Chippers using riveting guns at the Marinship Corporation in California, 1942

Women of the Forestry Commission section of the Women’s Land Army carry logs on their shoulders ready to be stacked at Culford Camp, near Bury St Edmunds, England, in December 1941

There is a new book called Dress Like a Woman, with a foreword by Roxane Gay and introduction by Vanessa Friedman.It features more than three hundred pictures showing women at work across the world and examines their evolving roles, from domestic servants to astronauts. First of all: Ambulance surgeons Doctors Cornelia Meaders and Alice Lewis at work in New York City in 1915.

William Margetson’s design for a postcard 1909.  In 1908 his sister-in-law Bessie Hatton was one of the founders, with Cicely Hamilton, of the Women Writers’ Suffrage League. The image on the postcard inspired Cicely Hamilton’s A Pageant of Great Woman, which  premiered at the Scala Theatre, London, in November 1909. ‘After its phenomenal success there, raising the profile of women’s suffrage groups, it toured many provincial cities, reaching the Prince’s Theatre, Bristol on 5 November 1910’ (more details here).

Sylvia Pankhurst’s design for the membership card of the WSPU, probably 1906-7.

This poster was published by the WSPU in late 1909.

Another marvellous new book that we sell in the shop is Elizabeth Crawford’s Art and Suffrage: A Biographical Dictionary of Suffrage Artists: this week we reproduce four posters from the book. This one was designed by the painter Emily Ford and was published by the Artists’ Suffrage League in 1908, it’s available from the Museum of London here. Emily Ford lived in Glebe Place, Chelsea, where she had an “At Home’ for members of the Women’s Guild of Arts  ‘to meet Mrs Fawcett about Women’s Suffrage.’ Her friend and neighbour Dora Meeson Coates described her cottage and studio as ‘a meeting-ground for artists, suffragists, people who did things’ (p. 100).