Setting the Stage for Suffrage

One of the most memorable slogans to come out of the women's suffrage campaigns in nineteenth-century England was the motto of the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU): “Deeds, not Words.” It may seem odd, then, that Ellen Ecker Dolgin begins her book on Shaw and the Actresses Franchise League: Staging Equality with a discussion of tableaux vivants, an art form that explicitly freezes its (mostly female) participants into idealized moments of stasis, the exact opposite of the active engagement that the suffrage campaign advocated in order to engender political change. However, Dolgin deftly unpacks these assumptions about the tableau vivant to argue that participation in this popular art form provided an important array of opportunities for feminist intervention and consciousness raising: from creating a permissible entrée for women into public space to providing a focal point from which to critique the idealized images of women on display to...