Special Collections RIC Fellow Talk: Laurence Housman and the Women’s Suffrage Movement

This public lecture will explore Housmans Bookshop namesake Laurence Housman (1865-1958) and his active role in the women’s suffrage movement. It will shed new light on UCL’s Laurence Housman Collection by discussing how Housman’s sociopolitical values emerged during the Victorian period as he developed an artistic practice as an Aesthetic and Decadent illustrator. Housman was also a writer who would go on to contribute to Votes for Women (1908-18), a suffrage newspaper edited by Emmeline and Frederick Pethick-Lawrence. He would later collaborate with his sister, the engraver Clemence Housman, to found the Suffrage Atelier, an artists’ collective. Using illustration as a form of social and political resistance, Housman designed An Anti-Suffrage Alphabet (1911), a work that featured many women artists who would go on to forge professional careers, including Pamela Colman Smith.

Dr Michelle Reynolds is a researcher in nineteenth- and twentieth-century art and visual culture. Her PhD thesis, which she completed at the University of Exeter, considered the professionalisation of women illustrators and cartoonists in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain and their relationship to the socio-political and cultural phenomenon of the New Woman. Her research interests include women artists and designers, illustration and book studies, gender and sexuality, reform movements, dress histories, and graphic satire.

The UCL Research Institute for Collections (RIC) provides a unified research focus for UCL collection specialists to work in collaboration with academics, building on UCL’s long tradition of ‘disruptive thinking’ to understand the human condition and the natural world. The work of RIC signals the innovative development of UCL as a prominent centre for humanities and science research using collections. It will create sustainable inter-disciplinary and thematic research opportunities and teaching engagement across UCL collections. It aims to build and enhance collaborations with other universities and museums and open new avenues for research funding by responding to funders recognition of the role of libraries and museums as partners in, and leaders of, academic and scholarly research.