Who doesn’t love the suffragettes? A group of women who are heroic, right, and, perhaps most advantageously for their collective reputation, no longer with us. Even the older and more exhausting ones have yet to be firmly identified, unlike so many of their successors, as Karens.
In adopting the suffragettes as role models, along with their slogan, “deeds not words”, Just Stop Oil has, rather brilliantly, picked a group that unites in admiration left and right, old and young, and, probably uniquely, Jeremy Corbyn and the current – at the time of writing – home secretary, Suella Braverman. Corbyn once stole into parliament to erect a plaque to Emily Wilding Davison. Braverman’s horror of protests has not stopped her reminding girls: “Always remember the suffragettes who gave you and me the right to vote, and cherish that right.” In 2018, the centenary of partial women’s suffrage, Theresa May paid tribute to Emmeline Pankhurst, founder and leader of the proudly militant Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), whose supporters engaged in arson, bombings, window smashing, spitting and throwing missiles at MPs. Postal workers were burned, a full theatre ignited.
The more closely, then, that it identifies with the suffragettes and their protests, the more nimbly Just Stop Oil and its supporters can deflect contempt for its (comparatively muted) tactics, and ignore curators’ warnings to the effect that activists “severely underestimate the fragility of objects”. You don’t like attacks that could destroy venerated paintings? The suffragettes did that! Would you blaspheme against the suffragettes?
Last week’s hammer attack in the National Gallery on Diego Velázquez’s painting, The Toilet of Venus, or Rokeby Venus (the gallery persists in associating it with the home address of an English collector who relished its depiction of Venus’s “backside”), was Just Stop Oil’s most explicit channelling to date of suffragette iconoclasm. Before slashing the Velázquez with a meat cleaver in 1914, in one of a series of art attacks that generated massive, outraged publicity for the WSPU, the perpetrator, Mary Richardson, had prepared a statement: “I have tried to destroy the picture of the most beautiful woman in mythological history as a protest against the government destroying Mrs Pankhurst, who is the most beautiful character in modern history.”
In the updated, climate-inspired double act, featuring blows to another part of the painting, it now appears to symbolise Richardson’s direct action, as opposed to anything related to the current cause: stopping oil and gas licensing. “Women did not get the vote by voting,” one protester explained, in a video in front of their work. “It is time for deeds not words.” Her (male) companion: “Politics is failing us. It failed women in 1914 and it is failing us now”.
Though they might not have anticipated the Velázquez nude being conspicuously less treasured, to judge by the public reaction, than Van Gogh’s Sunflowers (the protesters’ soup target in 2022), the adventure could hardly have gone better. For a day or so, everyone was talking about Just Stop Oil. The suffragette connection was reinforced, the painting was not known to be harmed; in fact, thanks to Esther McVey, one of the Conservatives’ many MP-GB News presenters, the young glass-breakers were able to style themselves as superior art lovers. “How dare these criminals storm our National Gallery & use hammers to smash a painting depicting the suffragette movement,” McVey tweeted. When everyone knows that Velázquez infinitely preferred constitutional suffragists like Millicent Fawcett, possibly the inspiration for his Old Woman Frying Eggs.
“These people make our laws,” commented a Just Stop Oil connoisseur. “Am lost for words.”
Following this triumph – the attack has been internationally reported – anyone interested in John Singer Sargent’s portrait of Henry James might want to get there asap, while it’s intact. For as long as Just Stop Oil re-enacts episodes in suffragette history, circa 1914, the painting, hanging, bold as you like, in the National Portrait Gallery, is asking for it. After Richardson was imprisoned, the portrait of James (who sympathised with the women’s movement) was slashed with a meat cleaver by Mary Wood, “an elderly woman of distinctly peaceable appearance”. Her explanation: “I have tried to destroy a valuable picture because I wish to show the public that they have no security for their property nor for their art treasures until women are given the political freedom.”
Maybe it’s some comfort to nervous museums that, as the Just Stop Oil activists will know, suffragette militancy – naturally the highlight in dramatised versions of the struggle – was not revived after its suspension when war broke out, having contributed to, rather than realised, electoral reform. That the more extreme acts alienated supporters and delayed suffrage has been plausibly argued. If, as the National Gallery protesters said, “politics failed women in 1914”, it worked better in 1916, when suffragists forged an alliance with the Labour party. “In the key moment of the reform,” Dawn Langan Teele writes in Political Origins of the Female Franchise, “militant activity was non-existent.”
To put it another way, “the suffragettes did it” is not necessarily the all-encompassing authorisation that Just Stop Oil and other supporters of vandalising paintings like to think. What if neither Venus nor Henry James even needed slashing in the first place?
Which isn’t to say “deeds not words” isn’t a great slogan to challenge political apathy on climate change, and that suffrage groups from the age of corsets aren’t promising models for climate activism in 2023. Almost miraculously, people seem to feel as unstintingly positive about the not always amiable senior Pankhurst as they did about George Orwell, before he was found to be mean. Activists from Just Stop Oil have even been able to forgive Richardson, the Venus slasher, for signing up, in the 1930s, as an organiser in Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists. But you can’t help thinking there might be, if irreplaceable art is to be regularly in jeopardy, more convincing arguments for this method.
• Catherine Bennett is an Observer columnist
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