BEAUTY

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Manuscript anonymous contemporary ribald spoof titled 'Mrs. Pankhursts Address to the Suffragettes'. [With two small photographs (one of Emmeline Pankhurst and the other of Sylvia Pankhurst?).]

Author: 
Emmeline Pankhurst (1858-1928), British political activist and leader of the suffragette movement [female suffrage; Victorian humour; sexuality; social history]
Publication details: 
Without date or place. [England, 1890s?]
£250.00

1p., 12mo. In good condition, on aged and worn paper, folded twice. Written in a late Victorian or Edwardian hand. The 'Address' is an interesting survival: the sort of ribald saloon-bar joke through which male opponents of the movement sought to tame it through ridicule. Similar examples survive, attributed to Lady Astor speaking in parliament, but this version clearly predates these. Here is a transcript of what is a concentrated dose of double-entendre: 'Mrs.

Prospectus for 'The Women's League of Health and Beauty | Object: Racial Health and Beauty', describing the 'Methods for 1932 and after' of this 'Sixpenny Health Movement'. With membership form, filled in by J. Bigg of New Southgate.

Author: 
[The Women's League of Health and Beauty, founded in 1930 by Mary Stack and continued by her daughter Prunella Stack (1914-2010] [J. Bigg of New Southgate]
Publication details: 
Prospectus: 'Address: The Mortimer Halls, 43 Gt. Portland St., W1.' Undated (circa 1932). Membership form dated by member to 27 September 1932.
£90.00

In its obituary of Prunella Stack the Guardian describes the League as 'the most innocuous of the interwar mass fitness movements': the present item would indicate otherwise. The prospectus is printed on both sides of a 25 x 31 cm. piece of shiny art paper, irregularly folded to make a 25 x 15 cm. front cover, flanked by two 25 x 7.5 cm flaps (with the front of one listing the members of the committee, and of the other the League's rules).

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