 1685–1845 (Thames & Hudson, London, 1990). I found at least 3 other famous female silversmiths in London in Hes­t­er’s era, but she stood out because of her 1] use of modern mech­an­ised pro­­d­uc­t­ion, 2] stunning out­put and 3] financial success! She antic­ip­at­ed soc­iety’s chan­ging expect­­at­ions and responded well. Renowned for her ornamental silver­ware and flatware, she is now seen as one of England’s most succ­essful late C18th silver­smiths. 

Peter, Ann and Jonathan's son William Bateman, London

Sterling Silver Tea & Coffee Sets, 1815

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Australia thanks Karl, Slawa & Eva Duldig

                     

Slawa on Sigmund Jaray furniture in the Duldig flat in Vienna in 1931

Slawa, with her sister Rella in Vienna, 1938.

Slawa and Karl in Vienna in 1938.

Karl Duldig (1902-1986) was born in Przemysl (now Poland). In 1914 his family moved to Vienna where he learned to love sculp­ture, studying later at Kunstgewerbeschule under An­ton Hanak (1921-5). Karl saluted Hanak’s teaching in Crouch­ing Fig­ure 1923, car­v­ed from soapstone.

He continued studying at the Akademie der Bildenen Künste (1925-9). In 1931 in Vienna, Karl married fellow art student Slawa Horowitz (1902-75). Sigmund Jaray, famed Austrian furniture des­igners, was com­miss­ion­ed by Slawa to design furniture for their flat, decorated in the Vien­nese Workshops style. Mean­time Sl­awa invented amodern foldable umbrel­la, hold­ing the patent for 10 years.

The musical examined pre-war Vienna, with fluky ev­ents that helped them survive, starting from Nazi Austria af­t­er the 1938 Anschluss. And 1938 was the year daughter Eva was born! In 3 con­­tinents & 3 gen­erat­ions, the musical reflect­ed both the losses that dis­located fam­il­ies suff­er­ed, and the ch­all­enges faced when ad­apt­ing to new lives.

Like others in 1938 & 1939, the Duldigs had to give their surviv­ing assets to Nazis and flee! Sl­awa's adored sister and bro­ther in law Aurelie & Ignaz Laisné survived the Holocaust by hiding in Paris, with Karl’s artworks stashed in their cellar.

There was a brief time in Switzerland when Karl was playing in a ten­n­is tournament. In 1938 the fam­ily grabbed the chance to get to Singa­p­ore, working in an art school in the British colony. But in Sep 1940 they were decl­ared Enemy Aliens by the Br­it­ish who dep­ort­ed them to Aus­t­ralia.

Because Australia was also at war, the family was interned at Tatura Camp in rural Victoria for 2 years, The camp was peace­ful but isol­at­ed. While Karl did kitchen duty in 2nd AIF 8th Employment Co., he carved Mother and Child 1942 from pot­atoes with a pocket knife. Later he cast them in bronze.

Released in April 1942, the family settled in urban Melbour­ne and be­c­ame Aust­ral­­ian citizens post-war. Karl held his first solo show at Koz­minsky’s (1947) and became art master (1945-67) at a prominant Mel­b­our­ne gram­mar school, while creating a small ceramics busin­ess. Karl ex­hib­ited re­g­ularly with the Victor­ian Sculptors’ Soc­iety and the imp­ortant Ad­el­aide Festival of Arts from 1960. Slawa’s work app­ear­ed in the major NGV 1990 exhibition, Vienna & Early C20th.

Eva de Jong-Duldig's book, 2017

Driftwood: escape and survival through art, was a book written by Eva Duldig in 2017. It followed the artists’ lives in pre-war Vien­na and their es­cape from Europe to Melbourne. And it offered an insight into the cultural life of Aus­t­ralia at a time of enormous political and art­is­tic change; a profound tran­­­sforming cont­rib­ution to the life of the nation through tal­ented immigrants. Note the enormous contr­ib­­ution mid­dle Euro­peans made to the national art scene. Yosl Berg­ner (left War­saw 1937); Wolfgang Siev­ers (Ger­many 1938); Ludwig Hir­schfeld-Mack (Berlin 1938); Mark Strizic (Germany post-war).

Driftwood was a new Australian musical, based on Eva’s book. Ad­ap­t­ed for the stage by play­wrig­ht Jane Bodie, it featured original music by Anthony Barn­hill, with lyrics by sop­rano Tania de Jong, and a fine cast directed by Wesley Enoch. Note that Eva’s real daught­er, Tania de Jong with the fabulous voice, played Eva’s mother Slawa in the musical. 

Karl and Slawa continued their art careers. Af­ter high school, Eva did physical educat­ion and arts at Mel­b­ourne Uni and worked as a teacher. Then her father, himself a highly ranked sports­man, en­couraged her into competitive tennis. The family moved near the Kooyong Tennis Courts, and in 1961 she reached Wimbledon’s quarter finals.

At the 1961 Maccabiah Games in Israel, she met her Dutch husband Henri and went to live in Holl­and. She became Nether­l­ands’ Na­tional Champion and repres­ented her new country at Wimbledon. They didn’t move back to Australia until after the bir­th of Eva’s first child in 1964.

With the talented European artists who were liv­ing 12,000 ks from home and speaking little English, Dul­dig helped de­fine the place of sculp­t­ure in Aust­ral­ian culture. He was very supp­ort­ive of younger artists, bec­oming first president (1962) of Ben Uri Society for the Arts aka Bezalel Fel­lowship of Arts. He was pre­s­id­ent (1977) of the Assoc­iation of Sculptors of Vict­oria. His last work was the Raoul Wallenberg monument 1985 at Kew Junction.

