Gette!
This may surprise you, but four years ago I started writing a musical. Provisionally titled Gette!, it was the story of women gaining the vote in the UK. The curtain is raised at an early Edwardian dinner party where the first song - 'Hush Woman' - follows one of the heroines giving an informed opinion on the Schleswig-Holstein question to the horror of the assembled gentlemen:
Women go on strike, the leader of the WNASL has second thoughts, and then the Great War begins. After a subplot involving right-on Labour saint Keir Hardie who supported universal suffrage and raging Tory imperialist Emmeline Pankhurst, women gain the vote and in the final scene, women in fashions from across the 20th century line up on stage, ballot papers in hand, singing the Suffragette Hymn March of the Women, and vote one by one.
It's an amazing idea and when I put it to a director four years ago her eyes lit up. She immediately started discussing the logistics and how, with great determination to overcome the many difficulties involved with putting on a live show, it could maybe be put on in the back room of a pub with a cast of two and a piano. Fuck that. I wanted a The Lion King spectacular or nothing. The idea went into hibernation - I had four years after all - and now here we are four years later at the centenary of women's suffrage still with nothing more than the original outline and some song fragments.
Instead I've been concentrating on writing my book of Scottish history. And one of the most notable aspects of the subject is the invisibility of women in much of written history. The first Scotswoman to enter the stage (unless you count the legendary warrior Scáthach) doesn't even have a name - she is described merely as Argentocoxus' wife. It is really only now that women are gaining parity - with a female First Minister and Prime Minister, female leader of the opposition in the Scottish Parliament, and increasing number of women leaders in business and public life.
So a challenge for the girls of today: it's over to you to make sure that when the history of the next 100 years comes to be written, there will be a lot more women to write about.
Hush woman, Hush woman!There follows public meetings, parliamentary defeats, the formation of the Womans National Anti-Suffrage League (a genuine organisation, astonishing to relate, of women campaigning against gaining the vote), smashings of windows with toffee hammers, force-feedings in jail, and the martyrdom of Emily Davison.
You are an inferior race.
Hush woman, hush woman!
Your opinions are a disgrace.
When it comes to matters of state
Only men can be first rate
Hush woman, hush woman!
You've got me quite irate.
Women go on strike, the leader of the WNASL has second thoughts, and then the Great War begins. After a subplot involving right-on Labour saint Keir Hardie who supported universal suffrage and raging Tory imperialist Emmeline Pankhurst, women gain the vote and in the final scene, women in fashions from across the 20th century line up on stage, ballot papers in hand, singing the Suffragette Hymn March of the Women, and vote one by one.
It's an amazing idea and when I put it to a director four years ago her eyes lit up. She immediately started discussing the logistics and how, with great determination to overcome the many difficulties involved with putting on a live show, it could maybe be put on in the back room of a pub with a cast of two and a piano. Fuck that. I wanted a The Lion King spectacular or nothing. The idea went into hibernation - I had four years after all - and now here we are four years later at the centenary of women's suffrage still with nothing more than the original outline and some song fragments.
Instead I've been concentrating on writing my book of Scottish history. And one of the most notable aspects of the subject is the invisibility of women in much of written history. The first Scotswoman to enter the stage (unless you count the legendary warrior Scáthach) doesn't even have a name - she is described merely as Argentocoxus' wife. It is really only now that women are gaining parity - with a female First Minister and Prime Minister, female leader of the opposition in the Scottish Parliament, and increasing number of women leaders in business and public life.
So a challenge for the girls of today: it's over to you to make sure that when the history of the next 100 years comes to be written, there will be a lot more women to write about.
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