When I started to consider this toy as a subject for a portrait, I wondered – I was interested in it, but did I really want to go down this road? Was I drawn to it as a plaything, or as a representation of something much broader?

This is my 20th portrait, and I am finding it increasingly fascinating to think about the way in which play and playthings are integrated into our lives, and are often used as social tools.

There are not many references to this toy – I was only able to find a Pinterest image which also shows the instructions in English and French  – and an image held by the Mary Evans picture library (cannot be linked to directly), which states that it dates from c. 1909 and is made of plastic, and can also be ordered as a print. There is a further image here – this site states it is made of ceramic, which seems unlikely given the mechanism. They would appear to be different examples of the same model.

 The toy seems to have been part of a series of dolls called The Jumpies, though I have not been able to find any of its companions, nor have I been able to find out who made it.

Putting social history aside for a second, the toy has a fun sort of mechanism. The instructions read: “Remove the head from the figure, place figure on table and press the head firmly into the neck, which causes a pin within the figure to penetrate the table. Raise the figure, when the head will spring off”. The appeal is in the jumping – a bit like a jack in the box, or one of those spring activated stick men that jump out when you press down on them – and presumably the head jumped out satisfyingly high or far. The instructions show two different figures: the body of what looks like a clown, and then a small man in a bowler hat and a pudgy face. They were clearly meant to be funny figures. It’s curious that in order for it to work, the pin had to press into a surface or ‘table’, so it must have left a little hole whenever it was used.

I came across it while looking through past toy auctions. The first suffragette toy I saw was this suffragette ‘wrestling toy’, where a suffragette is seen wrestling with a policeman, and then I also saw a similar one which appears to be from the same series, of a suffragette being led by a policeman. I was intrigued by their function and by who would have bought them, so I started to look into both anti-suffrage and pro-suffrage paraphernalia and entered a world that is as fascinating as it is often disturbing. 

Pro-suffrage toys and games included cards and board games (see here for a collection of games, and see here for the board game Pank-a-Squith). Anti-suffrage objects often proved to be very dark, and not simply ‘satirical’ or ‘amusing’ as I have seen them described.

When I did my portrait on the skipping girl bank, someone commented that there was something particularly upsetting and remarkable about how the mechanics of each toy enabled and ingrained into people a kind of repeated visual violence and dehumanisation against non-white people, hammering it into children’s heads in a ghastly way – one fall, one kick in the face, one cog-turn at a time. I had a very similar feeling here, where the visual of a frumpy suffragette that repeatedly loses her head is a source of amusement and ridicule. ‘How the Suffragette Lost Her Head’, the box reads.

Anti-suffrage propaganda included strong visual violence. I have been struck by the extent to which the tropes of the time have survived so well to this day. The sheer terror and fury at being challenged on age-old power structures can be seen in every line of these postcards (see here, or here or here) – you can almost see the men who drew them frothing at the mouth, spit mid-air while they added some crooked teeth and ratty hairs.

And of course, when race is added into the mix, there is a thick extra layer of monsterisation. I had mostly stuck to the UK Suffragette movement, and had not really looked at the US Suffragists, but I soon came across several hideous objects of what are regarded to be representations of Sojourner Truth. This toy, with a clockwork mechanism, is particularly disturbing.  In this bisque figurine, the Black figure is stripped down to her underclothes and carries a caveman style club.  

One of the postcards linked to above was sent anonymously to suffragette Christabel Pankhurst, bearing the message 'Don't you think you had better sew a button on my shirt'. A Welsh suffragette, on her part, received a voodoo doll, which you can see here . Anti-suffragists took pleasure in showing what they would like to do to these women (see here and here), and in what was in fact done to them in prisons (read Djuna Barnes on the subject).

But one of my unexpected delights this week was finding out more about Sylvia Pankhurst, Christabel’s sister and Emmeline’s daughter. I did not really know much about her other than her being a member of the suffrage movement. A socialist and a pacifist, she carved her own path within the movement, and, unlike her sibling and mother, believed in including working class women. I loved finding out that, of all things, she had set up the East London Toy Factory in 1914, which employed women in the area, and produced all kinds of toys, making the most of the gap in the toy market due to German toys not getting through on account of WWI. The factory also had a creche attached, so that women could take care of their children while also being paid a living wage. The factory started out making flat wooden toys, but then branched out and started making other things, including stuffed toys like Felix the Cat lookalike toys (see here).

I find it fascinating to think of this toy in its context. I wonder what suffragettes made of objects like this; whether they embraced them in much the same way as people are encouraged to claim ownership of things these days, and turn them on their head. 

Did it fuel them, or did it add to their exhaustion? 

Did they think to themselves, defiantly, ‘Yes, I have lost my head, because someone needed to’?