Duldig Studio in Melbourne

Before Karl died in 1986, he and Eva discussed what would hap­p­en to the house and collection. As custod­ian of her parents' leg­acy, Eva opened the home, sculpt­ure garden and art Studio in Malvern East up as a pub­l­ic mus­eum in 1996, showing the large coll­ection of fine and de­c­orative arts. And in the National Gall­ery Victoria.

In Karl Duldig and Vienna, Alison Inglis presented a paper at Vienna Art and Design symposium, NGV 2011. She show­ed his experience as an art student-scul­p­tor in Vienna pre-1939 was full of Secessionist values. The unex­pected recov­ery of all their Vien­n­ese art and other possess­ions in Mel­bourne suggested the Duldigs’ old lives wouldn’t be lost forev­er.

See artist Karl Duldig: Mitteleuropa in Australia

Consumptive chic for women???

Consumptive Chic: History of Beauty, Fashion & Disease 2017 by Dr Carolyn Day examined the connection between fashion and Tuber­culosis/TB. The book was beautifully written and illustrated, but I was angry on women’s behalf while reading. In an era ignorant about TB, the tuber­cular body came to be defined cul­t­urally. During the late 18th-early C19ths this became romant­ic­is­ed i.e people actively redefined notions of the otherwise horrib­le sympt­oms as ideals of beauty.

Dropsy and Consumption flirting outside a mausoleum.
Credit: Wellcome Collection

Illustrated with fashion plates and medical images, this was a clear story of the rise of Consumptive Chic which described the strange link between women’s fashions and medical thinking re TB. Thus two belief systems developed in a connected fashion:

1. Women's in­herent feminine character/way of life rendered them naturally sus­cep­t­ible to contracting TB.

2.  Despite the changing fashions over decades, TB’s symptoms were believed to increase the attractive­ness of its victim over time. Once they contracted TB, patients were indeed more likely to die. But they would be increasingly beautiful as they approached death. The emaciated figure and fev­erish flush of TB victims were positively promoted as a highly desirable appearance. As were the long swan-like necks, large dil­ated eyes, luxurious eye lashes, white teeth, pale comp­lex­ions, blue veins and rosy cheeks.

Women focused on their eyes by painting eye liner and eye shadow onto their faces, even though these eye paints contained dangerous mer­cury (causing kidney damage), radium, lead or antimony oxide (a carcin­ogen). Women placed poisonous nightshade drops in their eyes, to enlargen their pupils. And they bathed in pois­onous arsenic, to make their skin desirably pale. The poison vermillion was worn on the lips as a lush red tint. How brutal, then, that medical writers knew that the fash­ionable way of life of many women actually harmed them.

What would inspire largely educat­ed classes to respond to illness through the channels of fashion? Why would people try to glamorise the symptoms of a deadly disease?? Day showed that consumption was seen to confer beauty on its victim. Yes it was a disease, but one that would become a positive event in women’s lives.

The Victorian corset was a heavy duty clothing apparatus, capable of constricting a woman's waist down to a tiny 17”;  this and an hourglass figure were all the rage in the C19th. Dresses were desig­n­ed to feature the bony wing-like shoulder blades of the consumpt­ive back, emphasising an emaciated frame. Additionally, diaphanous dresses and sandals exposed women to cold weather.

The coughing, emaciation, endless diarrhoea, fever and coughing of phlegm and blood became both a sign of beauty and also a fashion­ab­le disease. As obscene as it seems now, TB was depicted as an easy and beautiful way to fade into death. It was neither!!

Day noted the dis­ease’s connections to the Romantic poets and to scholars in the early C19th. Literary influence was important for educated women; most Romantic writers, artists and composers with TB created a myth that consumption drove male artistic genius. The link coincided with the ideolog­ies of Romanticism, a philosophical movement that opposed the En­lighten­ment through its emphasis on emotion and imag­ination. These men were the best, most intelligent & brightest members of society. Lord Byron (1788-1824), the most notorious of the Romantic poets, noted that his TB affliction caused ladies to look at him with heartbreak. The poet John Keats (1795-1821) embod­ied an example of the refined tubercular artistic genius, doom­ed to a very early death. He was a body too delicate to endure earthly life, but one whose intellect indelibly imprinted on culture.

And artistic women too. The link between TB and ideal femininity was played up by Alexandre Dumas fils whose novel La Dame aux Camélias (1848) presented redemption for immor­al­ity via the suffering of TB. The consumptive model Elizabeth Siddal, the drowned Ophelia in John Everett Millais’ pre-Raphaelite painting of 1851, became an icon for her generation.

There was less interest in the appearance of TB in the lower classes. Not because working women and prostitutes deserved a miserable and painful death, but because the lower classes showed how women real­ly suff­ered TB’s brutal realities. TB was explained away rather realistically in the working classes: miserable living cond­itions, pollution, poor hygiene, poverty, promis­cuity and drunkedness. TB was not romantic and beautiful for working women.

Tuberculosis shaped Victorian fashion
Furman News, 1888

Could the different reactions to TB, the glamorisation of the ill­ness for upper class women Vs the bleak experience of TB in impov­erished Victorian communities, be there to maintain class order in Britain? Perhaps fashion-setters elevated TB as an elegant form of suffering for the upper classes, specifically to create a psychological dis­tance from the unsavoury realities of lower-class disease? No won­der TB victims from the British upper classes were lauded while poor vic­t­ims were stigmatised.

My blog-partner-doctor wanted to know why other diseases like cholera did not have the same cultural impact? Because, Day said, in­fectious diseases followed an epidemic pattern. First they inc­r­eased very quickly; then they slowly faded in intensity and incidence. The course of TB was less flashy than other contagious illnesses, but it still followed a ve ry slow epidemic cycle of infection.

