{"id":61369,"date":"2025-03-03T07:14:57","date_gmt":"2025-03-03T15:14:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.heuermontage.com\/?p=61369"},"modified":"2025-03-03T07:14:59","modified_gmt":"2025-03-03T15:14:59","slug":"and-another-one-in-the-interesting-people-department","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.heuermontage.com\/?p=61369","title":{"rendered":"And another one in the interesting people department…."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

It is March, spring is around the corner and nature is slowly waking up. Dainty snowdrops do their ballerina imitation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Croci clusters shine in cheerful purples and yellows, attracting early bees. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Early azaleas beckon with soft pinks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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And hellebores rule my friend’s garden, compact, round, frilly or solid, joyfully dotting the landscape.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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March is also Women’s History Month, and I’d like to remind us all how much gardening was tied to the Suffrage movement, or any other progressive social reworking since the earliest 20th century. (Much of what I summarize today I learned from George McKay’s book Radical Gardening<\/a><\/em> (2011) and the splendid Smithsonian website about Women’s History in American Gardens<\/a>.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Gardens and Garden architecture was for the longest time considered a man’s world. Just think about Winston Churchill commenting to Siegfried Sassoon in 1918: “War is the natural occupation of man \u2026 war – and gardening.” In the late 1800s, however, women started to form garden clubs, push for public parks as a health issues, and engage in the conservation of native plants.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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No longer content to embody a sentimental and idealized single vision of women posing decoratively in gardens or with plants (as many of the period paintings do that I am introducing below,) women started to use their collective power found in new organizations centered around gardening to support social change.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Frederick Carl Frieseke Lady in a Garden, (ca. 1912.<\/em>)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The first garden club in the US was founded in 1891. Next, the American Society of Landscape architects<\/em> saw one female founder in 1899, Beatrix Farrand, who was soon joined by several other women. Soon several schools and colleges dedicated to landscape design and agriculture opened for women. In 1914, the Smith-Lever Act<\/em> funded the deployment of home demonstration agents \u2013 mostly women \u2013 to teach up-to-date agricultural, gardening, and food preservation techniques to families of all races living in rural areas. One of the goals of the project was to \u201cdevelop leadership abilities in rural women and girls.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Jane Peterson Spring Bouquet<\/em>, (ca. 1912)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

During WW I, there was a mobilization of a Women’s Land Army<\/em> to harvest crops and produce food during World War I as men left to fight overseas. The organization later leveraged women’s role in the war to win voting rights for women. During WW II they were instrumental with Victory Gardens<\/em>, soon recognized by the USDA. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Matilda Browne Peonies (cira 1907) They grew in an Old Lyme garden. The woman in white is thought to be Old Lyme, CT resident Katherine Ludington, portrait painter and noted suffragist.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Similar, sometimes more radical, developments happened in Europe. In Great Britain, for example, the Women\u2019s Agricultural and Horticultural International Union was founded in 1899 (nowadays know as Women\u2019s Farm and Garden Association.) The founders were believers in universal suffrage. Soon a Women’s Land Army<\/em> was established there as well, increasingly popular during WW II with “\u2018land girls\u2019 central to the anti-fascist \u2018Dig for Victory\u2019 campaign, with their gendered perspective and an emancipatory rhetoric.” Suffragists, all. And very much in consensus with Suffragist Emmeline Pankhurst’s statement: \u201cWe are here, not because we are law-breakers; we are here in our efforts to become law-makers.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Violet Oakley June, (ca. 1902<\/em>)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By then, the Suffragettes, more actively engaged in militant action of all kinds, had also blazed a path. As McKay writes: “Suffragettes were gardeners, suffragettes targeted gardens for attack\u2014in each instance horticulture was politically positioned.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The most prominent attacks happened in 1913, when Suffragettes attacked the Orchid House at the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, and burnt down the Tea Pavilion a bit later. Three greenhouses were smashed, and rare and delicate plants, under bell-glasses, destroyed. The gardens were targeted in implicit or explicit acknowledgement of their link with empire, tradition, and male establishment. The women tried to point to their refusal to be “rare and delicate plant”, severing the link between flowering plant and old-style femininity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The attack on Kew Gardens is one of the most famous incidents for women\u2019s suffrage. It illustrates the political nature of gardening and its symbolic meaning, just like the example of Kew\u2019s role in the British Empire. Destroying flowerbeds and greenhouses seems insane, unless the gardens and the destruction of them by \u2018female vandals\u2019 are seen in terms of the power relations in society. Just as the orchid can symbolize extreme wealth, so a flower-bed can express the power of patriarchy in the political order.<\/em> (Ref<\/a>.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Philip Leslie Hale The Crimson Rambler<\/em>, ca. 1908 <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Two of the Suffragettes were captured and sentenced to prison for more than a year. Both went on hunger strikes that were undetected for almost a month, leading to such precarious health status that both were released from prison, after unsuccessful and risky attempts to force feed one of them, Lilian Lenton<\/a>, an activist who scores in my “interesting people I’d like to have met” department.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She was a dancer, and committed Suffragette at an early age – “deeds not words.” She believed that arson attacks on symbolic locales would create a crisis that would make people re-think power relations. When she was force-fed in prison with a tube through her nose down her throat, she aspirated food into her lungs and got seriously ill. The government then passed the Cat and Mouse Act<\/a><\/em> (in reaction to multiple Suffragette hunger strikers who they did not want to become martyrs,) which allowed for the early release of prisoners who were so weakened by hunger striking that they were at risk of death. They were to be recalled to prison once their health was recovered, where the process would begin again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Lenton became famous for escaping the authorities multiple times after release from prison by using the most daring costumes and escape routes, earning her the nickname the Leicester Pimpernel. <\/em>“She fled the city in a delivery van, dressed as an errand boy. Taxis took her to Harrogate and then Scarborough from where she escaped to France in a private yacht, although she soon returned to Britain, setting fire to things again.<\/em>” She served in Serbia with a hospital unit during WW I, and was awarded the French Red Cross medal. She lived to the age of 81, seeing the fruit of her activism with the eventual right of all women to vote (The Representation of the People Act <\/em> (Equal Franchise) of <\/em>1928). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Mary Cassatt Children in a Garden (<\/em>1878)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Am I saying arson and destroying plants is a good thing? Am I saying political activism that employs radical means after other things failed, has historically moved movements about equality and justice forward? Am I saying individuals can make a difference, when their role becomes symbolic of a “David vs. Goliath” struggle? Am I saying we need models of previous progressive movements in our own learning-curve, when trying to defy a re-introduction to patriarchal hierarchies and norms (check out the proposed SAVE act<\/a>, people!)?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What do you think I am saying?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Anna Ancher Fisherman\u2019s Wife Sewing<\/em> (1890)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here is a list of militant tactics presented by the BBC<\/a>, of the documented actions of Suffragettes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Whether you agree with direct action or not, the suffragette\u2019s militant tactics had a great impact on the government and society. Some of the tactics used by the WSPU were:”<\/p>\n\n\n\n