Who needs PowerPoint when you have a pack of suffragette playing cards? (Cecilia Peartree)

 At the moment I have a novel project well under way, so naturally I am prey to various other distractions, such as watching a tv series I like to think of as 'Climbing Amazingly Colossal Buildings', writing up the minutes for a meeting from a couple of weeks ago in time for the next meeting which has arrived more quickly than I expected, and setting up a new youth page on my local community centre website. So of course I've also volunteered to take part in a local event for International Women's Day. I didn't really intend to do this, but I talked myself into it because my suffragette great-aunt has been on my mind lately, which in turn is because her name has somehow got on to the shortlist to have a new school named after her. I had better not mention where the school is or what the exact circumstances have been, as her shortlisting has turned out to be somewhat contentious for various reasons. 

When I volunteered, I suppose I had imagined giving a presentation about my great-aunt, possibly even using PowerPoint, just as I used to do when attending museum conferences in various locations and speaking about ‘exciting’ topics such as how to barcode works of art, but I have since realised that the audience at the community centre will probably want something that's more fun than that. So it's time to get out my pack of Scottish suffragette playing cards. 

 

These were produced as part of a project in the wake of the centenary of women first getting the vote in the UK, and they are in a kind of Top Trumps format (apologies for mentioning that word in any context), whereby each card has a person or event depicted on it, with a list of actions and/or qualities associated with it, and a score for each item on the list, which is used to decide a winner in as many battles as it takes. I haven't described it at all well because I can't quite remember all the details, which is why I plan to play a few rounds with my son over the weekend to refresh my memory.

 Depending on the numbers who come along to my part of the event, I might have to divide the audience up in to groups and have one group playing the game and others doing something else for a while -the something else is still to be determined but I hope to get inspiration by revisiting some of the material I've collected about my great-aunt and other suffragettes while researching my family history. In this context I will be eternally grateful to the Daily Mirror of 1908 for printing a whole-page feature on the Women's Freedom League demonstration in and outside the House of Commons that year, including who did what. None of the other papers went into anything like that level of detail, although many of them did cover it, including The Times. Many of the women stormed the House of Commons, some chaining themselves to a grille in the visitors' gallery, while the report showed that my great-aunt, with two other women, climbed on to the equestrian statue of Richard the Lionheart outside, and began to make speeches to the assembled throng.

 In case the audience on the day expect to sit and watch a PowerPoint presentation after all, I will create one, but in case they don't, I will print out all I can find about my great-aunt, who did not give up activism after her experience but continued to harass the authorities after she was married with children, helping to organise a rent strike and speaking up for the strikers to the First Lord of the Admiralty. I wish I had half her assertiveness, not to mention the athletic ability!