New Medical Knowledge 

A much better understanding of TB came in 1882 when germ theory was described by Louis Pasteur. In that year Robert Koch announced he'd discovered and isolated the micro­­sc­opic bac­teria that cause the disease. Koch’s discovery helped convince public health experts that TB was contagious. And that the victim’s sparkling or dilated eyes, rosy cheeks and red lips were caused by frequent low-grade fever

Preventing the spread of TB led to some of the first large-scale public health campaigns. Doctors began to define long, trailing skirts as causes of disease because they swept up germs from the street. Corsets were also believed to exacerbate TB by limiting move­ment of the lungs and blood circulation. And doctors began prescribing sunbathing as a treatment for TB. Eventually TB was viewed as a pernicious biological force requiring control. The weak and susceptible female gave way to a model of health and strength. 

NB Emily Mullin How Tuberculosis Shaped Victorian Fashion

  

Ophelia, by John Everett Millais, c1852, Tate 

The tubercular model Elizabeth Siddal became an icon for her generation.

filmstar Hedy Lamarr: invented Wi-Fi tech

Hedwig Kiesler/ later Hedy Lamarr (1914-2000) left Vienna and moved to the USA in 1937 and continued her illustrious film career. But within a few years her film career became less satisfying, presumably because of her naked scenes in some films that were soon banned in the US and because she already had a decadent reputation. So she focused more on science and inventions. 

She already knew maths very well and had picked up practical munitions-engineering know­ledge from her charming but Fascist ex-husband Fritz Mandl. How ironic! If one of Mandl's favourite topics in his gatherings was the technology of radio-controlled missiles and torpedoes, did the American government acknowledge Hedy’s military knowledge and want to exploit it? [No; they didn’t utilise her genius, even in WW2]. Were the Germans interested in how much knowledge she took with her to the USA after 1937?

Hedy Lamarr and computer science, 1942

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Lamarr dated pilot Howard Hughes but she was most interested with his desire for innovation. Hughes pushed the innovator in Lamarr, giving her a small set of equipment to use in her trailer on set. While she had an inventing table set up in her house, Lamarr worked on inventions between takes. Hughes took her to his airplane factories, showed her how the planes were built, and introduced her to the scientists behind process. Lamarr was inspired to innovate as Hughes wanted to create faster planes that could be sold to the US military. She bought books of fish and of birds and looked at the fastest of each kind. She combined the fins of the fastest fish and the wings of the fastest bird to sketch a new wing design for Hughes’ planes. Upon showing the design to Hughes, he thought she was a genius.

How much expertise was she developing with American composer George Antheil in the USA where they met? Antheil was himself well connected, having earlier mar­ried Hungarian Boski Markus, the niece of star Austrian play­wright Arthur Schnitzler. Antheil successfully experim­ented with electronic musical instruments and de­vised a punch-card-like device that could synchronise a transmitter and receiver. They were interested in many inventions, but of their greatest concerns was the hideous war in Europe.

Antheil composing, 1940

Schubertiade Music

In 1940 Lamarr and Antheil believed they could design an anazing new communication system used to guide torpedoes to their targets in war. National Women’s History Museum published as follows: The system involved the use of frequency hopping amongst radio waves, with both transmitter and receiver hopping to new frequencies together. Doing so prevented the interception of radio waves, thereby allowing the torpedo to find its intended target. After its creation, Lamarr and Antheil sought a patent and military support for the invention. While awarded U.S Patent in Aug 1942, the Navy decided against the implementation of the new system. The rejection led Lamarr to instead support the war efforts with her celebrity, by selling war bonds.

Hedy Lamar and her patent sketch.

Linked.com

Giving her credit did not help the frequency-hopping idea; even when the USA finally joined the Allies, the discovery was never applied by the American military during WW2. Even though she became an American citizen in April 1953, the real payoff of frequency-intervention came only decades later. Eventually it became integral to the operation of cellular telephones and Blue-tooth systems that enabled computers to communicate with peripheral devices. In fact Lamarr came to be referred to as "The Mother of Wi-Fi" and other wireless communications like GPS and Bluetooth. Too late, of course, for Lamarr and  Ant­heil.

After WW2, Lamarr continued to act in films and on television. Her biggest hit was Samson and Delilah in 1949. She took American citizenship in 1953 and in 1960, she was honoured with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. In 1967 Lamarr wrote an autobiography, Ecstasy and Me: My Life as a Woman, but sued her ghost writers because the book was scan­d­alous. She complained that she’d had a $7 million income but was now subsisting on a grotty pension. More litigation followed in 1974. The story of her radio transmission invention became widely publicised but she didn’t earn an Electronic Frontier Foundation Pion­eer Award until 1997. She died in 2000 and was posthumously inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2014.

Newspaper coverage, 1945 

North Coast Current

Enjoy reading Hedy's Folly: Life & Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, the Most Beautiful Woman in the World, by Richard Rhodes, 2012 

Catholics killed heretics; Protestants killed witches

Heresies

Catholic Answers

The Inquisition was set up in the Catholic Church to root out & punish heresy. In 1184 Pope Lucius III sent bishops to southern France to track down Cathar heretics. In 1231 Pope Gregory officially charged the Dominican & Franciscan Orders with hunting heretics. Then in the C14th, the church pursued the Waldensians in Germany and Northern Italy.

Inquisitors moved into a town and announced their arrival, giving citizens a chance to admit to heresy. Those who confessed were forced to testify and received a punishment. If the heretic did not confess, torture and execution were inescapable. Heretics weren’t allowed to face accusers and received no counsel. The Inquisitors, on the other hand, were supported with a manual called “Conduct of the Inquisition into Heretical Depravity”.

Nonetheless there were many abuses of power. In 1307 Inquisitors were involved in the mass arrest and tortures of 15,000 Knights Templar in France, resulting in many executions. Joan of Arc was also burned at the stake in 1431 by this Inquisition.

In the late C15th, King Ferdinand II and Queen Isabella of Spain believed corruption in the Spanish Catholic Church was caused by Jews who, to survive increasing anti-Semitism, converted to Christianity. These Conversos were viewed with suspicion and were blamed for plagues, accused of poisoning peoples’ water and abducting Christian children.

