In Tate Britain
- Artist
- Sylvia Pankhurst 1882–1960
- Medium
- Gouache on paper
- Dimensions
- Support: 415 × 268 mm
- Collection
- Tate
- Acquisition
- Purchased with funds provided by the Denise Coates Foundation 2021
- Reference
- T15755
Summary
In a Glasgow Cotton Spinning Mill: Changing the Bobbin 1907 is one of a group of gouaches in Tate’s collection from the series Women Workers of England by the artist and campaigner for women’s rights, Sylvia Pankhurst (Tate T15755–T15758). It depicts a female worker standing in front of one of the mechanical frames used to spin cotton fibres into yarn in a Glasgow cotton mill. She is dressed in simple working clothes, facing the mechanical frame, and has her arms raised to change a full bobbin on the top row of the frame. The same location and machinery are depicted in In a Glasgow Cotton Mill: Minding a Pair of Fine Frames (Tate T15756), though in that work the female worker sits in a rare moment of pause from what would normally have been a physically demanding job.
Sylvia Pankhurst’s lifelong interest was in the rights of working women and she made a profound impact on the fight for women’s rights both as an artist and a campaigner. Trained at the Manchester Municipal School of Art and the Royal College of Art, she was a key figure in the work of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), set up with her mother Emmeline and sister Christabel in 1903, using her artistic skills to further the cause. Pankhurst designed badges, banners and flyers for the WSPU. Her symbolic ‘angel of freedom’ was essential to the visual image of the campaign, alongside the WSPU colours of purple, white and green. As the suffrage campaign intensified she struggled to balance her artistic and political work, and in 1912 she gave up art to devote herself to the East London Federation of Suffragettes, the organisation she founded to ensure that working-class women were represented in the suffrage campaign.
In 1907 Pankhurst spent several months touring industrial communities in Northern England and Scotland, documenting the working and living conditions of women workers. Living in the communities she studied, she painted and wrote about industrial processes and the women who performed them. Her combination of artworks with written accounts provided a vivid picture of the lives of women workers and made a powerful argument for improvement in working conditions and pay equality with men. She painted in gouache, which she found ideal for working quickly under factory conditions. Pankhurst’s detailed account of working conditions and wages was published as an illustrated article, ‘Women Workers of England’, in the London Magazine in November 1908, and as a series of articles on individual trades in the WSPU journal Votes for Women between 1909 and 1911. These highlighted difficult working conditions and the differential between men’s and women’s wages. Her studies of women at work were unusual for the time in their unsentimental observation and their focus on female workers as individuals rather than stock figures in genre scenes, as had been so often the case in British art up to this point. Historian Kristina Huneault has observed that Pankhurst recognised ‘the women’s crucial presence within the industrial arena, their economic agency, their productive activity and their public community’ (Huneault 2002, p.3).
Cotton manufacturing was one of the most important industries in Glasgow in the 1900s and the factories employed men, women and children. Pankhurst visited the Glasgow cotton mill in Bridgeton in the winter of 1907. She described the women’s skilled work tending the machines:
The work in all the different processes of cotton-spinning consists in keeping the machines clean, supplying them with fresh cotton, taking away the cotton that has been spun, and in rejoining together the threads which are constantly getting broken as they become longer and finer. This work is not really arduous, but it requires a light, quick touch, and a great deal of practice is needed before the operative can become expert.
(Pankhurst 1908, p.306.)
Although the work in the cotton mill was not as physically demanding as in some of the factories Pankhurst visited, the working conditions were difficult and the workers’ health was affected by the dust, heat and noise of the machines. Pankhurst wrote: ‘The most unpleasant features of the life in the cotton mill are the almost deafening noise of the machinery and the oppressive heat. Cotton will not spin, it is said, if the windows are open and the fresh air is allowed to come in.’ (Pankhurst 1908, p.306.) She also recalled: ‘The mule-spinning room where I put up my easel was so hot and airless that I fainted within an hour. The manager, who had a kindly respect for artists, gave orders for a little window to be kept open near me, although the outer air was considered injurious to the thread.’ (Pankhurst 1938, p.291.)
Pankhurst’s gouache studies were intended to support her documentation of the conditions that women workers were enduring and her campaigning for better conditions and pay for them. She had envisaged that the ‘Women Workers of England’ article would be extended to book form and provide a comprehensive survey of the conditions of women workers in Britain, but the suffrage campaign increasingly absorbed her time and the book was never finished. From the perspective of the twentieth century, Pankhurst’s gouaches are striking in the way that they engage with working women as individuals and use different visual conventions to represent them. Huneault has also argued for the social importance of these works:
In the hands of Sylvia Pankhurst the image of women’s labour posed an intrinsic challenge to the restrictive codes of femininity promulgated by so much Victorian visual culture. Her challenge was not simply celebratory of female employment. Pankhurst’s images are sensitive to the hardships experienced by working women in employment ... nevertheless for Pankhurst women’s employment was also a potential means for gender equality. In her contacts with Black Country chain makers she found that work was an important source of self-esteem among women whom the media presented only as victims.
(Huneault 2002, p.3.)
This particular gouache, along with the others in Tate’s collection, has been in Pankhurst’s family ever since it was produced, before passing to Tate.
Further reading
Sylvia Pankhurst, ‘Women Workers of England’ London Magazine, November 1908, pp.299–307.
Sylvia Pankhurst, ‘Sylvia Pankhurst’, in The Countess of Oxford and Asquith (ed.), Myself When Young by Famous Women of Today, London 1938, pp.288–91.
Richard Pankhurst, Sylvia Pankhurst: Artist and Crusader, New York and London 1979, pp.79–85, 97–9.
Kristina Huneault, Difficult Subjects: Working Women and Visual Culture in Britain 1880–1940, Aldershot 2002, pp.1–3.
Emma Chambers
September 2018
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