First published last month, we’re republishing this excellent article about Joy Bounds – Suffolk writer and long-time champion of women’s equality issues – and her journey as a feminist, for International Women’s Day.
Joy Bounds has lived in the Ipswich area for many years. During the 70s and 80s, she began to identify with the growing frustration shared by women worldwide who felt their potential had been stifled for too long. She describes how her discovery of the injustices of women’s position in society, and the struggle for acknowledgement and opportunity resulted in local women taking action in Suffolk. They began to redefine a feminist perspective that would enable women to demand greater parity of opportunity and the right to live a life that would enable them to fulfil their potential. This was to become Joy’s quest too, and resulted in the recent publication of her latest novel, Shining Threads, based on Ethel Smyth’s life up to 1914.
About the author and her journey
While researching an earlier book, A Song of Their Own (2014) about the suffragettes in Suffolk, Joy discovered Ethel Smyth, who composed the music of The March of the women (1911). This powerful song became the anthem for the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU).
Joy is also a musician, but found it difficult to name many women composers. As a feminist, she found this deeply frustrating. “Did this mean that there weren’t any women composing music? Or, was their work simply not acknowledged, published under a male pseudonym or even under a male partner or relative’s name?” This would not have been uncommon before the 20th century! So, she decided to learn more about Ethel Smyth.l
Shining Threads
In reading about Ethel Smyth (1858-1944), Joy discovered a remarkable, unconventional and inspiring woman – a composer, conductor, writer and suffragette. By the age of 22, Ethel was already composing songs for voice and piano. She fought all her life against society’s social restrictions of women at the time, and to have her compositions accepted. Male critics dismissed her as a ‘lady composer’. But Ethel was a feisty, no nonsense woman of considerable talent. She achieved justifiable success with her chamber pieces, symphonies and operas, even performing parts of her Mass in D informally for Queen Victoria in 1891. In 1903, she became the first woman composer to have her work performed at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York.
In 1910, Ethel Smyth attended a meeting of the WSPU where she heard Emmeline Pankhurst give an impassioned speech. She was so moved that she gave up her music for two years to devote her life to the fight for women’s right to vote. She and Emmeline Pankhurst became firm friends and it is famously said that she taught Emmeline how to throw stones! Perhaps unsurprisingly then, in 1912, Ethel joined over a hundred women in smashing windows of MPs opposed to the suffrage movement, resulting in her imprisonment.
Although after her death, her work was largely forgotten, it is now being revived. In 2018, on the anniversary of Female Suffrage, Cantamus Choir in Norfolk and choirs in Suffolk performed March of the Women. In 1922, Ethel Smyth became the first woman composer to be made a Dame. In our own time, to mark the centenary of that honour, a statue of her conducting was unveiled in Woking.
Joy says that Ethel’s struggle reflected her own feminist beliefs and ideas and certainly her involvement in local and national actions. And Ethel’s story became the basis of her book ‘Shining Threads’.
Feminist action in Suffolk
So, in the 1980s, Joy and many others in Suffolk, came together in consciousness-raising groups, sharing their own experiences and aspirations. They talked about how the world was set up for men’s benefit, and women just had to fit in as best they could. But they recognised that together they could change things. It was all about learning, empowerment and action.
In 1982, a judge made an outrageous judgement in a rape trial (Evening Star, 18 January 1982), laying the blame on the victim who had been hitchhiking at night. His pronouncement that she was therefore “asking for trouble”, provoked women to organise a Reclaim the Night march in Ipswich. The first Reclaim the Night march had been in Leeds at the time of the Yorkshire Ripper when women were told to stay at home. The same message was given women in Ipswich in 2006 when the ‘Suffolk Strangler’ was at large. A Reclaim the Night march is now an annual event in Ipswich and throughout the country calling for an end to violence against women and girls. The point is to demand that blame be solely on the perpetrators and not the victims.
Feminism and peace
For many, there was a strong link between feminism and peace. Locally, Lakenheath and nationally, Greenham Common became the focus of actions against nuclear weapons.
As part of the ‘Star March’, which started in Wales in 1983 and spread to the rest of the country, Joy set off on what became inspiring proof of women’s power as a united front. She pushed her four-year-old son in his buggy the 130 miles from Haverhill to Greenham Common along with about 60 women and children from Suffolk to highlight America’s siting of cruise missiles in the UK. The women were hosted by women’s peace groups along the way. Many women from Suffolk took part in the demonstrations at Greenham, a women-only space, and participated in actions, such as Embrace the Base, and cutting the fence (for which Joy was arrested), to raise awareness of the dangers of a nuclear war.
In memory and commemoration
2011, a small group of women, including Joy, organised a dinner in the Old Museum Rooms in Ipswich, to celebrate the 1911 Census strike by suffragettes: Thousands of women across the country had refused to fill in their census form as a way of saying, “If women don’t count, neither shall they be counted.” Some women had spent the night in the Old Museum Rooms to avoid filling the form.
Significantly, the group also created a guide to 30 ‘forgotten’ women in a Women’s History Trail taking people around Ipswich. And they worked with the Ipswich Society to put up six blue plaques for women.
In 2018, the group organised a women’s festival to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the first women getting the vote. There were all kinds of educational and political events in recognition of how far women have come. It was, however, also recognized that women still have to challenge areas such as domestic violence and sexual abuse, and achieve parity with men in all spheres.
Now what?
Ethel Smyth’s story still has relevance today, despite the many achievements, women have made through their campaigns. Recently the Me Too movement has begun to hold perpetrators to account in multiple environments. Young women and girls are still so far from being safe from male violence or achieving full equality. And they are facing completely different dangers from their mothers and grandmothers: spiked drinks, and the bullying and coercive nature of an unregulated social media which adversely affects their safety, confidence and self-image. Consider too, the pressurising images that girls think they have to imitate, the abuse so many women and girls have to put up with.
And if we thought nuclear missiles had gone, recently there’s been talk about the Americans basing nuclear weapons at Lakenheath.
So, women cannot rest. The experiences gained through working together live on in each woman who has been and is involved in campaigning, in many different ways. And the inspiration and work to improve life for women and society as a whole will continue.