Auto de fé, final, public stage for punishing religious heretics.
Jan Hus at the stake, 1485
FreeSpeechHistory

The 2 monarchs believed Conversos were secretly practising their old religion;  and that Christian support would be crucial for their upcoming crusade in Muslim Granada. King Ferdinand felt an Inquisition was the best way to fund that crusade, by seizing the wealth of heretic Conversos.

In 1478, urged by clergyman Tomas de Torquemada, the two monarchs created the Tribunal of Castile to investigate heresy among Conversos. The effort at first focused on stronger Catholic education for Conversos, but by 1480, Jews in Castile were forced into isolated and locked up ghettos. The Inquisition expanded to Seville and a mass exodus of Conversos followed. In 1481, 20,000 Conversos confessed to heresy, hoping to avoid execution. But by the year’s end, hundreds of Conversos were burned at the stake.

Hearing the complaints of Conversos who had fled to Rome, Pope Sextus stated that the Spanish Inquisition was wrongly accusing Conversos. In 1482 Sextus appointed a council to take command of the Inquisition, but the same Torquemada was named Inquisitor Gen­eral and established courts across Spain. Torture became systemised and routinely used to elicit confessions. Sent­encing of confessed heretics was done in a public event called the Auto-da-Fe. Torque­mada’s downfall came only when he investigated members of the clergy for heresy. Diego de Deza took over as Inquisitor General, escalating the hunt for heresy within cities and rounding up scores of accused heretics, including members of the nobility and local governments. Some were able to bribe their way out of imprisonment.

After Isabella’s death in 1504, Ferdinand promoted Cardinal Gonzalo Ximenes de Cisneros, head of the Spanish Catholic Church, to In­qu­is­itor General. Ximenes had previously been successful in pers­ecuting Islamic Moors in in Granada. As Inquisitor General, Ximenes pursued Muslims into North Africa, encouraging the king to take military action and to establish the Inquisition there.

The Protestant Reformation

Martin Luther published his 95 Theses in 1517 and the Reformation began.  Rome renewed its own Inquisition in 1542 when Pope Paul III created the Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Roman Inquisition to combat Protestant heresy!! And in 1545, the Spanish Index was created, a list of heretical European books forbidden in Spain, based on the Roman Inquisition’s own index.

The popul­at­ion of Spanish Protestants increased, particularly in the 1550s. In 1556, King Philip II ascended the Spanish throne - he had previously brought the Roman Inquisition to the Netherlands, where Lutherans had been hunted and burned at the stake. Although origin­al­ly organised to deal only with Jews and Moors, The Spanish Inquisition now had to widen out to include Protestant heretics.

As Spain expanded into the Americas, so did the New World Inquis­it­ion; it was established in Mexico in 1570 and in 1574 in Peru. In 1580 Spain conquered Portugal, and began rounding up and kill­ing Jews and Protestants who had fled Spain. Philip II also renewed hostilities against the Moors, selling them into slavery. 

A late witch trial in Protestant Europe in Paisley, near Glasgow, 1697.
Amusing Planet

Witch-hunts were completely different. They started only after the Reformation in majority-Protestant countries, with the num­ber of cases increasing in the later C16th. At the very same time in Catholic countries in southern Europe, there were almost no witch trials because they were banned by the Catholic Church. As a result the Spanish killed only a handful of witches, the Portuguese just one and the Italians none at all. 

So the witch-craze focused on Protestant northern Europe, in countries like Germany, France and Scotland. Presumably in those countries witchcraft was seen as a remnant of ignorant Catholic beliefs that needed to be eradicated. 

Witchcraft and heresy were thus inversely related: as witchcraft trials were on the rise in Protestant countries, large-scale heresy trials rapidly decreased. In Scotland there were large-scale witch-hunts in 1590, 1597, the 1620s and 1649. Was witchcraft merely an alternative way of accusing heretics, without calling it heresy? 

Even in majority Protestant populations, there were regional differences. In places like Russia and Estonia the majority of executed witches were men (68%), not women (32%). In Germany the vast majority of executed witches were women (82%).  Did Eastern Europe communities have different views of women? And witch prosecutions in the Protestant Low Countries had almost ended by 1578, many decades before they died out in Germany and Scotland. 

Where the Catholic Church was strong (Spain, Portugal, Italy), the Reformation was definitely the first time that the church had to cope with a large-scale threat to its existence and legitimacy. The Spanish Inquisition was so busy executing c32,000 religious heretics in 200+ years that they didn’t have the time or the need to go after witches. 

In 150 years in Protestant countries, c80,000 people were tried for witch­craft and c40,000 of them were executed. Only after 1700 did witch trials disappear, almost completely, in Protestant communities. 

Ruth Ellis UK 1955 - hanging is immoral

I will never forget the letters, petitions and public protests ag­ainst the last execution carried out in Australia. Ronald Ryan (1925–1967) was found guilty of killing a warder during a pris­­on outbreak in 1965. His 1967 hanging horrified Australian citizens and led to permanent legislative change across the nation.

David Blakely and Ruth Ellis 
at the Little Club London, in 1955

Australia should have learned earlier. Ruth Ellis (1926–1955) was hanged for her lover's murder, the last woman to be executed in Britain. Welsh-born Ellis had been a beautiful nude and lin­g­erie model with a great figure, a nightclub hostess in a plush London club. The blond 29 year old mother of 2 young children, she said she'd been in a relation­ship with a 25-year-old upper-class racing driver David Blakely.

There was a ton of evidence that Blakely had been violent towards her including 3 miscarriages from beatings on the stomach, hospital records of bruised and broken body parts. Today the medical evid­ence would have cancelled the mur­der charge in favour of a man­slaughter charge, or actual bodily harm in self defence.

