With 2018 marking the centenary of votes for women, Arena welcomed a panel of guests to discuss female emancipation and the arts. Joining Sean Rocks was Sinéad Gleeson to discuss literature, Karin McCully who focused on theatre, visual arts curator Catherine Marshall and musician and musicologist Una Hunt.
Sinéad Gleeson feels that the whole of the 19th century was building up to the great push that resulted in votes for women in 1918.
"In terms of literature, you can't talk about emancipated women and writing without going back to the decade of the 1890s… the New Woman Movement was starting and I think some of the key texts that are still reverberating and very important today came out of that decade. It's also worth noting that this is the decade that Freud was starting to publish his case studies about women, about hysterical women, about female sexuality, there was a lot of fear around women and independence, bodily autonomy, sexuality, those kind of things."
Books like Kate Chopin's The Awakening pushed boundaries and challenged the role of women in the home and in the arts at this time and ever since. Karen picked up on Sinéad's theme of fear of women, saying:
"I think the male anxiety is around the fact that perhaps women – if you allow them the freedom and autonomy – will actually dominate. It's not just in terms of their reproductive power. It's that they're seen as more complex, more passionate, more attached to the emotions, therefore perhaps capable of more if they're let loose"
The discussion turned to individual trail-blazers within the arts such as artist Sarah Purser – "she terrified them" says Catherine Marshall, and composer Ethel Smyth, who would stop at nothing to live her dream of creating music that was played on the world stage. Even though she achieved astonishing success, Una Hunt says:
"She wasn't taken seriously as a composer. She was taken seriously as a lady composer, which was quite a different thing."
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