"Etta Lemon" by Tessa Boase

The December book for our Gateway/Lighthouse Women NoMo book club is "Etta Lemon: The Woman Who Saved the Birds" by Tessa Boase. 

In some editions/markets, the book has a different title: "Mrs Pankhurst's Purple Feather: A Scandalous History of Birds, Hats and Votes"  (see the cover, below). The edition I was able to get for my Kobo e-reader, however, was "Etta Lemon," so that's how I'll refer to it here. 

Many/most of us, even outside of the UK, will have at least heard of Mrs. (Emmeline) Pankhurst, who fought for -- and won -- the right for women to vote in Britain, 100+ years ago. But who was Etta Lemon? And which book title is more correct?  Is the book about Etta Lemon, or Emmeline Pankhurst?  

Both, actually. They were contemporaries, leading movements that flourished (and ultimately achieved their goals and changed Britain in dramatic ways) at around the same time in history -- but they were different women, with very different views and interests, and different stories -- and they can be linked in some interesting ways that the book explores. 

Emmeline Pankhurst, her daughters (Christabel and Sylvia), and the suffragette movement they led (under the banner of the Women's Social and Political Union, or WSPU) are very well known. But Etta Lemon -- who was childless -- and her crusade to save the birds has been mostly forgotten by history -- until now, thanks to Tessa Boase and this book. 

Elaborately plumed hats were a central part of the suffragettes' image, as they crusaded for the vote. "The ever-elegant Emmeline Pankhurst insisted that if they were to win the nation over, suffragettes must ensure that they were the best dressed, most alluring women at every social gathering,"  Boase writes in Chapter 31 ("The Feminine Arts"). In the Prologue, she reveals that the "purple feather" of the book's other title refers to the voluptuous purple feather Mrs. Pankhurst wore on her hat when she and her suffragettes stormed the British House of Commons in 1908. After her death in 1928, it was preserved by the Suffragette Fellowship and, since 1950, has been on display at the Museum of London.  

The elaborately feathered hat was an indispensable part of her brand:  a way of showing the world that she was no unnatural, mannish harridan intent on a 'petticoat government.' Yet she was also steely, autocratic and dictatorial. She liked a good fight. Like a strutting cock's extravagant tail, Emmeline Pankhurst's plumage signified power.   

Etta Lemon, on the other hand, was vehemently ANTI-suffrage -- but she too was a divisive, crusading figure, who helped found what eventually became known as the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), which still exists today and is Britain's best-known nature conservation society. There was a great deal of rivalry and tension between the two organizations. (Some women, of course, belonged to both and supported both causes.)  

Both crusades were eventually eclipsed -- and yet at the same time bolstered -- by the First World War.  During the war years, women stepped into men's roles and proved themselves entirely capable, while importing feathers was banned and domestic bird populations flourished in the absence of hunters. In 1921, after the war ended, the feather ban finally became permanent law. Some women gained the right to vote in 1918, and the vote was extended to all women age 21 and older in 1928. 

I had absolutely no idea about what a "thing" feathers were for Victorian-era women, or what a huge business they were -- or what a toll they took on bird populations around the world, with some species hunted to the point of extinction. Boase lays out the facts here in horrifying detail. I was reminded of how both the beaver and the buffalo here in North America were hunted and slaughtered in massive numbers -- primarily for their pelts -- between the early 1600s & late 1800s, almost to the point of extinction. 

(Slight personal digression:  there's a buffalo hunt scene in the Kevin Costner movie "Dances With Wolves," with what looks like hundreds of buffalo thundering across the prairies of South Dakota, that had me in tears when I first saw the movie in the theatre. Not so much because of the killing itself (although I am not at all a hunter) -- this was how the indigenous tribes survived, after all, before the buffalo hunt was commercialized by settlers -- but because seeing all those beautiful creatures running around in a huge pack in their natural habitat was simply so amazing, and such a rare sight -- something brought to life straight out of the history books. As someone who was born and raised on the Prairies, whose family came to the Red River Valley in the late 1870s -- not that long after and not that far away from the events and the setting of the movie -- it touched me deeply and made me homesick in a way that I can't really explain.) 

This was an interesting read overall -- a little dry/academic in tone, and perhaps a little more detail than most of us ever wanted or needed to know on these subjects...!  It did take me a little while to get into it. But once I did, it was a pretty fascinating piece of social history. The author has certainly done her homework and knows her subject...!  Etta Lemon is yet another unsung woman -- and a childless one, at that -- who did great things and whose story has been overlooked until now. Thank you, Tessa Boase, for (re)introducing her to us!  

3.5 stars, rounded up to 4 on Goodreads. 

This was Book #47 read to date in 2022 (and Book #1 finished in December), bringing me to 104% of my 2022 Goodreads Reading Challenge goal of 45 books! I am (for the moment, anyway...!) 5 books ahead of schedule. :)  You can find reviews of all my books read to date in 2022 tagged as "2022 books."  

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As noted above, Etta Lemon was childless. I was pleased to see Boase elaborate on this point in Chapter 33 ("Maternal Weakness"):  

The message of the National League for Opposing Woman Suffrage was that being a mother was the only importance a woman required. The earlier Women's League emblem showed a mother reading to her young son and daughter. Such women were well balanced, educated and intelligent, it implied. They did not need the vote to make them happy too... 

Childless women were largely regarded as unfortunate and neurotic. "The happy wife and mother is never passionately concerned about the suffrage," wrote the bushy eyebrowed bacteriologist Sir Almroth Wright, in an extraordinary letter to The Times in March 1912.  Under the heading "Militant Hysteria," he argued that not only childless women, but menopausal women, too, were unhinged and a menace to society.  Think, he asked his readers, of "the serious and long-continued mental disorders that develop in connection with the approaching extinction of a woman's reproductive function."  Wright concluded that peace would come again only when the present surplus of women (around one and a half million) had gone to outposts of the empire and found husbands...

No doubt Mrs. Lemon, breakfasting at Hillcrest's mahogany dining table, also read Sir Almroth Wright's letter in The Times. Perhaps, at some level, it hurt. Etta was 51 and childless. The birds had fulfilled many of her maternal urges;  they had kept her busy. But they were not enough. 

Boase goes on to describe the elaborate Christmas parties that Etta organized for the children of the town where her husband was mayor, and the close relationship they enjoyed with their nephew Hugh, whose father was in British Malaysia in the colonial service, and who was shipped back to England at age 5 to attend boarding school.  He spent his school holidays with them, "smothered in the loving attentions of Aunt Etta and Uncle Frank." 

Etta also helped run a hospital for injured soldiers during the First World War, and was a pillar of the community, supporting many other charitable causes and organizations. She remained devoted to the RSPB until 1939, when she was unceremoniously forced out of her position at the age of 79, her portrait relegated to a cupboard in the attic -- until Boase's book was published. The portrait has been restored, reframed and now hangs in a prominent place at the RSPB headquarters, and is also displayed on its website.  (Etta died in 1953, age 92.) 

As I noted above, this book has two titles:  apparently it was the first/hardcover edition of the book that was titled "Mrs. Pankhurst's Purple Feather" -- presumably because Mrs. Pankhurst was better known and her name would sell more books. (It was first published in 2018, the 100th anniversary of the suffragettes' initial victory in obtaining the vote.)  The title was changed for the paperback edition to focus on Etta Lemon, and in the acknowledgements at the end of the book, Boase thanked her paperback editor "for instantly grasping that Etta Lemon was the revelation, and for encouraging a rethink on the cover." She also saluted her late researcher:  "Beryl [Holt] always thought that Etta Lemon was the real heroine of these pages -- and she was right."  :)