Hampstead, where he'd been hiding out in friends’ homes, was not far from the Magdala pub where the shoot­ing was. Ellis was definitely the person who fired the shots at Blakely but had she been driven there and given the loaded gun by her other lover, Desmond Cussen? In any case, the trial las­t­­ed just a day. A unanimous, swift (23 mins) guilty ver­dict saw the trial judge immediately don his black cap to pass the death sentence.

Ellis was portrayed as calm and expressionless between the mur­der, in mid April 1955, and the very speedy execution in Hol­lo­way Prison 3 months later. But the main question remains: how much did class and sexist prejudices play in the decision not to bar or can­cel Ruth Ellis’ hanging?

                                    

Crowds gather at Holloway Prison London

before the execution of Ruth Ellis, 1955

Flicker

There has long been a fascination in Britain with young women acc­used of murder eg
1. Edith Thompson & Fred­erick Bywaters were a British couple executed for the murder of Thompson's husband Percy in 1923.

2. Young songwriter Alma Rattenbury was accused along with her younger lover of killing her husband, in 1935. The trial judge told the jury NOT to convict her just because she was an adulteress. Only her lover was hanged, so Rabbenbury stabbed herself to death.
3. Margaret Allen, hanged in Man­chester in 1949, was a gay woman who killed her elderly, brut­alising neighbour.
4. In 1953 Louisa Merrifield was hanged for pois­oning her employer, in response to the boss’s newly changed will.

Murders by women were sensationalised in the English press. While male villainy was dismissed as an unfortunate regres­sion, the same sort of behaviour in females, particularly when it was direct­ed at males, was condemned as a hideous perversion. Men were punished; women were punished and villified. The Victorians were originally fasc­inated by the transgressive woman, but so were 1950s newspapers! Ruth Ellis could not have breached more sexual stand­ards of 1955, had she tried – nude modelling, adultery with Blakely, working in a night club, drinking alcohol herself and receiving money from Cussen.

Front page, Daily Mirror, July 1955 Two Royal Commissions have protested against these horrible events. Now it is time for ordinary citizens to add their voices.

BBC Four gave 3 hours to a re-examination by the American film-maker Gillian Pachter in March 2018. The tv series The Ruth Ellis Files looked at new evid­ence of Cussen’s role and also the part that a journalist played posthum­ously. The chief crime reporter for The People took up Ellis’ case and inter­viewed her young son, Andy – something the police had never done. In early 1956, the report­er noted: “Ruth Ellis would not have hanged … but for a tragic er­ror of judgment by the home secretary.” The home secretary had not given Scotland Yard enough time to investigate how Cussen had prim­ed and encouraged her to kill.

Months later, the Home Office conceded that there might be some­thing in Webb’s claims. Director of Public Prosecutions concluded that: “Since Ellis is no longer available as a witness, there is no ev­id­ence to prove that Cussen supplied her with the gun.” Good grief!! Cussen secretly emigrated to Aust­ral­ia and died 1991.

In 2003, Ellis’ sister Muriel Jakubait requested a post­hum­ous appeal. Muriel revealed that their father had raped her at 14, producing a son who was brought up as her brother, and had also abused Ellis. The abuse and the beatings by Ruth’s husband, George Ellis, and boyfriend David Blakely, formed the other part of her case for the appeal court. However the appeal court concluded that Ruth Ellis had been rightly convicted of murder under the law back then.

Her execution played an important role in eliminating capital pun­ishment across the UK. So Gillian Pachter had to ask if that 1955 case still had any particular relevance today. Yes! Firstly, Pachter said, there hasn’t been a case that changed the conscience of the USA in quite the same way as Ellis’ did. Secondly the way that Ellis’ own violence and male sexual violence against her was framed by the auth­or­ities …still resonates today.

Endless protest marches against capital punishment in Melbourne,
Herald Sun, 1967

Ruth's ex-husband, George Ellis, committed suicide in 1958. Her son Andy suicided in 1982, aged 38. Her daughter Georgie died in 2017 of cancer, aged only 50, still hoping that her mother would be cleared. Capital punishment was always immoral, and not just for the executed person.

Teffi - beloved Russian writer, sad exile.

My maternal side of the family was very proud of the Russian arts, with one cousin becoming a professional writer, one a composer and two became music teachers. My late mother studied literature at uni­ver­sity then joined a number of book clubs. Her goal was to read every Russian novel and play (in English) from Alexander Pushkin 1799-1837 on. Of the early writers, she loved Fyodor Dostoyevsky 1821-81, Leo Tolstoy 1828-1910, Anton Chekhov 1860–1904 and Maxim Gorky 1868-1936. Of the modern writers, no-one quite matched up to Boris Pasternak 1890–1960.

I quite believe that Russians are indeed "the world's most reading nation", even decades after their writers and readers perman­ent­ly moved abroad. So I was very lucky my mother didn’t keep her memories alive by calling me Lyudmila at birth, and my brothers Igor and Grigor. 

Teffi arrived in France in 1920, 

planning to go home to Russia when she could. She never did.

Wiki

Imagine the surprise when a Russian writer’s book called Memories from Moscow to the Black Sea was reviewed by Judith Armstrong in the Weekend Australian (12th-13th Nov 2016). Written by Teffi, the book was published by Pushkin Press in 2016. Nadezhda Lokhvitskaya aka Teffi (1872-1952) was one of Tsar Nicholas II’s favourite writers, a woman born into a well educated professional St Petersburg family. Early in her career she wrote short stories and satirical articles for newspapers and magazines. In the heady excitement and radical passion after the 1905 Revolution, Teffi turned increasingly to political issues and published in the Satiricon magazine and the Russian Word newspaper. Life was going very well indeed.

Even then there was a price to pay. Teffi left her noble husband and three children on their country estate and returned to St Petersburg alone.

