Gottlieb was approached to be historical consultant to Wearing less than a year before the statue was due to be unveiled. Her research on British women’s citizenship and activism across the political spectrum gave her a distinctive view on the challenge of identifying the women to line the plinth. “I had the chance to use academic knowledge for transformative impact, to make a real difference,” as she describes it.
Meeting for the first time in a café on London’s Euston Road, Wearing was particularly struck by Gottlieb’s view of history. “I remember one very interesting bit of information, which I hadn’t really thought about before. History often remembers people and events at a future time when it becomes relevant. We’re all part of re-interpreting historical events…” That discussion on the ways in which people are written in and out of history, “…Helped me really think about how you shape history.”
Julie would help Gillian draw up a list of individuals for inclusion around the plinth, aiming to achieve the greatest diversity along national, regional, gender, sexual, class, political, generational, religious and ethnic lines.
It was a discussion that highlighted the importance of the role Gottlieb and Wearing would play in contributing to women’s history. Whoever was on the statue would be remembered in a very public way, in a public space, and likely for centuries to come.
So where to start? Historians ‘go where the documents are’, as Gottlieb describes it when we meet to discuss the impact of her work as historical consultant on the project. But for over 50 years following women’s suffrage, the broader history of the movement and many individuals were ignored, overlooked by male scholars at the time. The easiest stories to find were from the suffragettes who seemingly predicted this course of events and preserved their stories for the archive through the Suffragette Fellowship.
However, their stories were not fully scrutinized until the second-wave feminists rescued them from obscurity, as they sought to celebrate Votes for Women 50 years on in 1968.
These were the ‘breadcrumbs’ for women’s historians who would help to start re-writing women back into history. They would also help inform the list of campaigners to line the plinth of Fawcett’s statue. But the suffrage campaign involved many more groups than just the eponymous suffragette in purple, green and white chaining herself to railings.