But when Lenin returned to Russia in 1917, he apparently had no feel­ing for beauty whatsoever. He overhauled New Life magazine, saying “Nowadays we don’t need theatre. Nor do we need music. We don’t need any articles about art or culture of any sort.” Like every Russian whose soul was fed by Russian culture, Teffi was devastated. She resigned with the rest of the literary section, not long before the paper was shut down by the authorities.

In 1918 Teffi moved to Moscow, Kiev and then Odessa, but she was never going to find a happy place to settle. The miseries brought by WW1 and the difficulties of the Russian Revolution suggested to her that the time had come to look for a new life. Her book was “her blackly funny and heart­breaking account of her final, frantic journey into exile across Russia - travelling by cart, freight train and rickety steamer - and the ordinary and unheroic people she met. From refugees setting up camp on a dockside to a singer desperately buying a few last scraps of fabric to make a dress, all were caught up in the whirlwind; all were immortalised by Teffi's penetrating gaze. Her sadness at leaving home and her horror of never seeing the family again will resonate with every person across the planet who has EVER gone into exile.

How does one describe the state of being a no-one nowhere, with no place on the map, or in society, to claim as one’s own? Teffi did not pretend to know what she did not know at the time. The brief stories of her journey through Russia contained almost no generalis­at­ions. On only a couple of occasions did the writer insert a fact that she learned some months after the events she was describing. She succeeded in conveying the sense of claustrophobia and disorientation that typified the refugee condition. [I lived overseas for 5 years and although I spoke the language fluently and was not a refugee, there was always the fear of stuffing up, of accidentally offending, of not finding my way around].

Readers believed that a trademark of Teffi’s writing had always been her ability to describe the absurd as though it were the ordinary. In the second half of this book, follow a harrowing train journey through Russia and Ukraine (with stays in German-occupied Kiev and French-occupied Odessa, which she fled as the Reds approach). Teffi ended up aboard a ship to Istanbul, commandeered by an ad hoc group of refug­ees. She ­had to scrub the decks on the ship to prove that she too was a proper worker.

 

Memories was first published as a serial, Dec 1928-Jan 1930.
It was republished in Russia by Pushkin Press in 2016

The book ended mid-journey, in the uncertainty that was the hallmark of the refugee state. The author was saying her goodbye to Russia, but she could not know where she was going next, when or how. I agreed with the comparison that was drawn with the works of Stefan Zweig, the Austrian author who wrote about the end of a grand epoch of European civilisation just before WW2. But everyone’s sadness is personal; everyone’s tragedy is individual. Perhaps it is just as well I did not even recognise Nadezhda Lokh­vits­kaya aka Teffi’s name before Judith Armstrong’s review. Teffi’s experiences would have broken my heart.

It worked out well in the end. After years of wanderings, Teffi settled in Paris in 1920, where she lived and wrote succ­ess­fully. Like so many other Russian intell­ectuals, Teffi began publishing her works in the Russian newspapers in Paris and had an eager and large Russian-reading public. Her book Memories from Moscow to the Black Sea was first published as a serial between Dec 1928 and Jan 1930.

The final years in Paris were financially strapped but friends looked after her until her death in 1952. Appropriately Teffi was buried in the Russian Orthodox cemetery called Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois, just south of Paris.

Not until the late 1980s was Teffi’s work seriously reconsidered in Russia. In 1990, an important publisher in Moscow brought out a two-volume edition of her humorous stories and in 1997, the Gorky Institute of World Literature held a Teffi conference to honour her oeuvre.

In recent years Pushkin Press has done English readers a service by releasing Rasputin and Other Ironies (2010), a selection of Teffi’s old journalism and non-fiction: politics, society, art, literature and family life. And Subtly Worded (2014), a collection of her short stor­ies. The publications are in elegant packaging and have scholarly notes attached.

Teffi: A Life of Letters and of Laughter

by Edythe Haber, 2018

Her most popular works: A Modest Talent; Diamond Dust; All about Love; Love and a Family Journey; When the Crayfish Whistled; Tolstoy, Rasputin, Others and Me; and Memories. For short stories, see Shoshi's Book Blog.

Brilliant Dr Alice Hamilton, USA

Alice Hamilton (1869-1970) grew up in a cult­ured family on a large Fort Wayne Ind. estate. Her fath­er wanted home-schooling for his daughters, but eventually Alice decided to become a doc­tor anyhow. She studied phys­ics and chemistry with a local teach­er, took biol­ogy and anatomy courses, ov­ercame her father’s objections and enrolled in the top class Uni of Michigan Med­ical Sch­ool in 1892. There were c4,500 fe­male doc­tors in the US then, mostly trained at women’s medical colleges.

Dr Hamilton, first-ever woman lecturer at Har­v­ard
Smithsonian

After graduating from Michigan, Dr Hamilton interned at N.W Hosp­ital for Women and Children, Minneapolis and then at the New England Hospital for Women & Children Bos­ton. Hamilton had already decided on a career in research rather than clinical med­ic­ine, but she wanted some clinical exper­ience. In 1893, Hamilt­on accepted a path­ol­ogy re­sear­ch position at Johns Hopkins Medical School. Then she taught path­ology at Women's Med­ic­al School of N.W Uni Ch­icago and was soon was appointed Pathology Prof there.

She lived for years at Hull-House Chicago, a settlement staff­ed by university graduates who helped immig­r­ants and the poor, via social research and reform. Hull-House people investigat­ed family in­come, school truancy, sanitation, TB and issues affecting community health and safety. And they helped organise Lab­our unions when many wealthy Americans opp­os­ed workers’ rights. And she later work­ed as a bact­er­iol­og­ist at Chicago’s Memorial Institute for Infect­ious Diseas­es.

Hull-House, Chicago

In the 1902 summer holidays, Dr Hamilton found Chicago in a severe typhoid fever epidemic. So she needed to explain typhoid, ident­ifying the in­eff­ec­tive sewage dis­­posal in 19th Ward, outdoor toilets, broken plumb­ing, standing water and flies. Tests on flies captured near filthy toi­l­ets ind­ic­at­ed the presence of the typhoid bacillus. But blame properly fell on broken wat­ermains that spewed sewage into water pipes, despite Chicago Board of Health denials.

That same year, when the Women’s Medical School of N.W University closed, Al­ice became a bact­er­iologist at Chicago’s new­ly opened Memorial Institute for Infect­ious Diseas­es. The U.S saw rapid industrialisation and by 1900 had become the world’s most industrialised nat­ion. The growth occur­red in mining, manufact­ur­ing, transport and commerce, enabled by cheap energy, better technol­ogy, grow­ing transport­, investment capital and cheap labour. But it al­so pro­duced low wages, job insec­urity, poor working con­ditions, ind­ust­rial accid­ents & disease.

Industrial poisoning was problematic since it could take years to emerge. Most employees & employers were ign­or­ant of the dang­ers from chemicals, and few factories emp­loyed doc­tors to mon­itor wor­k­er health. In any case, which workers would complain, risking their jobs?

Ill­inois' governor app­ointed Dr Hamilton to the Illinois Commission on Occupat­ional Dis­eases (1908-10). Indus­trial tox­icol­ogy was little und­erstood, so the commiss­ioners asked her to study diseases where high mor­tality rates were found: in painting trades, lead and en­am­el­ware industries, rub­ber production, explosives and munit­ions. The most widely used poisons were lead, arsenic, zinc and carbon mon­oxide.

From 1911-20, she became a special investigator for the U.S. Bureau of Labour Statistics, examining the manufacture of white lead and lead ox­ide in paint pigments. The team visited factories, read hospital rec­ords and interviewed unionists to uncover lead poison­ing cases. She discovered 70+ dangerous processes that caused high lead poisoning. During this time, Hamilton became a noted expert in industrial medic­ine. Harvard Uni quickly placed her on fac­ulty in the School of Public Health in In­dustrial Medicine, making her the first-ever woman lecturer at Har­v­ard. This made Dr Hamilton a famous expert in industrial medic­ine.

The Illinois report on industrial disease led to state legisl­at­ion, Oc­c­upational Disease Law (1911), requiring employers to: end work­ers’ ex­posure to risky chemicals, offer monthly medical exams for work­ers in dangerous trades, & report diseases to the Dept of Fact­ory Inspection. Soon Charles Neill, Comm. of Labour in Dept of Comm­erce asked her to do nationally what she’d done in the state, first in the lead trades, then in other poisonous trades.

Workers trimming and binding the felt hats
leading to mercury poisoning
Connecticuthistory

In WWI she also investigat­ed the pois­onous effects of man­­ufacturing expl­os­ives on workers, as requ­ested by National Research Council. Factories had sprung up to produce TNT, picric acid and merc­ury fulminate. Her rep­or­ts on the dan­gers in war-industries led to the adoption of many safety proced­ures. After the war, Hamilton discussed mercury poisoning in the felt-hat industry, the mercury causing wild jerk­ing of limbs, and mental ill­ness. And workers who made matches were subject to an industrial dis­ease that result­ed from fumes of white or yellow phosphorous which pierced the jaw bone.

Hamilton’s impressive work was soon recognised abroad. From 1924 she ser­ved a 6-year term on the Health Committee of the League of Nations. She was invited by the Soviet Public Health Ser­vice, and toured a Moscow hospital that was the first-ever facility devoted to occup­at­ional disease. Appropriately she wrote Indus­trial Poisons in U.S (1925). And she pub­lish­ed Ind­ustrial Toxicology (1934), studying anil­ine dye, carbon mono­xide, mercury, benzene and other toxic chemicals for the Dept of Lab­our. Over the years, her many reports for the Federal gov­ernment dram­at­ised the high mortality rates for industrial workers, bringing major legislative changes.

Alice Hamilton wrote Industrial Toxicology re workplace safety, in 1934.
Radcliffe Institute

Dr Hamilton first encountered carbon disulfide years earlier when she had stud­ied rubber making. Then in 1935, Hamilton conduct­ed a study of vis­c­ose rayon manufacture. This new ind­ustry used two dan­g­erous chem­icals: 1] carbon di­sul­fide, which poisoned the central nervous system, leading to mental disease, blindness and paral­ysis. And 2] hydrogen sulfide, a pow­er­ful asphyxiating toxin. Car­bon disulfide received lit­tle Amer­ican attention until Hamilton examined serious illness­es am­ong U.S viscose rayon workers. The Dept of Labour appointed her Ch­ief Med­ical Consultant, with her results pub­lished in Occ­upational Pois­oning in the Viscose Rayon Industry 1940. What an amazing career.

Finally she retired to write her autobiog­raphy, Expl­oring the Dangerous Trad­es (1943). Hamilton celebrated her 100th birthday in 1970, then passed away. Congress immediately passed the Occupational Safety and Health Act.

The guest writer Dr Joe, recomnends reading Alice Hamilton & Development of Occupational Medic­ine, 2002.

Alice Paul: bravest American suffragette

The main U.S organisation fighting for Women’s Suffrage was the National American Women’s Suffrage Association-NAWSA, founded in 1869 by Susan Anthony and Elizabeth Stanton. But over the next decades, successes were rare. Women in Wyoming got the vote in 1869, Col­or­ado in 1893, and Idaho and Utah in 1896, in time for the 1896 Pres­id­ential election. Women in oth­er states could not vote, so the NAWSA wo­men concentrated on pers­uading state legis­latures to submit suffrage am­endments to state constit­ut­ions.

Alice being arrested
Pinterest 

Alice Paul (1885-1977) was born in Mt Laur­el N.J, the first child prom­­in­ent Quak­ers, Wil­liam and Tacie Paul. William Paul led a Trust Co. in N.J, which provided for comfortable family living. Nonetheless Alice was still taught the Qua­k­er trad­­itions of working for society, gender equality, non-mat­erialism, closeness to nature, and modesty

Af­ter finishing high-school in 1901, Alice attended Swar­th­more College Pa because her Quaker grandfather was one of the Coll­ege’s found­ing fath­ers. And mum Tacie was respon­sible for int­ro­duc­ing Alice to the fight for women’s suffrage. Tacie was a devoted member of the NAWSA and often took Alice with her to the meet­ings.

After earning a Bachelor’s Degree in Biology at Swarthmore in 1905, she went to the Columbia Uni School of Social Work in New York.

Perhaps American suffragettes should have gone to New Zealand or Australia for guidance, not Britain.  NZ's suffrage campaign peaceably succeeded with women’s rights in 1893 and only later spread through Britain and its Empire etc.

Yet Alice Paul sailed to Britain, training in the Quak­ers’ Woodbrooke Sett­lement  Birmingham (1907-10).  Birmingham was where, in 1907, she became politically active and where she met Emmeline and Christo­bel Pankhurst. These were militant suffrag­ettes who endorsed direct measures like heckling, window smashing and rock throwing, to raise public aware­ness about their cause. And the Pankhursts also hel­d the pol­itical party in power respon­sib­le for dis­crim­inat­ion against women. 

Alice enrolled at Pennsylvania Uni on her return to the USA in 1910, earning a Ph.D in sociology and launched her car­eer in 1912. Work­ing within the NAWSA, Paul gathered a group of young women, many of whom had also worked in Britain with the Pank­hursts and who were willing to drop NAWSA’s conservative tactics.

Alice Paul addressing thousands of women, 1913
Washington DC

From 1910-3, NAWSA focused on passing legislation at state and local levels by org­anising St­ate referendums and tail­or­ing the fight tow­ards men. NAWSA believed that if the move­ment had more male support­ers, it would be more persuasive to male legisl­at­ors.

Leading the Congres­sional Committee of NAWSA in Wash­ington DC, Alice assembled a mass march of suf­­fra­g­ists around the most imp­ort­ant gov­ernment buildings: White House, Cap­it­ol Buil­ding, Treasury Building. This huge march took place in Mar 1913, the day before Pres Wilson’s inaugur­ation. Photo pinterest!

From 1910-4, some western states gradually yielded to suf­frag­et­te de­mands. The movement was winning the battle by slow in­st­alments: Wash­ington in 1910, California 1911, Arizona 1912, Kansas 1912, Oregon 1912, Illinois 1913, Nevada 1914 and Montana 1914. So it was evid­ent to Paul that the struggle for women’s vote needed a chan­ge in strategy to get a Federal amendment passed.

By 1913 Alice or­g­­anised eager young women who moved to each recal­cit­rant state, visiting newspapers and calling on local women to serve on vote-getting committees. Once the women had est­ab­lished thems­el­ves, the Congressional Union sent out a speak­er. From there, each woman moved to a new town, until every town in a state had been canvassed, when the woman returned to Washington and made a report to that state’s congressman.

Alice spent 3 years with the NAWSA, yet the marches on Washington were seen as too rad­ical by some. So she broke with the NAWSA and joined the Con­gressional Un­ion, seek­ing a Fed­eral con­stit­ut­ional amendment. Then she formed the National Woman’s Party/NWP in 1916, headquart­ered in Wash­ington. Un­der her leadership, the NWP became known for its radical tactics that prop­elled the Women’s Suffrage Move­ment. In Jan 1917, suff­ragists from the NWP marched down Pennsyl­vania Ave, stopping in front of the gate to Woodrow Wilson’s White House.

Des­p­ite the US’s entry into WWI in 1917, NWP refused to abandon their tactics! There were thousands of women from different states who volunt­eer­ed to stand on the White House picket lines daily, in front of Amer­ica’s policy makers and press. But public opinion in war-time US changed to that of dis­dain. The women’s attacks were seen as an unpatriotic menace to the U.S government; opponents at­tack­ed the women, taking their ban­n­ers and in­cit­ing violence. And policemen never protected the pick­et­ers.

In Oct 1917, Paul was sentenced to 6 months in Occ­oquan Workhouse Prison Va. The prison cells were small, rat infested and dark, and the air fetid. Plus gaolers started brutal phys­ical intim­id­at­ion.

The women’s hunger strikes were to ensure the treatment of suffrag­ists as pol­itic­al pris­on­ers. So to deter the hunger strikes, prison officials began to force feed Paul 3 times daily. In solitary con­fine­ment, she was deprived of sleep by noise all night and event­ually put into the psy­ch­­iatric ward. The prison hoped that she’d be diagnosed as ment­ally insane, ending the legitim­acy of the National Women’s Party. But she was considered sane by the gaol psych­iatrist!

Almost immediately after the torture news broke, the NWP prisoners at Occoquan received support from some of the public, the press and pol­iticians. The women were released from prison in late 1917.

Silent Sentinels, picketing White House, 1917,
Library of Congress.

After WWI, Pres. Wilson returned home & en­cour­­aged legislatures to pass the 19th Amendment (Women’s Vote). The League of Women Voters (formed 1920) prom­ot­ed social reform through ed­uc­ation. But Am­erican women had a problem: only MEN could vote for the 19th am­endment. 

The 19th Amendment passed in both houses of Congress with the necessary 2/3 majority; it was ratified by the states and in Aug 1920, the Amendment was added to the Constitution. In 1923, Alice Paul proposed an Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitut­ion. But that was a longer battle.

Read Fearless Radicalism: Alice Paul and Her Fight for Women’s Suffrage, by Anna Reiter.